Abstract
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe limitations on the freedom of assembly, if not an outright lockdown, in many cases complemented by restrictions on further civil and political rights. Although restrictions were generally considered necessary to save lives and protect health care systems from overburdening, they also pose the risk of government overreach, that is, governments may use the pandemic as a convenient opportunity and justification to impose restrictions for political purposes. In this sense, COVID-19 may give yet another substantial boost to a global trend that has been unfolding since the early 2000s: the shrinking of civic spaces, which is characterized by an increase in government restrictions that target civil society actors and limit their freedoms of assembly, association, and expression. The aim of the paper is to assess civic space restrictions that have been imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a view to exploring their immediate consequences as well as their potential mid-term implications for civil society organizations in general and contentious civic activism in particular. We do so by, first, providing evidence from multiple data sources about the global spread of COVID-19-related restrictions over time and across countries. Second, we identify key dynamics at work in order to assess the immediate consequences and the potential mid-term implications of these restrictions. These dynamics are illustrated by looking at experiences from individual countries (including Cambodia, Germany, Hungary, and Lebanon).
Highlights
Starting in early February 2020, a rapidly increasing number of governments began to impose severe restrictions on core civic freedoms as a means to contain the COVID-19 pandemic
Until early April 2020, a majority of countries worldwide had introduced severe limitations on the freedom of assembly, if not an outright lockdown, in many cases complemented by restrictions on further civil and political rights
They entail the risk that governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic may give another lasting boost to the spread of shrinking civic spaces, a phenomenon that has been observed since the early 2000s
Summary
Starting in early February 2020, a rapidly increasing number of governments began to impose severe restrictions on core civic freedoms as a means to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the early 2000s, politicians, civil society activists and scholars have observed a worldwide increase in government restrictions targeting civil society activists and organizations (CSOs) and limiting their space, autonomy and/or capacity (see Carothers and Brechenmacher 2014; Poppe and Wolff 2017).. International counterterrorism measures—and namely the attempts by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to limit terrorist financing by strengthening the oversight of non-profit organizations—directly pushed governments towards adopting more restrictive NGO (funding) rules in many places.3 Against this background, we assess civic space restrictions that have been imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in two ways. This article adds to the role of idiosyncratic events, external shocks and emergency situations that shape the spread of, and the controversies over, civic space restrictions As opportunities, they enable governments to justify extraordinary measures that would otherwise provoke (much more) resistance. While in the overall debate 9/11 and its implications for the spread of shrinking civic spaces have received a lot of attention (see Carothers and Brechenmacher 2014; Howell et al 2008; Poppe and Wolff 2017), existing comparative studies rather focus on general factors (e.g. levels of foreign aid or commitment to human rights treaties) and recurring events (such as elections) to explain the phenomenon (see, for instance, Bakke et al 2020; Dupuy et al 2016) and have yet to systematically include individual, but salient events and crises as potential explanation
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