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Elzbieta Drazkiewicz

When the SARS-CoV-2 virus began its global spread, around the world authorities sought to reduce the novel caronavirus’s propagation by regulating not only where people could go and with whom but how to dress (with masks, gloves, etc.) and behave (no shaking hands, keeping 2m distance from each other, etc.). As epidemiologists turned to intensified contact tracing, private companies and governing bodies joined forces not only to develop new medical devices, vaccines and medications, but also to create new technologies and mobile apps for scaling up surveillance. Consequently, the pandemic shone a light onto extant tensions between governance and freedom as individual rights got pitted against state-defined visions of the public good, to be achieved though lockdowns, testing, tracking and vaccination.

Moreover, the pandemic brought to the fore questions that previously were concerning mostly niche groups. The questions such as ‘what is the truth?’, ‘what science knows?’, ‘what is the real agenda of the medical industry?’ which used to preoccupy the so called ‘conspirationists’, ‘anti-vaxxers’ or ‘science deniers’, now seem to be at the centre of most conversations and public debates. In many instances, concerns over control, authority, transparency, and freedom—fuelled by competition between officially sanctioned, expert knowledge and popular knowledge—support the circulation of ‘conspiratorial beliefs’ generating conflicts and dividing societies. Around the world, fraught discussions of COVID-19 cover-ups, pandemic geopolitics have risen to a notable high. 

This exploratory paper will investigate conflicts over conspiratorial views on pandemic in order to reveal what utopian and dystopian visions of the state and civil society they carry. The paper asks what can conflicts over scientific knowledge and health governance – the Covid-19 pandemic at large – reveal about people’s perception of what counts as a legitimate political critique, and what does not?

As conspiracy theories have been flourishing the boundary between legitimate concerns, questions and critiques on the one side and conspiracy theories on the other started to blur. In order to address these issues, particularly to restore the trust in a scientific knowledge and democratic governance, social activists, political leaders, journalists and scientists designed campaigns, mobile apps, but also research projects committed to fact checking, debunking false claims or investigating the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. By the early March of 2020 conspiracy theories became central issue not only to those people who propagate or endorse them, but significantly also to those who fear of their societal consequences. Conflicts over ‘the truth’ soon became a highly antagonising topic, strongly dividing many societies.

But with this paper I argue that what is at stake is not simply facts about Covid-19 pandemic, but larger questions regarding transparency and accountability, the right to political and social critique and the relationship between state authorities and citizens. The paper therefore asks: where do we draw a line separating authentic and necessary questioning of the state and unjustified suspicion or scaremongering disrupting democratic process? What conflicts over those issues can tell us about the ways in which people understand transparency and accountability – values particularly important for the existence of democratic states and state-civil society relationships? What is Covid-19 pandemic revealing about the condition of political trust and the future of democracy?

As I have explained elsewhere (Drążkiewicz 2016) the understanding of what civil society is, what is the role of NGOs in the state differs significantly between states and societies.  Also the latest work I conducted with Elisa Sobo (Sobo and Drążkiewicz 2020) reveals, that not all societies define conspiracy theories in the same way. Our work suggests that the way the term ‘conspiracy theories’ is applied and loaded with meanings differs across societies: what counts as conspiracy theory in one context, in another, can be seen as valid form of theorising about the world, a ‘critical thinking’. Finally, as other scholars have pointed out conspiracy theories are highly politicised phenomenon with conspiracy label being frequently weaponised against political opponents.

In this paper, focusing on Polish examples, I will explore what implications those issues have for the state - non-state relations and the future of civil society in Poland. I will demonstrate that increased importance of conspiracy theories, brings new challenges for our understanding of what civil society is: who is included and who is exclude from that phenomenon? Do anti-mask, anti-restriction groups count? Should groups denouncing Covid-19 as a scam and ‘plandemic’ be treated in the same way as those expressing concerns regarding state transparency and surveillance strategies?

Drążkiewicz, E. (2016). "‘State Bureaucrats’ and ‘Those NGO People’: Promoting the idea of civil society, hindering the state." Critique of Anthropology.

Sobo, E. J. and E. Drążkiewicz (2020). Rights, Responsibilities, and Revelations: Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories and the State. Viral Loads: Coronavirus, Inequality and an Anthropology of the Future. N. Burke, A. Wahlberg and L. Manderson. London, UCL Press (in press).