CoronaCrime #94 - Protest Movements against COVID-19 mandates

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a terrible toll on lives, illness, and economic devastation and it is having diverse effects on violence and crime. Daily Prevention News publishes weekly a Corona Crime Issue dedicated to collecting related news and information.

1. Anti-vax protest or insurrection? Making sense of the ‘freedom convoy’ protest
   While many see what happened in Ottawa as unique, it’s also similar in some ways to what’s occurred in the past. The convoy might be considered a social movement protest or a form of “contentious politics,” which covers protest and related phenomena, including insurrections. Source: The Conversation
2. Statephobia on display at the ‘freedom convoy’
   The so-called “freedom fighters” who reject COVID-19 mandates are not any more free or autonomous than the person who follows mandates. Rather, they are governed through different relations of power and knowledge. Investigating how power is highlighted and obscured in particular moments can help people think critically about resistance, freedom and the post-pandemic future Canada wants to build. Source: The Conversation
3. Reimagining public bureaucracy – the death of knowledge-power
   In our 21st-century world of fake news, right populism and anti-vax social media posts, the foundations of ‘knowledge-power’ are looking decidedly shaky. The technocracy of science and economic efficiency is increasingly challenged by an anti-science agenda and by powerful appeals to nostalgia – old cultural values, lost empires, natural order and ‘common sense’. At the same time, years of denigration of public administration and lauding of the benefits of competition over social cohesion have left public bureaucracy without clear purpose and stripped of resources. Source: Transforming Society
4. What is behind the COVID protests across Europe?
   As governments introduce stricter measures to curb the latest wave of the pandemic, protests have intensified across the EU. What unites and differentiates the demonstrators? Source: DW

Please find more information and news about the interlinkages between the Coronavirus, Crime and Violence in German published every Tuesday on our German News Service Tägliche Präventions News.