Crisis Bequests Conflict: A Sociological Analysis of Their Relationship

Crisis highlights political, public policy and social imperatives. Crisis implies that a conscious intervention is needed to address a perceived threat in a context of insecurity and contingency (cf. Luhmann 1982) and implies a removal or mitigation of the causes of the crisis. This in turn implicitly assumes conditions of security as outcome. Implicit to any crisis though is an acknowledgment of urgency, and the potential for conflict before a return to the normal.

Implicit to policies addressing a crisis is a belief that as the desired goal is achieved, there will be resumption of a putative “normal” or even an improvement to the situation prior to crisis. Such assumptions are implicit to the practice of fields seeking to mitigate conflict and re-establish security, such as Social Work, Policing and International Relations. On the micro-level such assumptions are implicit like Social Work and Policing. In international relations, confrontation and conflict followed by a desire for de-escalation is also a part of policy goals, and strategy.

Judgments about how to intervene in and implicitly solve a crisis (or not) are also the reason for designing and realizing alternative conditions or “Real Utopias” (Wright 2010) that avoid the underlying reasons for social crise with its potential for conflict. The relationship between crisis, conflict, intervention, and the search for crises-free alternatives is largely undertheorized from a sociological perspective. Thus, a systematic description of the relationships between these concepts and development of hypothesis about the current links of current crises and conflicts is of interest.

The relationships between insecurity, contingency, crisis, conflict, and de-escalation is sociologically explored by developing illustrative examples from Real Utopias as “alternative life concepts” in Social Work, Policing, and International Relations.