Joelle Grogan, Review of Miguel Poiares Maduro and Paul W. Kahn, eds., Democracy in Times of Pandemic: Different Futures Imagined

Abstract

Writing from behind a facemask eighteen months into the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult, to say the least, to aim to present any concrete analysis on the impact of the pandemic on democracy or democracies worldwide. For the social sciences, the legacy of the global health crisis has both profoundly changed and continues to change assumptions about the functions of democratic institutions, governance during emergency, law, politics, religion, and sociology. It is within this context that editors Miguel Poiares Maduro and Paul W. Kahn have presented their edited volume, Democracy in Times of Pandemic: Different Futures Imagined. Written (rather optimistically) when the world was “tentatively beginning to open” and published in November 2020, coinciding with the so-called “second wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume certainly should be lauded for the speed of its delivery, and the ambition of its analysis. Rather than “only” seeking to take initial stock of the transformative impact of the pandemic on national and transnational governance systems, the volume aims to bring varied viewpoints on democracy during a global pandemic in order to imagine “post-crisis political conditions,” or, perhaps more accurately, to present arguments for how democratic practices can be reinvigorated, reformed, or renewed.