TY - JOUR

T1 - Slow crisis in Bissau and beyond

AU - Vigh, Henrik Erdman

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - This article takes an ethnographic look at processes of long-term and lingering crises. Building on longitudinal and transnational fieldwork with migrants from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the ways that crisis may ramify across time and scale, thereby affecting everyday life, social relations and political dynamics. While the concept of ‘slow crisis’ sits uncomfortably within our common understanding of crisis as a momentary aberration and tipping point, the article clarifies how attending to the lingering and wandering effects of the phenomenon may grant us a fuller understanding of its temporality and social life. The article explores the way crisis is lived through a longitudinal study of Guinea-Bissauan migrants in Bissau, Lisbon and Paris. Via an ethnographic case study of a protracted and compound crisis, it illuminates the social deterioration, contraction and fragmentation that define such situations, and points to the common dynamics of crises as continuing critical conditions rather than singular aberrations.

AB - This article takes an ethnographic look at processes of long-term and lingering crises. Building on longitudinal and transnational fieldwork with migrants from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the ways that crisis may ramify across time and scale, thereby affecting everyday life, social relations and political dynamics. While the concept of ‘slow crisis’ sits uncomfortably within our common understanding of crisis as a momentary aberration and tipping point, the article clarifies how attending to the lingering and wandering effects of the phenomenon may grant us a fuller understanding of its temporality and social life. The article explores the way crisis is lived through a longitudinal study of Guinea-Bissauan migrants in Bissau, Lisbon and Paris. Via an ethnographic case study of a protracted and compound crisis, it illuminates the social deterioration, contraction and fragmentation that define such situations, and points to the common dynamics of crises as continuing critical conditions rather than singular aberrations.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - crisis

KW - migration

KW - criminalisation

KW - cocaine

KW - ethnography

KW - global criminology

U2 - 10.1332/204378921X16348942683000

DO - 10.1332/204378921X16348942683000

M3 - Journal article

VL - 12

SP - 522

EP - 536

JO - Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought

JF - Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought

SN - 2043-7897

IS - 3-4

ER -