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Since submitting our first issue for publication, the global pandemic Covid-19 has moulded our political, economic and social worlds relentlessly. The notion of a public health emergency has led to exceptional modes of governing, claiming control over the mobility of populations locally, regionally and globally. The immediate effect on industries relying on short- and long-distance movement for work and leisure has been most visible: the grounding of aircrafts, car-free streets, along with the demise of businesses that rely on such daily movement and the flow of the masses from suburban areas to towns and cities. Each one of us has experienced this period differentially. Some of us, the editors, were in the United Kingdom (England) with its quick shutdown of all non-essential economic activity and heavy restrictions on human mobility flows, legally prohibiting people from leaving home apart from taking one form of daily exercise, shopping, providing care for a vulnerable person or travelling for (essential) work. Others were in France, where, after a first period of hesitancy between January and the first round of municipal elections on the 15th of March, the government imposed a country-wide confinement starting the 16th of March and declared a state of sanitary emergency the 23rd of March that lasted until the 11th of May. Deconfinement and reconfinement measures were subsequently applied regionally in the name of striking a balance between public health concerns and the risk of a major economic crisis. Also putting a halt to all non-essential services and industries under the powers of the Epidemics Act, Swiss public authorities put in place social distancing rules and restrictions on public gatherings like many other countries but continued to allow inhabitants to circulate outside of their dwellings. There were also countries, such as the Netherlands, where social and economic activity went on relying largely on voluntary compliance and considerations.

In spite of differences in public ways of engaging with the pandemic and the controversies they have created amongst publics willing to follow their governments more or less coercive rules of neighboring countries, the visible restrictions and limitations imposed on all of us, editors and readers alike, have also led to something much more significant and invisible. Namely crucial modifications to our political, economic and social worlds that have been initiated through the pandemic, but that cannot be undone with the end of the epidemic, be they our modalities of working, of moving, of interacting with our social and material environments, of using digital technologies, of enjoying our basic freedoms.

In addition, the pandemic has necessarily narrowed our vision to something much more presentist and ethnocentric. Academics working in public health have warned about the effects of the ‘covidization’ of academic scholarship; the potential risk that a plethora of special calls for grants on Covid-19 poses to undermining other areas of research. Social sciences too must take care not to reduce research to a ‘single story’ or temporality of urgency. So many other problems become invisibilised or rendered less significant if pandemic becomes the singular interpretive framing of our current times.

In this issue, we try to navigate this difficult terrain, acknowledging long-term transformations invoked through the pandemic and its long-lasting modulations to practices of governing and forms of governmentality (running theme 6). We take care however to also make space for research which does not speak directly to the pandemic and its responses, but engages with transformations towards illiberal democracy which long predate the current moment, the long-term diffusion of precarity and autonomisation in higher education (running theme 4), and practices of mobility and lived experiences (running theme 3) which have been framed through a ‘crisis’ narrative in Europe for over five years now.

Styles of Governing, Forms of Governmentality - and the Epidemic

We start this issue with “The Contemporary Exercise of Emergency Powers: Reflections on Permanence, Impermanence and Challenging Times” by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Professor of Law and currently United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism. As she accentuates, emergencies can be political, social, economic, sanitary and ecological in nature, but these cannot be neatly separated, emergency practices rotate and circulate. During Covid-19, security and counter-terrorism measures have been repurposed to health emergencies. On the other hand, the Covid-19 pandemic has important effect on an evolving set of emergency practices. It is reinforcing the mobilization of the administrative state, the move from national-level regulation to sub-national responses, incorporating city and regional responses. Ní Aoláin implores us to take contemporary practices of governing in relation to security and human rights seriously. These topics are also picked up in the following three articles by Ákos Kopper, Zsolt Körtvélyesi, Balázs Majtényi and András Szalai, on “The Insecurity Toolbox’ of the Illiberal Regime: Rule by Law and Rule by Exclusion”, Anthony Amicelle on “Right of Entry: The Struggle over Recognition in the World of Intelligence” and Ivan Manokha on “Covid-19: Teleworking, Surveillance and 24/7 Work”.

In the first of these papers, Kopper et al scrutinize what they call the ‘insecurity toolbox’ that Hungary’s illiberal regime relies on in order to create an increasingly authoritarian system that sidelines the opposition and silences discontent. Contrasting their analysis with the ready-made explanations of an insecuritization move and speech act of the powerful, they insist that we are far from a permanent state of emergency or a meta-securitization. They insist, on the contrary, on the normalisation of authoritarian shifts by regular laws. This is this specificity which makes the case of Hungary unique and difficult to manage for the different institutions of the European Union. The authors identify three important features of the regime: (1) it relies on using an everyday anti-immigrant meta-frame to justify virtually all types of policies, independent from border crossings and presence of migrants in order to identify permanently new types of enemies (Soros, opposition, judges) whose presence associated with migrants justify nationalist and chauvinist measures; (2) it applies law instrumentally and thanks to a majority in Parliament, rules “by law”, in a way that undermines the rule of law and its guarantees against arbitrariness; (3) it maintains a screen of compliance with democratic and constitutional norms by avoiding to openly enact exceptions. While the EU seems impotent, or unwilling to halt this authoritarian backsliding, Kopper et al argue that the Hungarian government feels it necessary to fake compliance with democratic norms by adopting policies that formally acquiesce to European standards, though contradict them in essence.

Anthony Amicelle takes another innovative angle to speak about the ways in which emergency invades our present yet is activated in the absence of exceptional state of emergency declarations. He describes the birth of Financial Intelligence Units [FIUs], a new kind of national intelligence agency which has changed the mechanism for sharing data about financial transactions with more than 170 agencies around the globe. Though non-existent in 1990, he explains how arguments about the necessity of speed and prevention in terms of tracking money have transformed the intelligence agencies of Western states and their relations with public and private actors. These financial agencies are now part of the intelligence world but they blur institutional boundaries between internal and external intelligence as well as public and private institutions. Additionally, FIUs exacerbate calls for scientific prediction that justify the routinisation of a permanent emergency logic via a politics of numbers. Therefore, these new players introduce “heteronomous logics” connecting instituted universes, transforming the rules of the game, or even contributing to the emergence of new spaces between fields—a reflection which can, perhaps, be extended nowadays to different public health actors involved in pandemic public policies.

In the articles that follow, we continue to engage with modalities of governing during Covid-19 with a set of papers that address modes of power and control over human populations beyond immediately visible restrictions to human movement. Here, we continue to focus on longer-term effects of the pandemic in moulding our political, economic and social worlds. Ivan Manokha explores, for example, in “Covid-19: Teleworking, Surveillance and 24/7 Work” how the epidemic has accelerated a trend towards remote work, triggering temporal and spatial transformations and resulting in a new form of worker alienation. He examines the spread and normalization of telework during the pandemic with reference to the growth of the 24/7 work culture and the blurring of boundaries between work and private lives that have been developing in the last two decades and describes the increased dominance of work imperatives over other needs, with the ‘colonization’ of family life by work (including via the growth of ‘informal’ remote work), often expressed by individuals as inability to have ‘quality time’ with kids or partners, which in turn adds to stress and anxiety related to work, as well as the revolts that this form of management by distant surveillance imply almost ineluctably.

Speaking of revolts against some public policies of Covid-19, the paper entitled “Italian Perspectives on Pandemic Responses: Tracing Early Critiques from Europe’s First Lockdown” is a translation of three early critiques of the responses of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, each addressing a unique facet and different perspective of Europe’s first lockdown. Through bringing together these memorial traces, the article captures the heterogeneity of discussions taking place on the left at the very beginning of the pandemic, destabilizing a totalizing framing of Covid responses through simple binaries such as health vs economics or individual rights vs the collective good. Cristina Morini addresses the ambivalences around the term ‘care’ (in Italian meaning both ‘attention’ and ‘cure’). Grounded in feminist economics, she argues for the establishment of a self-determination income envisioned as an unconditional and universal income, not linked to working positions. Sara Gandini ponders the possibility of turning anger into a political force and questions what forms this could take. Highlighting the problems related to turning a public health issue into one of national security, Gandini probes the politics of acceptability around Covid-related deaths against non-Covid related deaths, particularly deaths precisely exacerbated by confinement strategies. She speaks also of the silencing and policing of dissent when one tries to raise such issues in the public space. Lastly, Andrea Fumagalli uses the idea of crisis as an opportunity to rethink social and economic issues. These include readjusting the balance between private and public healthcare, (especially as Covid treatments are not very profitable), the implementation of a major European investment plan relating to social infrastructure and the environment, which will relaunch the European economy. This article is also central as an illustration of the politics of translation and the heterogenization and pluralization of style (running theme 7), that we want to develop.

Problematizing Transversal Lines and their Methods

Transversality is one of the core running themes of the pariss journal: How can transversal lines be created between disciplines? How can we travel between and across disciplines, not as a tourist or passer-by but as a multi-sited anthropologist, an international nexialist, an historian of the dynamics of fields of power which first structure the relational positions of actors, and second, account for their trajectories which create encounters, collisions, fragmentations or collusions regarding emergent interests, disinterests, indifference or ignorance on some topics and not others. In this issue we continue to the second part of a conversation with Yves Dezalay, “Interview with Yves Dezalay: Investigating the Internationalisation of State Nobilities: A Reflexive Return to Double Game Strategies,” carried out by Didier Bigo and Antonin Cohen. This is followed by a conversation on transversal lines and methods between Nicholas De Genova and Sandro Mezzadra in “Migration and the Question of New Political Possibilities”.

In the second part of this interview, Yves Dezalay—an emeritus cnrs researcher who spent much of his professional career at the Centre of European Sociology in Paris, previously directed by Pierre Bourdieu—takes us even deeper into his trajectory as a scholar and shows the concrete feasibility and practicability of a field approach, notably in international terrains. In situating the institutional-intellectual spaces in which he circulated, Dezalay brings to life the inter/intra-disciplinary boundaries he regularly crossed and even forced open in his quest to understand the complexity of interconnections between the national and the international, the professional and the political, as well as the law and the state in overlapping processes of globalization. Speaking about his long-term collaboration with professor of law Bryant Garth, Dezalay also elaborates a collaborationist methodology of transversal, multi-sited research. This is a lesson for many young (and not so young) scholars who want to be creative and rigorous in their approaches.

Taking the form of a dialogue, Nicholas De Genova and Sandro Mezzadra walk us through the articulations they make respectively in their work between labour, mobility, and subjectivity. Sharing experiences of activism, lived memories, and moments of encounter that brought them to think about migration and borders, amongst other things, De Genova and Mezzadra open up a space for working at the “boundaries between disciplines” or, rather, within a discipline as an intellectual insurgent. Their reflections thus offer a fertile ground for reflexively questioning the disciplining effects of disciplines in terms of the constraints they pose on which questions may be raised and how. The trick, though, is not simply to do multidisciplinary work, but instead to radically transform disciplinary boundaries by working at their edges.

Politics of Knowledge and Higher Education

We introduce this theme which will continue in other issues in order to have a reflexive stance on the current status of social sciences today, their recognition, the difficulties encountered by their scholars, the degradation of their conditions, and often the social suffering which is lived by the youngest and most precarious scholars and students who want to engage in these professions. Too often the discussions stay unnoticed even if they are a permanent feature at lunch or after-work drinks. We consider it is time to reflect individually and collectively about the transformations of our working conditions and the modalities of management which affect our subjectivities and often generate a sense of despair. We are committed to publishing articles on this topic and to give voices to these often repressed feelings and the reflexivity they need to bring. Here we begin with the situation in France, but we hope to have other specific experiences.

Written by an anonymous collective of academics as well as an alliance of academic journals on strike, “Why French Academic Journals are Protesting” firstly operates as an archive of struggles unfolding in the world and on the future of research and higher education in France. Documenting a wave of transformations, from the bureaucratization of student-teacher relations and the commodification of university diplomas to the contractualisation of academic labour and cuts to employee benefits, the article exposes the loss of autonomisation and the diffusion of precarity in French academia. More than merely chronicling devastating legislative and administrative reforms, it acts as a testament of a unique form of scholarly disobedience or scholar-activism. In doing so, the author-activists open up a space of hope for alternative futures or perhaps even a sanctuary, wherein the university-as-it-were might be salvaged from or imagined beyond neoliberalism.

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