From the editors: research in times of COVID

Abstract

For almost one and a half year, the world has been in the grip of the COVID pandemic, confronting people worldwide with a wide variety of unexpected health, social, economic, legal, political and other impacts on their daily lives and lifeworlds. COVID took the world by surprise and totally unprepared; the rich parts of the world more interested in business-as-usual and economic growth than in disaster-preparedness, despite earlier wake-up calls like ebola, SARS, Q-fever and many others. Those who read David Quammen’s Spillover, published in 2013, could have known. Sociologically COVID can be seen as a life-changing “event,” a rupture that creates a “before” and an “after.” However, it does so differently for various people in different parts of the world and positioned differently socially, economically and otherwise. The outbreak and spread of the COVID pandemic does not only reveal the human vulnerability to and unpreparedness for pandemics, but also lays bare the deeper social, political and other fault lines, sensitivities and conflicts that tend to remain hidden under “normal” conditions. While in most countries COVID was acknowledged to be a serious threat, in some it was disregarded for political-ideological reasons (e.g. the United States during the Trump administration; Bolsonaro’s Brazil) or it was even forbidden to mention it (Tanzania under John Magufuli). Governing the COVID crisis is a matter of trial and error. While it took time to find out what works in combatting the pandemic, the three cases mentioned above have clearly shown what does not work, what bad governance of the pandemic looks like, and what the consequences of denial and disregard are in terms of human suffering. Many COVID-related measures have raised important constitutional, legal and justice issues. COVID has become the legitimizing argument for forms of securitization, centralization of powers and the creation of “states of exception,” expressed through emergency laws, policies and interventions. In Hongkong, for instance, COVID created a window of opportunity for those in power to forbid demonstrations against Beijing’s growing influence and thus to eliminate political opposition. In a world preoccupied with combatting the pandemic, authoritarian regimes more generally seem to have benefited from fear of contamination, reduced social interaction, and the ban on mass meetings and demonstrations. But the pandemic has raised many other political, legal and justice issues. Globally, the huge inequalities in access to pharmaceutical production infrastructure and the markets for vaccines dominated by rich countries have created unacceptable distributional inequalities and massive vulnerabilities. While rich countries bought up the lions’ share of global vaccine production, many poor countries, especially in Africa, stand by and remain dependent on gifts by other countries. Moreover, COVID