When the illiberal and the neoliberal meet around infectious diseases: an examination of the MERS response in South Korea

Lim, So Hyung; Sziarto, Kristin

doi:10.1080/21622671.2019.1700825

Cited by 18 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…During the 2003 SARS epidemic, Korea's 'command and control' system fared well. Subsequently, however, neoliberal reforms fragmented and privatised key parts of Korea's healthcare system, leading to the world's second-worst performance during the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) pandemic (Lim & Sziarto, 2020).…”

Section: The South Korean Contrastmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state

Jones

2021

Review of International Political Economy

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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed massive failures of governance at the global and national levels. Global health governance failed rapidly, with action quickly becoming nationally based, uncoordinated, and often zero-sum. However, domestic health governance also often fared very poorly, even in some of the wealthiest countries, which were ostensibly best-prepared to deal with a pandemic. Why? We argue that this reflects the inherent pathologies of the shift from 'government to governance' and of the 'regulatory state' it had spawned. This has resulted in the hollowing-out of effective state capacities, the dangerous diffusion of responsibility, and de facto reliance on ad hoc emergency measures to contain crises. We demonstrate this through a detailed case study of Britain, where regulatory governance and corporate outsourcing failed miserably, contrasting this with the experience of South Korea, where the regulatory state form was less well established and even partially reversed.

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Section: The South Korean Contrastmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state

Jones

2021

Review of International Political Economy

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“…Even the most democratic regimes may curtail civil liberties in a state of emergency or in their response to challenges caused by an external crisis. Epidemics and pandemics have in the past led governments to respond to outbreaks by curtailing civil liberties in the past to reduce the spread of disease (Barbisch, Koenig, and Shih 2015;Rothstein 2015;Gostin and Hodge Jr. 2020;Lim and Sziarto 2020).…”

Section: Subnational Democratic Backsliding and Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

Calling in "Sick": COVID-19, Opportunism, Pretext, and Subnational Democracy

Stenberg¹,

Rocco²,

Farole³

2021

Preprint

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As governments sought to manage the Coronavirus pandemic, many pursed a temporary increase in centralized authority, a general tactic of crisis management. However, in some countries, centralization in the name of public health was not the only motive. The COVID-19 response coincided with broader worldwide trends towards democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation. Some of these efforts happened while the world was preoccupied with responding to the pandemic without concretely referencing Coronavirus; however, in other cases, public health rationales are clearly and explicitly invoked as a pretext for actions that instead aid the consolidation of regime authority. This has been especially pernicious in subnational democracy, where efforts have been made to undermine the ability of opposition parties to fairly contest in local and regional politics. This paper looks at four cases in which political actors either opportunistically used worldwide distraction from the COVID-19 pandemic or explicitly invoked public health while seeking to undermine long-term domestic contestation in their jurisdictions: Hong Kong, Hungary, Uganda, and the United States. We examine the use of public health as a pretext for undermining opposition parties, recentralizing political authority in dominant actors, and inhibiting the fair contestation of elections.

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“…Understanding these hybrid forms are crucial to understand specific places better. The places explored in this issue are Hyderabad, India (Sood & Kennedy, 2019, in this issue); rural China (Tynen, 2019, in this issue); Korea (Lim and Sziarto, 2020, in this issue); Singapore (Luger, 2019, in this issue); and the 'Sanctuary Cities' of the United States (Kuge, 2019, in this issue).…”

Section: Beyond Illiberal Normativity? This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Questioning planetary illiberal geographies: territory, space and power

Luger

2020

Territory, Politics, Governance

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In the news media, stories abound of nationalist outbursts, of authoritarian repression, of populist eruptions and of closures/enclosures of space, and of freedoms. Strikingly, these stories have and continue to be amplified and mobilized by social media. When publics around the world demand the freedom to express themselves and generate online opinion, it can be difficult to distinguish between genuine public sentiment and manufactured outrage. Governments around the world from Donald Trump's America to Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines are proving adept at 'rigging' outbursts, generating repressions and unleashing populist arrows (e.g., 'Send them home', 'Lock her up').Before predicting the demise of liberalism and the dawn of a new, more illiberal age, it is necessary to pause and reflect on the weight, meaning, and construction of these terms and concepts. It is salutary to recall that the term 'illiberal democracy' was first coined in 1997 by the Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria (Zakaria, 1997). Zakaria argued that all around the world there were democratically elected regimes routinely avoiding constitutional limits and restraints. His point was simple: democracy is flourishing but constitutional liberalism is not.Twenty years later, we might ask whether normative understandings of illiberalism be made or unmade? Is illiberalism appropriate as a frame for a comparative approach to territory, space and power, given the trouble of categories such as 'East', 'West', and the associated (mis)conceptions about moral geographies and politics? Where are illiberalism's origins, influences, endpoints, boundaries and limits? Certainly, things such as the postcolonial reordering and rescaling of nation-states and the advent of 'do-it-yourself' geopolitics via social media (which has upended hierarchies, rescaled borders and allowed for new types of political encounters) suggest that such a rethink is necessary.Second, before heralding the planetary nature of illiberalism, it is important to zoom in on the local and reconsider the role of situated context, and the embedded/embodied flows of power attached to place. To what degree, for example, are Chinese state-society relations and the oppression of the Uyghur people comparable (or not) with other states, with other oppressions? What lessons can, or cannot, be learned from such a comparison? And does such a comparison perpetuate an East-West moral hierarchy, a sort of illiberal Orientalism?Third, moving away from the mainstream news, from the spectacular and from the violent, we seek to look more closely at the ordinary, the mundane and the everyday operations, flows and embodied performances of illiberalism and illiberal powerin other words, a popular geopolitics (e.g., Agnew & Shin, 2019). Through mechanisms as seemingly ordinary and banal as community centres, public health infrastructure, urban planning strategies, WhatsApp conversations and the local geographies of sanctuary, the relational processes of illiberalism come into view. However,

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When the illiberal and the neoliberal meet around infectious diseases: an examination of the MERS response in South Korea

Cited by 18 publications

References 38 publications

COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state

COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state

Calling in "Sick": COVID-19, Opportunism, Pretext, and Subnational Democracy

Questioning planetary illiberal geographies: territory, space and power

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