Palliative Presentism and Its Alternatives

International organizations (IOs) are having growing recourse to digital technologies in emergency response. Digital interfaces, such as online earning warning tools, are informing how humanitarian emergencies are analysed under international legal auspices and in what time frame. This article probes the latter shift: change in the temporality of emergencies being readied for international legal analysis. It situates this shift amid recent humanities and social sciences literature on presentism and scrutinizes it through a close reading of two exemplary interfaces developed by IOs: VAMPIRE and HungerMap LIVE. Using these examples, this article argues that digital mediation tends to render international humanitarian emergencies incessant and all-absorbing in the present. No longer does the emergency interrupt time as in many prior international legal conceptions of crisis. Instead, the digitally assembled crisis situation invites waiting, a practice often associated with dead time. Insofar as waiting has been identified with submission or inaction, digital interfaces may propagate a perplexing combination of dispositions in those charged with assessing emergencies – namely, vigilant attentiveness to present conditions and sufferance of their inevitability. However, this is not the only register of presentism that international lawyers may imbibe in connection with digitalization; an abundance of scholarly resources offer alternatives