Migration and Bioterrorism during the Pandemic

Guest Contributor

Thomas Nail, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Denver

The current pandemic is another crisis being turned against immigrants. Five years after the terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015 migrants are again being treated as terrorists. This time they are being treated as bioterrorists. Bioterrorism refers to the intentional release of toxic biological agents and migrants are being treated as if their bodies were intentional biological weapons when they are not. This is part of the ongoing characterization of migrants as “invading armies” sweeping the media these days.

Migrants are being denied entry to apply for asylum along the southern border of the United states. This violates national and international immigration law, yet it’s happening anyway in the name of a national health emergency. Donald Trump has temporarily suspended immigration law claiming that immigration is bioterrorism even though the Center for Disease Control has publicly said that asylum seekers pose no health risk.

Assessing the Impact of School Closures on Social Inequality

Blog Editor’s Note

By Barbara Gornik, Science and Research Centre Koper

The idea that the coronavirus is an equal opportunity killer must be killed itself, wrote Charles M. Blow, opinion columnist for the New York Times, in his article on the privileges of social distancing. He argued that Covid-19 does not affect all people in the same way and to the same extent. Joining Blow in his view, this post reflects on that, metaphorically speaking, it is actually equal opportunity that this virus kills.

The global Covid -19 pandemic has dramatically changed the routines of our daily lives. After schools across Europe came to an effective standstill during the virus outbreak in March 2020, most children had to continue their educational activities through distance learning. Political authorities struggled to regulate the situation and introduced different approaches to alternative educational arrangements; online platforms were the most popular tool, while some also relied on educational packages, radio education and educational television (Schleicher, 2020; Schleicher and Reimers 2020). The situation was particularly challenging in the first weeks of school closure, when school staff were largely unprepared to teach online.

Guest Contributor

Bassel F. Salloukh, Associate Professor of Political Science, Lebanese American University

Consociational power-sharing is no stranger to academic and policy controversy. It tends to divide students of politics in plural and postwar places into unwavering proponents and staunch opponents. Some find power-sharing institutions necessary for any prospects for peace after protracted wars; others consider ‘power sharing as an impediment to peace and democracy,’ to borrow the title of Donald Rothchild and Philip G. Roeder’s seminal essay (Rothchild and Roeder, 2005: 29-50). This is not surprising, however. After all, the stakes are usually very high, especially in postwar contexts, and the policy choices are stark. For how do you reconstitute postwar states and societies? How can you convince one-time warring combatants to disarm, demobilize, and reconcile? How can you ensure that postwar consociational power-sharing arrangements do not end up reifying sectarian or ethnic identities at that moment when they are most injurious, or that they do not destroy the very state institutions they are supposed to salvage?

These are only some of the questions considered in a Special Feature I edited for Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. The essays gathered in this Special Feature grew out of a desire to reflect theoretically and normatively on consociational power-sharing, take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab world after the popular uprisings. This is not strictly an academic exercise in an Arab world dotted by seemingly frozen conflicts. It is rather an attempt to examine both the pitfalls and the possibilities of consociationalism in institutional and structural contexts that differ substantially from those states that make up the theory’s original birthplace.