Institutional states: norm, pathology, emergency

Abstract

Uncertainty and the accumulation of risks in modern societies are almost the main challenges to institutional systems (state, market economy, education system, church, army, business). The article analytically differentiates and considers three states of institutional reality, represented by the event-time pictures of the world. Normally, institutions are relatively autonomous, in the process of their reproduction ensuring the stability of social orders and generating new problems. In pathology, some institutions form a kind of coalition, in which they lose their traditional functions, concentrating on their own sustainable reproduction. In a state of emergency caused by exceptional events (war, pandemic), the state and the army monopolize the right to legitimate violence, and other institutions lose the potential for effective functioning. This happens due to the material and financial damage caused, as happened in Ukraine since 2014 and after the armed invasion of the armies of a neighboring state on February 24, 2022. The situation of emergency in its institutional aspects remains the least conceptually equipped, and therefore not so studied.