Crisis governance, (de)mobilisation and new inequalities: the legacy of COVID-19

Abstract

According to many traditions of political theory, how states behave in exceptional circumstances reveals much about their underlying nature (Agamben, 2008; Lazar, 2006; Schmitt, 2005). The COVID-19 lockdowns, in that respect, should provide an extraordinarily fruitful opportunity to test presumptions about contemporary governance regimes. For many states, the pandemic was the most abrupt transformation in state-society relations outside of wartime or (counter)-revolutionary contexts. Globally, it ranks as the most severe downturn in capitalism since the Great Depression (Gopinath, 2020); its impact was to increase inequalities both within and between societies (Mahler et al., 2022).

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241268370

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https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/en/publications/43fb59e5-8704-4289-bf26-7c4804bd325b