On a word that does more work than we admit, and what happens to the people it gets applied to.

By Méline Laffabry

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At some point before publishing, a journalist has to decide what to call what they are looking at. Not just what happened, but what kind of thing it is. Whether it is a crisis, a tragedy, a conflict, a situation, an emergency. This is not a neutral decision. It rarely feels like one either. There is a moment, often unspoken, where the framing arrives and then shapes everything that follows: the sources you call, the images you request, the register you write in, the urgency you assign.

The word crisis carries a specific gravity. It signals that something has crossed a threshold. That a response is required. That the situation has moved beyond the ordinary and into a register where attention, resources, and action are justified. But this threshold is not fixed. It moves depending on where you are standing and who is being described.

Some suffering gets called a crisis immediately. Other suffering waits. It is documented, reported, discussed, and still does not quite reach the level of naming that would shift what happens next. This unevenness is not random. It tends to follow familiar lines of geography, race, and political interest. The same number of deaths, the same displacement, the same collapse of basic infrastructure can land differently in the language of coverage depending on whose country it is and whose allies are watching.

But there is a further problem, and it is one that coverage of migration has made especially visible. Sometimes the word crisis is not applied to a pre-existing condition. Sometimes it is applied to a situation that policy itself has created, and then the coverage reports the crisis without fully naming its cause. When governments closed borders, reduced legal routes, and made movement more dangerous, the resulting suffering was reported as a migration crisis. The framing was accurate in a narrow sense: there was suffering, there was movement, there was pressure on systems. But the word arrived without its context. The emergency was treated as something that had appeared (almost out of nowhere), rather than something that had been constructed or was the consequence of very real and violent realities.

This matters because the word crisis rarely arrives alone. It brings a response mode with it, and that response mode has a shape. It tends to produce images of volume and chaos rather than individuals. It tends to source institutions, officials, and emergency actors rather than the people at the centre of what is happening. It activates a kind of charitable attention that is genuinely interested in suffering but less interested in agency, and still less interested in accountability. The people inside a crisis become objects of concern, or worry when they are presented as a mass crossing borders and seas to come still jobs, rather than subjects of a story.

There is also something that happens when the crisis is declared over. Coverage moves on. The threshold is crossed again, in the other direction, and the story loses its framing. What remains is rarely reported in the same register. The communities who were the subject of intense attention find that the attention has gone somewhere else, even when the conditions that produced the crisis have not changed. The word crisis has an expiry date. The reality it describes often does not.

None of this is an argument against using the word. Some situations genuinely are crises in the fullest sense, and naming them clearly matters. Failure to use the word can itself be a political act, a way of normalising what should not be normalised. The question is not whether to use the framing but what we carry with us when we do. What assumptions are already active before we sit down to report. What gets explained and what gets treated as given. Who is called to account and who is photographed.

These are not questions with easy answers, which is partly why they tend not to be asked out loud. Editorial decisions about framing happen fast, under pressure, in contexts where the goal is to get the story out. The vocabulary arrives before the reflection does. What we are interested in is what happens when the reflection comes first, or at least when it comes at all.