Exposing the Crimes of the Neoliberal State in the Governance of COVID-19

Two of the most promising developments to emerge from the failed attempts to contain the spread of infectious disease outbreaks since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) a pandemic on 23 January 2020 are (i) an acceleration of the critique of neoliberalism and (ii) a reinvigoration of the state crime vocabulary. As Henry Giroux (2020) argued, the pandemic has exposed “the plague of neoliberalism” and revealed the need for a new language to make sense of the current crisis. In this article, I argue that the language of state crime has both the terminological and the conceptual capacity to inform such a sense-making endeavour and, relatedly, that the academic literature on state criminality can complement critiques of the global neoliberal order in the context of the failed governance of the COVID-19 pandemic.