Governing pandemic fatigue: an International Relations case of experiential biopolitics

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has made evident that living through a protracted global biopolitical emergency requires new theoretical reflections to make sense of what it means to govern life in a global context. As a central reference in the study of global health in International Relations (IR), biopolitical approaches have privileged a molecular-informational understanding of life as their object of governance. However, the phenomenon of global pandemic fatigue calls for a new problematisation. Experiential biopolitics is proposed here as an approach from which to recognise a limitation of biopolitical emergency governance that has resulted in a generalised feeling of exhaustion among populations subject to prolonged emergency measures. This reformulated biopolitical gaze understands human life, not only as a biological substance, but through its reflexive capacity to nurture lived experience, highlighting the entanglement of pandemic experiences and infection dynamics. The article explores experiential biopolitics through the WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue. It analyses how assessing pandemic experience through behavioural insights studies enables a reflexive visibility of the pandemic event by drawing together biological and experiential variables. Subsequently, it interrogates theories of risk perception as a cornerstone in imagining the pandemic subject as a fundamentally experiential being.