Crisis

The present moment is marked by a crisis that has spread through every part of society. A collapse in finance brought on recession and job losses. Governments then faced deficits and turned to austerity, which set off a political crisis that could develop into a crisis of democracy. The hardship has not fallen evenly, and it is widening divisions of class and gender. Two competing accounts shape the debate. One points to austerity and cuts in welfare spending, while the other points to the financial crisis and the need for democratic control over finance. Each supports very different choices about how resources should be shared and how economies might grow, and disputed gender relations sit at the centre of these arguments. How the crisis plays out will depend largely on whether democratic institutions deepen, including those of the European Union.

Sylvia Walby proposes a new framework for theorising crisis. It draws on complexity science and places crisis within the broader study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. Through this work she critiques the social sciences as they currently stand and proposes revisions to them, arguing they are needed to understand the crisis.