States Reimagined: COVID-19, the Ordinary, and Extraordinary in Aotearoa/New Zealand

ABSTRACT Shifting public imaginaries have played a vital role in shaping government and citizen responses to COVID-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand. During the nation’s first COVID-19 lockdown, the general public expressed support, and at times even enthusiasm, for strict measures put in place to curb the spread of the virus. Less than a year later, what had begun as a nationalistic rallying cry to ‘unite together’ and ‘be kind’ while ‘combatting COVID-19’ took on more sinister tones through government-sponsored moral panic, including the blaming and shaming of those who did not or could not uphold COVID-19 regulations. At the same time, growing dissent, particularly by those protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, steadily chipped away at government-promoted images of national solidarity. By early 2022, with the spread of omicron, the government stepped away from attempting to eradicate the virus and jettisoned its collectivist message, highlighting instead each New Zealander’s ‘personal responsibility’ to try and stay well. This article traces how citizen-State relations have been reimagined in Aotearoa/NZ over the first two years of the pandemic, the effects of various pubic- and government-supported moral imaginaries in enabling the government to exercise ‘extra-ordinary’ powers, and the power and fragility of national consensus-building in the midst of crisis. I suggest how examining the pandemic and pandemic responses as a ‘collective critical event’ enables us to trace not only how it altered citizens’ visions of the State, but their active engagements in reconfiguring and reimagining various states of social, economic, and cultural life.