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Paper short abstract

In this paper, rather than treating crisis talk, emergency talk, and urgency talk as mere descriptive terms of exceptional events, I conceptualize them as governance practices that actively produce particular temporalities and privilege particular actions.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I examine how contemporary governance is increasingly structured through competing and overlapping temporal discourses of crisis, emergency, and urgency. Rather than treating these terms as descriptive labels for exceptional events, I conceptualize crisis talk, emergency talk, and urgency talk as governance practices that actively produce particular temporalities through compressing time, suspending futures, and reordering horizons of action. Building on critical scholarship on temporality, securitization, and scenario-based governance, I argue that these discourses do not merely respond to disruption but themselves function as technologies of disruption, reshaping how political problems are framed, anticipated, and governed.

Through a comparative analysis of policy documents, planning exercises, and scenario practices in the fields of security, public health, and energy, I demonstrate how each modlity mobilizes a distinct temporal logic. Crisis talk constructs moments of decisive rupture that demand interpretation and choice; emergency talk legitimizes exceptional authority and accelerated intervention; and urgency talk normalizes permanent acceleration and continuous readiness. I further introduce the concept of disrupting temporalities to capture how these discourses simultaneously destabilize established temporal orders and install new ones that privilege immediacy over deliberation.