Crisis geographies from above and below: Constructing globality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

In this paper, we posit that the 'global' status of the pandemic is not an essentialized feature of the crisis, but a product of social construction by political leaders. More specifically, we examine how political leaders of a superpower and a peripheral nation produce the pandemic's globality through crisis geographies from above and below. Utilizing a mixed methods framework, we analyse public speeches by Donald Trump of the United States and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines through a critical approach to text analytics. Quantitatively, we found that besides mentioning their own homelands, Western countries featured more prominently in Trump's speeches while Asian neighbours were more salient in Duterte's speeches during the pandemic. However, the United States and China were consistently the most central in the crisis geographies of the pandemic of both speakers. Qualitatively, we further characterized the discourses surrounding these global pronouncements as: (a) collective reflexive positioning on the world stage, (b) charting zones of hope and (c) scapegoating zones of blame. Taken together, implications of this work are discussed in terms of understanding pandemic leadership in national and international contexts, recognizing its negotiated embeddedness in global structural hierarchies and enhancing critical approaches to geopolitical psychology.