The sacrificial citizenship of COVID-19

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the implications of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic for neoliberal citizenship. It explores how this crisis has been shaped by a neoliberal rationality of scarcity—of intensive care beds, ventilators, PPE, qualified and properly trained staff—which has materialized in years of underfunded public healthcare infrastructure and just-in-time managerial approaches aimed at saving costs at the expense of the capacity of saving lives. Indeed, saving the market or saving lives has been the fundamental neoliberal rationality governing the COVID crisis. This has prompted the further internalization of the categories of ‘sacrificial others’ to include nominal ‘normal’ citizens such as the elderly in care homes. Their sacrifice has been made imperative by a biopolitical ‘calculus of lives’ that increasingly subordinates the ‘right to have rights’ associated with citizenship to one’s individual perceived value. The coronavirus pandemic, the chapter discusses, has contributed to further strengthening the hold of neoliberal citizenship by normalizing the idea that lives are sacred only insofar as they can survive scarce health provisions without affecting the functioning of the neoliberal order.