This article examines Judith Butler’s concepts of vulnerability and grievability in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and biopower practices introduced in the name of the protection of the people. An analysis of the elite political discourse in Czechia, Germany, Great Britain, and Slovakia in the first three months of the pandemic explores how vulnerability was constructed and distributed among the respective populations. We identified two prevailing discursive frames – science and security. Within the first, vulnerability was constructed in terms of biological characteristics, rendering elderly, disabled, and chronically ill bodies as already lost and ungrievable. Within the security frame, Roma or migrant populations’ vulnerability to the virus has been discursively shifted into being seen as a threat, while vulnerability itself was recognized more as a feature of institutions or society. Thus, despite the claims that ‘we are all in this together’, the pandemic has exposed how our vulnerability and interdependency are embedded within existing social structures.

The popularity of conspiracy theories poses a clear challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conspiracy theories undermine rational debate, spread dangerous falsehoods and threaten social cohesion. However, any possible public policy response, which would try to contain their spread, needs to respect the liberal commitment to protect pluralism and free speech. A successful justification of such a policy must therefore: 1) clearly identify the problematic class of conspiracy theories; and 2) clarify the grounds on which the state is justified in acting against them. This article argues that the prevailing epistemic approaches to conspiracy theorizing cannot fulfil these criteria. Defining conspiracy theories by their flaws in reasoning, questionable coherence or factual mistakes can neither sharply distinguish problematic conspiracy theories from other, non-problematic worldviews nor justify state action. Thus, we propose to understand conspiracy theories through their ethical unreasonableness. We hold that containment of conspiracy theories is justifiable insofar as they undermine the liberal-democratic ideals of mutual respect, freedom and equality. We then show that such ‘ethical’ criteria for conspiracy theories can be sufficiently robust and clear-cut so that they can serve as a useful guide for public policy.

Over the past decade, Slovakia has witnessed the dismantling of public human rights institutions and gender equality policies and incessant efforts to limit sexual and reproductive rights. While these processes have been mostly discussed in relation to the transnational anti-gender movement, this article conceptualizes them as part of an illiberal turn. We argue that recent rhetorical, institutional, and policy processes in Slovakia have been enabled by a discursive shift positing a new subject: conservative people and their rightful demands. Our argument is bolstered through two analyses. Quantitative content analysis of media articles published between 2002 and 2020, firstly, traces the increased emphasis on the signifiers “conservative” and “liberal.” This examination demonstrates that the anti-gender discourse in the 2010s accelerated and normalized this specific discursive frame. Furthermore, it underscores how the carriers of the conservative label shifted away from institutions towards individual politicians and, more importantly, toward a collective subject—people. Qualitative discourse analysis, secondly, focuses on the anti-gender discourse, understood here as a Laclauian populist practice. It posits three types of demands entangled in an equivalential chain—demands dealing with cultural recognition, material redistribution, and political representation. This analytical approach enables us to show how the construction of the conservative/liberal divide goes beyond the struggles for so-called traditional values, but is embedded in broader socioeconomic processes, and how it led to calls for political representation of the “conservative people” and for a “conservative” (in fact illiberal) transformation of political institutions.

This contribution reviews and comments on recent scholarship on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how vulnerability was constructed and studied. We reflect on the various meanings of vulnerability and suggest political science should go beyond individualized and identity-based approaches and see the pandemic conditions as shared and embedded within the already existing social, political, and economic structures. We also examine how our previously identified discursive frames of science and security work in the context of the later pandemic stages and the vaccination rollout and note how these frames continue to render certain lives ungrievable. Our contribution is intended to add to the growing interest in using the concepts of vulnerability, precariousness, and precarity in studies of politics and international relations, as well as in critical studies of public health and the coronavirus pandemic.

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