Conceptualizing crisis brokerage: brokering crisis or brokers in crisis

In the article the authors develop a conceptual framework for ‘Crisis Brokers’. The contemporary world is facing multiple and closely interlinked crises: from pandemics to wars, from climate change to forced migration. Regardless of nature and scope of the crisis, affected people often rely on brokers to create meaning, mitigate the disruptive and disturbing impacts, or find ways to cope with them and survive.

While brokers play important roles as intermediaries and facilitators in a wide range of settings, their knowledge and skills are particularly relevant in rapidly emerging, volatile as well as continuing crisis settings, where established mechanisms to restore order no longer work. People with relevant knowledge, skills and networks become brokers to help those affected to navigate the crisis by mediating between clashing ‘worlds’, between the specific locality and forces or interventions meant to trigger or alleviate the crises, and to regain control. Through their centrality in processes of translation, information dissemination and connection of disparate actors, they are important agents of social change, impacting power dynamics.

In this article the authors take a critical look at the notion of crisis and analyse the phenomenon of brokerage in the context of crises. Time and temporality then serve as analytical tools that allow the authors to better understand the significance of brokerage in crises contexts. They are interested in how brokers respond to temporal aspects of crisis and how brokers can change ensuing temporalities. The framework allows the authors to explore ways in which crises create spaces for brokers to emerge and operate and to make novel contributions to both the crisis and brokerage literature in ‘times of crises’.