Biopolitics and the Coronavirus

Berge, Lukas van den

doi:10.5553/njlp/.000097

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For discussion, see Bratton (2021a, 2021b), Caldwell (2020), Kotsko (2022), and Silva and Higuera (2020). Our view echoes van den Berge (2020, p. 5): ‘it seems advisable … not to ascribe too much weight to Agamben's assessment of the corona crisis as far as it concerns his medical expertise. With regard to the danger of exceptionalism becoming the rule rather than the exception, however, his critique deserves to be taken very seriously.’…”

supporting

confidence: 52%

Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

Schliehe

Philo

Carlin

et al. 2022

Trans Inst British Geog

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set‐apart spaces of enforced confinement for “wrong‐doers,” has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault's inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault's claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti‐prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID‐19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as “retrenching,” “reworking” or “reducing” the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic “emergency,” the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked “carceral state,” disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The “biological sub‐citizens” of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified.

show abstract

supporting

confidence: 52%

Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

Schliehe

Philo

Carlin

et al. 2022

Trans Inst British Geog

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For the data analysis I used the theoretical framework of Foucault's theory on biopolitics and how biopolitics is understood in the Foucauldian sense, namely how biocitizenship disciplines and controls subjects even as it affords them certain rights (Shapiro, 2019, p. 358), being in a COVID-19 state of exception, as Agamben demarcated it. "Biopolitics" as a system of constant surveillance and discipline in governmental control pertains directly to the physical existence of citizens (Berge, 2020). The biopolitics of COVID-19 have been based on the promotion of horror and fear of contagion (Silva &Huguera 201,p.504).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives of Slow Violence Fear by Greek-speaking Pregnant Women during the COVID-19 Period

Saini¹

2023

Rand. Inter. Social Sci. J.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

During the COVID-19 pandemic pregnant women had to cope with the unknown and unprecedented challenges the coronavirus health crisis created. The Greek state and the biomedical discourse classified pregnant women as vulnerable due to the increased risk of severe illness and mortality rate of pregnant women infected by the coronavirus, depriving them of any kind of agency. However, the fear of slow violence of potential COVID-19 infection to the fetus’s health and the health of pregnant women led them, and particularly, the participants in this research, to act agentively as self risk-managers and to proceed to the adoption of several measures in order to alleviate this fear and to safeguard their own and their fetus’s health. These measures consisted of self-regulated preventive measures, mitigation strategies, and the COVID-19 vaccine uptake or refusal. These findings constituted the voice of the interviewees and their experience of being pregnant during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were the outcome of the conduct of eighteen online formal semi-structured in-depth online interviews and netnography. The research lasted three months, from 10 February 2022 to 10 May 2022, and was conducted in framework of the thesis: The experience of pregnancy in the COVID-19 period in Greece at the Master Course: Cultural Anthropology-Sustainable Citizenship of Utrecht University.

show abstract

“…Tewari (2020) defends Agamben's view of the pandemic as “war” and his concomitant concern with arbitrary power (cf. van den Berge, 2020). For Stelzenmüller (2020), law's role is to resist “[t]he coercive state,” meaning that “other constitutional actors such as courts, governors and citizens [must] reassert their rightful roles, and demand that government actions be evidence‐based, proportional, accountable and reversible.” From her characterization of the crisis flows a liberal rule of law argument.…”

Section: Law and Crisis Todaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world

Desai

2023

Law & Policy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Law has translated the coronavirus crisis into politically salient forms in people's lives, from states of emergency, to border closures, to mask mandates. Yet political theory work on these forms has focused on constraining arbitrary state power. In this paper, I try to broaden this focus. Substantively, I argue that policy and its implementation also matter to how we theorize the role of law in crises, in terms of how we understand the political power of society and its relationship to the state. Methodologically, I argue that thinking about law in this way is more than a complement to or replacement for thinking about constraints on arbitrariness. Rather, different forms of thinking about law and crisis should constantly be used to critique each other in order to pursue the sorts of legal innovations required by geomobile and interconnected crises. Given that the current pandemic and its broader consequences are still unfolding, I turn to development policy and practice to demonstrate the process and consequence of such ongoing critique in action. Studying rule of law reforms-including during the West African Ebola crisis-I show how practitioners continually reimagined law in ways that facilitated ongoing legal innovation that could adapt to the politics of the crisis. | INTRODUCTIONWhy is the relationship between law and crisis important? At the level of political theory, law is a way in which a crisis becomes politically salient in people's lives, by translating the crisis into familiar terms with political purchase, such as authority and right, or even states of emergency and vaccine mandates. In more abstract terms, "crisis" refers to conditions of rupture that

show abstract

Biopolitics and the Coronavirus

Cited by 17 publications

References 0 publications

Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

Narratives of Slow Violence Fear by Greek-speaking Pregnant Women during the COVID-19 Period

Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About