This is the title of an open-access article authored by Dr. Carlo Caduff and just published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly on July 21st. I highly recommend it and I wish there were more truly brave people like him in academia, speaking out about the ongoing steep rise of authoritarianism all around us, under the guise of biosecurity/public health. Below I provide the abstract and the link to the full paper:
What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop
Abstract
This article examines the global response to the Covid‐19 pandemic. It argues that we urgently need to look beyond the virus if we want to understand the real seriousness of what is happening today. How did we end up in a space of thinking, acting, and feeling that has normalized extremes and is based on the assumption that biological life is an absolute value separate from politics? The author suggests that today's fear is fueled by mathematical disease modeling, neoliberal health policies, nervous media reporting, and authoritarian longings.
Full paper:
Article What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop
Dear Dragos,
the paper by Dr. Caduff is interesting indeed. During Covid-19 pandemic, the world population experienced several phases, from fear of death to medical personnel mythologizing, and non-medical professional citizens ended up considering theirselves as "lockdown heroes". The capitalist economic model has proven its weakness in such a situation, and a lot of companies even took advantage of it in order to sell more.
Since social-economical gap between countries has been highlighted like never before, prioritizing industrialized ones within the race for survival, we have to seriously reconsider ethical issues that all nations across the globe took for granted. Those that before pandemic were considered as untouchable rights, have now become questionable, due to the global martial law adopted to face the emergency.
An interesting paper on this topic by Ajnesh Prasad:
Prasad, A. (2020). The organization of ideological discourse in times of unexpected crisis: Explaining how COVID-19 is exploited by populist leaders. Leadership, doi:10.1007/s10551-018-4006-z.
He points out how the populist leaders convert extraordinary challenging situations to their advantage by causally attributing these situations to their political opponents and then use this attribution to go to a higher level of authoritarianism.
Thank you for suggesting that paper, Shoaib! I looked it up and luckily it is open access:
The abstract: Using the persecution of Muslims in India that is currently taking place against the backdrop of the COVID-19 global pandemic as an illustrative case, this essay identifies the dynamics of the organization of ideological discourse by populist leaders in times of unexpected crisis. The organization of ideological discourse represents strategic, discursive acts committed by populist leaders aimed at foregrounding social conditions that would function in the advancement of various political ends—whether those ends may be the consolidation of power, the undermining of institutional systems of checks and balances, the implementation of exclusionary or injurious policies against disenfranchised constituents, the suspension of civil liberties, or a combination thereof. It is engendered through a three-stage process. In the first stage, surface-level validation by legitimate institutional actors confirms preconceived ideas about a constructed enemy. In the second stage, inflammatory rhetoric is deployed by populist leaders, which scapegoat that constructed enemy. These two stages culminate to create widespread moral panic in society. With moral panic firmly established, in the third stage an environment of fear and paranoia becomes susceptible to the enactment of symbolic and physical violence against the constructed enemy. The essay concludes with some words on the pressing need to deconstruct ideologically motivated discourses related to COVID-19.
Full text here:
Article The organization of ideological discourse in times of unexpe...
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