Introduction

The notion of emergency has come to have a wide range of meanings and understandings that have stretched the range of possibilities for socio-legal research. Although emergency can refer to extraordinary medical, environmental, financial, and even perceived cultural crises, it is often discussed within the arena of politics and the law. Conceptually, emergency might be situated anywhere between that which is considered ‘normal’ and that which is considered ‘exceptional’, suggesting a variety of temporal and qualitative conditions that might delineate its parameters. In many respects, the very idea of emergency as an exceptional set of circumstances depends on and enables an understanding of what constitutes ‘non-emergency’ situations. From the perspective of the state (and those officials managing its administrative structures), emergency might be considered a category designed to make threats to society ‘legible’ by incorporating those elements into a familiar vocabulary of governance. For those seeking reform or advocating resistance to the state's definition of the status quo, the conditions associated with emergency can certainly come to mean very different things. It is the socio-legal context underlying this ambiguity that makes the defining of emergency (and conversely the defining of normality) in different cultural-political settings a provocative area of comparative research.