Introduction
The rhetoric of crisis is one of the most powerful tools available to political actors seeking to consolidate authority, limit dissent, and accelerate decision-making. While crises often do require urgent and coordinated responses, the framing of events as emergencies can also serve a strategic function: it can narrow the range of acceptable debate, justify extraordinary measures, and insulate leaders from blame. In contemporary governance, “crisis talk” has become a normalized feature of public discourse, invoked in contexts ranging from public health and migration to economic instability and environmental disaster. This article examines how emergency rhetoric operates as a mode of blame avoidance and how problematization offers a means of exposing the discursive tactics that convert urgency into impunity…
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