Over the last decade, education has been advanced as a new and legitimate core of the humanitarian crisis response. "Education in Emergencies" (EiE) developed into an institutionalised field of humanitarian practice, advocacy, and scholarly work. Identifying how emergency discourses have been critiqued to operate as "social imaginaries", in this paper the "emergency imaginary" as it develops in the particular discursive context of EiE is analysed. We scrutinise how emergencies are represented in this EiE-discourse by pointing to the socio-ideological and economic drivers of conflict, how the interconnections between education and these drivers are pictured, and the educational changes subsequently advocated for. We conclude that, while EiE has been called a "new field of academic and policy research", the discourse might reiterate prevailing power relations, leading to an adverse portrayal of crisis-affected communities and a legitimation of a global status-quo.