All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State by Saptarishi BANDOPADHYAY,. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ix + 320 pp. Hardcover: £47.99. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780197579190.001.0001 ;Crisis Narratives in International Law edited by Makane Moïse MBENGUE, and Jean D'ASPREMONT,. Leiden/Boston: Brill Nijhoff, 2021. vi + 194 pp. Softcover: €61.00. doi: 10.1163/9789004472365

ABSTRACT

Commenting on international law in the domestic space, Crisis Narratives contains contributions that flag the marginalisation of science in crisis management, due in part to the supremacy of politics over expertise (Józefiak), the incompatibility of some domestic policy responses to the pandemic with state obligations under international human rights law (Pinto), and the repeated failures to adequately protect those who are already at the margins (Fitzmaurice). Revisiting three disasters in the eighteenth century the 1920 Marseille plague outbreak, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and the 1770 famine in Bengal, All is Well gives nuances to accounts such as those given by Naomi Klein, that the making of contemporary developmentalist-security states is a US invention of the post-World War II era, pioneered by Chicago school economists, US conservatives, and the Central Intelligence Agency.2 The book illustrates the centrality of disaster management to creating and holding on to the authority necessary for state making and remaking. Lessons drawn from this account for contemporary international law and policy are that disaster management mechanisms, such as climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction, serve to remake and reshape states in the Global South for the purposes of sustaining a global state of hegemonic normalcy.