As public health and safety measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic were rolled back or lifted across the world in the spring of 2020, news outlets and politicians have portrayed this as a “return to normal”. Indeed, like other crises and disasters, the pandemic years were commonly and understandably perceived as a state of exception from the normal; yet another and no less reasonable manner of perceiving them is as a state of exception, which is the normal. Saptarishi Bandopadhyay's monograph All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (All is Well) is an invitation to think about crisis and disasters in this manner as it explores the operation of disaster management as a means of cultivating authority. The collection of short essays Crisis Narratives in International Law (Crisis Narratives), edited by Makane Moïse Mbengue and Jean D'Aspremont, is prompted by disaster management, namely that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both books contribute to a rich strand in legal scholarship, which ponders about the relationship between international law and crisis.Footnote ¹ Both books are thought-provoking reads, though for very different reasons.

Having been edited by two respected academics, Crisis Narratives features contributions by well-established international law scholars representing expertise across all branches of international law, and a multitude of theoretical leanings. Some portray crisis as an inevitable part of political culture in a liberal democracy and separable from international law (Klabbers). Others view crisis as an opportunity for norm manipulation and entrepreneurship (Scobbie), for re-orientation and renewal (Shany), or for measured norm expansion (Tams and Brown Weiss). Such a normative change could be inspired by both counter-hegemonic movements (Chimni) as well as by global solidarity (Mbengue), which some view as an international constitutional principle that should be interpreted in light of the One Health approach (Peters). Others caution that putting solidarity and human dignity at the heart of the international legal order requires a profound structural reform to reverse fragmentation (Boisson de Chazournes). Others invite considering international law and crisis as two vernaculars for a better epistemological understanding of one another (Ruiz Fabri), pointing to the revealing character of the pandemic as it regards knowledge production in international law (Mégret), or simply to the crisis discourse character of international law (D'Aspremont). 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). At the same time, there is much that international law and institutions could learn from domestic actors, such as frontline workers (Kingsbury).

While these contributions add a valid perspective to a significant topic, those familiar with the contributor's work will not be surprised by the interventions made in this edited volume. Judging by the date signed to the introduction (2 July 2021), the contributions were written in the midst of the pandemic and are thus not so much reflections on, but rather impressions of, its relationship with international law. Understood as such, the volume has the potential of becoming an important reference work on the sentiment of international legal voices on their discipline in the midst of a global crisis. At the same time, it is difficult not to walk away from reading Crisis Narratives with the sentiment that Zarbiyev expressed about scholarship, produced in the early months of the pandemic, which is “the depressing lack of anything that could be dignified with the adjective ‘intellectual’ if one means by ‘intellectual’ the quality that furthers one's understanding beyond what should be obvious immediately or in a matter of minutes to any decently trained international legal professional capable of competently reading and interpreting legal materials” (p. 183). In light of the calibre of editors and contributors, as well as a sense that the absence of this volume would have been far more conspicuous than its impressively rapid publication, this volume is a testament to international law by truly being a discipline that thrives on crisis.

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.Footnote ² The book illustrates the centrality of disaster management to creating and holding on to the authority necessary for state making and remaking. Though Bandopadhyay does not invalidate Klein's celebrated concept of “disaster capitalism”, showing, for instance, the significance of mercantilist interests in creating the conditions for the Marseille plague outbreak, the account foregrounds how these disasters, which were undoubtedly experienced as such for those who lived through them, created the perfect conditions to impose governance from above. 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. The book is thus an important intervention in contemporary humanitarian and development discourses, and speaks to practitioners and academics.

Crisis Narratives and All is Well are two distinctly different approaches of how one can accept the challenge that international law is a discipline of crisis. The former is a product of scholarship in crisis-mode whereas the latter is a provocation to resist the allure of crisis.