Elite panic is Rebecca Solnit’s term for the recurrent pattern in which authorities fear survivors as a source of disorder and therefore prioritize control over support [@solnit2009].
The term matters because it helps explain a persistent feature of disaster response: ordinary people often cooperate under pressure, while official actors anticipate looting, irrationality, and breakdown [@solnit2009]. That inversion shapes how institutions police movement, control information, and restrict unaffiliated relief.
Elite panic is not simply a bad judgment. It is a political response to unauthorized collective capacity. When survivors demonstrate self-organization, institutions organized around command often treat that capacity as illegitimate, embarrassing, or threatening.
Related terms
- Emergent citizen groups - the forms of collective capacity elite panic often misreads
- Spontaneous Volunteers - unaffiliated relief capacity that official systems often try to control
- Mutual aid - horizontal provision that elite panic often obstructs
- The state - the institutional form most associated with command-and-control response