- Published
- 01 August 2024
- Journal article
Crisis governance, (de)mobilisation and new inequalities: the legacy of COVID-19
- Authors
- Source
- Critical Sociology
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).
Rights
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Cite as
Bužinkić, E., Foley, J. & Kerr, E. 2024, 'Crisis governance, (de)mobilisation and new inequalities: the legacy of COVID-19', Critical Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241268370