Legitimate Emergencies: Reconciling Liberal Rights and Democratic Authority in Times of Crisis

This project will perform a realist analysis of emergency politics.

More specifically, it will give a realist account of what states of emergency reveal about the nature of political legitimacy.

This will be achieved through a mixture of history of political theory, critical analysis of competing recent approaches to emergency, and an empirical study of the political crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At present, political realists controversially argue that emergency politics expose how liberal theories of legitimacy are excessively divorced from reality. Their argument, however, remains underdeveloped in three key respects.

In the first place, they seek to ground their claims in a broadly Nietzschean worldview, yet they do so in a manner that conspicuously jars with what Nietzsche himself writes about situations of emergency. Second, the realist literature fails to critically engage with recent liberal theories of emergency (and vice versa).

Finally, realists neglect a wealth of relevant literature in jurisprudence, which has not yet been brought to bear on the debate in political theory.

By addressing each of these lacunae, this interdisciplinary project will formulate a robust realist theory of emergency, one that will then be empirically applied to the states of emergency declared in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the project will be published in the form of a monograph.