EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply shaken societies and lives around the world. This powerful book reveals how the pandemic has intensified socio-economic problems and inequalities across the world whilst offering visions for a better future informed by social movements and public sociology. Bringing together experts from 27 countries, the authors explore the global echoes of the pandemic and the different responses adopted by governments, policy makers and activists. The new expressions of social action, and forms of solidarity and protest, are discussed in detail, from the Black Lives Matter protests to the French Strike Movement and the Lebanese Uprising. This is a unique global analysis on the current crisis and the contemporary world and its outcomes.

Social movements have often played an important role in emergencies, mobilising in defence of those rights that they perceive as being at risk or more urgently needed than ever. In general, progressive social movements develop in moments of intense change, mobilising with the aim of turning them to their advantage. the variable mix of challenges and opportunities related to a critical juncture. The specific balance of challenges and opportunities faced by progressive social movements during the Covid-19 crisis is a central question addressed in this volume. Based on existing research on the first phases of the pandemic Covid-19, this Element addresses the ways in with the health emergency had an impact on the repertoire of action, the organizational networks and the collective framing of progressive social movements that adapted to the pandemic conditions and the related crises, but also tried to transform them.

This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society. The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice. This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis. Contents Notes on Contributors Preface Gerard Delanty 1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State Claus Offe 2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its ‘Epistemic Regime’ Stephen Turner 3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals Jan Zielonka 4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians? Jonathan White 5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19 Daniel Innerarity 6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future Helga Nowotny 7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization Eva Horn 8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19 Bryan S. Turner 9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes Daniel Chernilo 10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran 11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact Part 3 The Social and Alternatives Sylvia Walby 12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy Donatella della Porta 13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic Sonja Avlijaš 14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic Albena Azmanova 15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99% Index

Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with mass media and social media playing a key role, anti-vax protests have received sustained attention. The first comments often pointed at the heterogeneity of the events, whose participants seemed to belong to different milieus, from the far right to exoteric groups that opposed mainstream medicine, suggesting alternative ones. In reality, in their forms and claims, these protests developed as a regressive response to the health crisis. Conspiracist beliefs—from the politicized QAnon and Great Replacement conspiracies widespread on the far right to the Chemic Trails and 5G ones present in an exoteric milieu that promoted alternative health practices—were clearly expressed in the slogans and symbols used by the protestors. In different moments in different countries, the contestation of the anti-COVID-19 measures proceeded with picks and ebbs, following the waves of contagion and the related increase in policy measures to curve them. Increasing especially during the vaccination campaigns, they seemed to subside however quite quickly as the COVID-19 virus started to become endemic, with vaccination reducing its lethality. This volume builds upon social movement studies in the attempt to illuminate the dynamics of these protests in the various steps of their emergency, growth and decline. Referring to most recent developments in social movement studies, it in particular contributes to the analysis of contentious politics in emergency times, characterized by deep disruption in everyday life and rapid structural transformations in the society. In order to understand how specific strains are transformed into actions, it considers the opportunities and challenges for different actors in moments of intense mobilization in which different and contrasting claims are put forward. While these moments are rich in innovation, they built upon existing social movement infrastructures, that contribute to give meaning to dissatisfaction by proposing a shared definition of problems and solutions. Looking at the wave of anti-vax protests through the lenses of social movement studies, the analysis addresses the spread of the protests, their forms, but also their quick decline.

This collection explores conceptions and practices of democracy of social movement organizations involved in global protest. Focusing on the global justice movement this book shows how they adopt radical new democratic approaches and thus provide a fundamental critique of conventional politics.

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

This book analyzes how COVID-19 impacted politics and how politics shaped the response to the pandemic in Latin America, the region which has become the epicenter of the global health crisis started in China. The volume brings together studies carried out in eight countries of the region – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay – and show how the impacts and outcomes varied a lot across the region depending on the political processes under way in each country in the years preceding the pandemic and on the political responses adopted by each government to deal with the health crisis. The volume is divided into four parts, each one dedicated to a specific dimension of the relation between politics and COVID-19 in Latin America. The first part is dedicated to denialism, and presents three case studies of governments that denied the importance of the health crisis: Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua. The second part takes Uruguay and Colombia as two opposite examples of successful and failed state action against COVID-19. The third part analyzes how social movements faced the pandemic in Brazil and Chile. Finally, the fourth part analyzes how public opinion reacted to political responses to COVID-19 in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. COVID-19's Political Challenges in Latin America will be a valuable resource for political scientists, sociologists and other social scientists interested in understanding how the pandemic affected politics and how politics affected the fight against the biggest health crisis faced by humanity in the last hundred years.