Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy

In this incisive book, Andrâe Duarte examines the health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the contemporary crisis of democracy. Reflecting on President Jair Bolsonaro's misgovernment of Brazil, as evidenced by his political actions, speeches and omissions from March 2020 to September 2021, and using concepts like biopolitics, neoliberalism and necropolitics, Duarte proposes three interrelated hypotheses to demonstrate Bolsonaro's sharp distrust of democracy. First, that Bolsonaro's rhetoric during the first year and a half of the pandemic revealed a dangerous mixture of biopolitical, neoliberal and necropolitical governmentality strategies. Second, the pandemic in Brazil intensified the politically damaging side effects brought by neoliberalism and biopolitics, once the necropolitical vector assumed precedence. And third, Bolsonaro's political 'agenda' aimed to implement a faðcade democracy in Brazil either by violent means or by slowly distorting it from within, slowly blurring the differences between democracy and authoritarianism. Conceptualizing democracy not exclusively as a political regime organized around a definite set of political institutions and normative legislative documents, Duarte exposes why Bolsonaro eschewed the political tasks assumed by so many other political leaders when confronted with the pandemic. Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy is an important book for researchers, students, and anyone concerned about the dangers that surround the democratic experience in the contemporary world--