Call for Papers: 'The Idea of Crisis'

Forthcoming special issue

Submission Deadline: 1st December 2010

The concept of ‘crisis’ has a long and complex lineage in the human sciences. On the one hand, it has been consistently deployed to understand issues of order and change since at least the 18th century. Influential contributions run the gamut from Marx on the evolution of macro-social structures all the way through to Lacan on how the individual finds and maintains its place within these. On the other hand, its sheer ubiquity and apparent polyvalence has served to render the concept an object of inquiry in its own right. Conceptual historian, Reinhart Koselleck, for example, has written at length on how the term’s meanings and referents have varied across space and time.

In the contemporary study of global politics, this richness of meaning is on full display. Indeed, both during and after the Great Credit Crash of 2007-2009, the notion of ‘crisis’ has been widely employed in a range of different ways. For example, it has been used to identify different periods in world history and to account for specific pathways of institutional transformation; to describe the contradictions that underpin the failure of a political or economic system to function; and to understand the interpretive struggles triggered by the recognition of these failures. Within the very broad remit of thinking about ‘The Idea of Crisis’, the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies invites full-length articles, essays (pieces up to 5,000 words), and book reviews for its fourth issue. The aim of the special issue is to bring together academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in order to explore how different theories of crisis or change may feed into the historical process itself. The editors particularly welcome pieces that explore some of the following questions (although without intending to proscribe any other avenues contributors may wish to explore):

Download the full Call for Papers for Issue 4