Pandemic And Crisis Of Democracy

In this incisive book, André Duarte examines the health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the contemporary crisis of democracy. Reflecting on President Jair Bolsonaro’s misgovernment of Brazil, as evidenced by his political actions, speeches and omissions from March 2020 to September 2021, and using concepts like biopolitics, neoliberalism and necropolitics, Duarte proposes three interrelated hypotheses to demonstrate Bolsonaro's sharp distrust of democracy. First, that Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, actions and omissions during the first year and a half of the pandemic revealed a dangerous mixture of biopolitical, neoliberal and necropolitical governmentality strategies. Second, that the pandemic in Brazil intensified the damaging side-effects against democracy brought by neoliberalism and biopolitics, once the necropolitical vector assumed precedence. And third, that Bolsonaro’s political agenda is either to revoke the Brazilian democracy by violent means or to implement a façade democracy by slowly distorting it from within, blurring the differences between democracy and authoritarianism. Conceptualizing democracy as power of the demos and not exclusively as a political regime organized around a definite set of political institutions, Duarte argues that Bolsonaro's misgovernment of Brazil is related to his antidemocratic viewpoints. Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy is an important book for researchers, students, and anyone concerned about the dangers that surround the democratic experience in the contemporary world.

Covid-19 has highlighted limitations in our democratic politics – but also lessons for how to deepen our democracy and more effectively respond to future crises. In the face of an emergency, the working assumption all too often is that only a centralised, top-down response is possible. This book exposes the weakness of this assumption, making the case for deeper participation and deliberation in times of crises. During the pandemic, mutual aid and self-help groups have realised unmet needs. And forward-thinking organisations have shown that listening to and working with diverse social groups leads to more inclusive outcomes. Participation and deliberation are not just possible in an emergency. They are valuable, perhaps even indispensable. This book draws together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers. Together they make visible the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic and make the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts. Another, more democratic world can be realised in the face of a crisis. The contributors to this book offer us meaningful insights into what this could look like.

Examines the most important democratic challenges of today, using the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study.

Democracy in crisis -- Pandemic resilience -- Federalism is an asset -- A transformed peace: an agenda for healing our social contract.

This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society. The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice. This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis. Contents Notes on Contributors Preface Gerard Delanty 1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State Claus Offe 2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its ‘Epistemic Regime’ Stephen Turner 3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals Jan Zielonka 4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians? Jonathan White 5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19 Daniel Innerarity 6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future Helga Nowotny 7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization Eva Horn 8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19 Bryan S. Turner 9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes Daniel Chernilo 10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran 11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact Part 3 The Social and Alternatives Sylvia Walby 12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy Donatella della Porta 13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic Sonja Avlijaš 14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic Albena Azmanova 15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99% Index

Examines the economic, social, cultural, as well as purely political threats to democracy in the light of current knowledge.

Examining 36 democracies from 1945 to 2010, this text arrives at conclusions about what type of democracy works best. It demonstrates that consensual systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and unemployment, and limit budget deficits.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an important case study, on a global scale, of how democracy works - and fails to work - today. From leadership to citizenship, from due process to checks and balances, from globalization to misinformation, from solidarity within and across borders to the role of expertise, key democratic concepts both old and new are now being put to the test. The future of democracy around the world is at issue as today's governments manage their responses to the pandemic. Bringing together some of today's most creative thinkers, these essays offer a variety of inquiries into democracy during the global pandemic with a view to imagining post-crisis political conditions. Representing different regions and disciplines, including law, politics, philosophy, religion, and sociology, eighteen voices offer different outlooks - optimistic and pessimistic - on the future.

Covid-19 has highlighted limitations in our democratic politics - but also lessons for how to deepen our democracy and more effectively respond to future crises. In the face of an emergency, the working assumption all too often is that only a centralised, top-down response is possible. This book exposes the weakness of this assumption, making the case for deeper participation and deliberation in times of crises. During the pandemic, mutual aid and self-help groups have realised unmet needs. And forward-thinking organisations have shown that listening to and working with diverse social groups leads to more inclusive outcomes. Participation and deliberation are not just possible in an emergency. They are valuable, perhaps even indispensable. This book draws together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers. Together they make visible the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic and make the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts. Another, more democratic world can be realised in the face of a crisis. The contributors to this book offer us meaningful insights into what this could look like.

This book offers an analysis of the causes, development, and likely consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for global neoliberalism. The analysis will draw upon the author’s previous work on neoliberalism, and on its twin crises: the economic crisis (the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), ongoing since 2007) and, subsequently, the crisis of political democracy that has been associated with the rise of ‘spectacular’ authoritarian leaders in several countries. The approach is grounded on Marxist political economy. The book argues that the Covid-19 pandemic emerges out of this context of deep inequalities and crises in the economy and in politics, and it is likely to reinforce the exclusionary tendencies of neoliberalism, with detrimental implications both for economic prosperity and for democracy. In turn, the pandemic has revealed the limitations of neoliberalism like never before, with implications for the legitimacy of capitalism itself, and opening unprecedented spaces for the left. This book will be of interest to academics in economics, international relations, political science, political economy, sociology and development studies.