Managing Risk beyond the pandemic

So, there is no vaccine yet. Testing and tracing is patchy at best. But economies are tanking and jobs are slipping away. In other words, life in the new normal has to continue with a deadly virus in our midst. Risk is an important organising feature of modern governance practices, as Ulrick Beck had explained around four decades ago in Risk Society:Towards a New Modernity (1986) . Some risks are known knowns (like the possibility of hacking a government database) and others are unknown knowns (like a natural calamity) and still others are unknown unknown (risks that we don’t know of but can appear). The pandemic was a known unknown - history tells us that there was always a possibility of an “untreatable contagious disease” spreading globally.

In fact modern transport systems and modern life and lifestyles in general were the “super spreaders” of the corona virus. Beck had argued that in the advanced capitalist age, a new risk society is evolving as part of managing risks systematically produced through the modernisation process. He added that the old problem of the modern capitalist system - unequal distribution of wealth would evolve into a new and emerging problem of unequal distribution and management of risk. Today, as life with the virus is emerging distributional inequality and risk inequality overlap. This means that risk is differentiated as it presents itself, is embodied and managed across class and status inequalities. For some, working from home and online learning for their children was feasible in the throes of the pandemic and is tenable for the foreseeable future. For others the same poses risks of survival and exclusion. So, how is risk managed by governments?

The first level of managing risk is to manage individual behaviour. This is modern liberal governmentality, which is a form of rule that an only be exercised through the freedom of the individual. Individual freedom is a limit on ‘liberal power’ and simultaneously ‘liberal power’ has to find a way of balancing self-interest and desires of free individuals with achieving what is good for all of modern society. In the context of managing the risk of a contagious disease, therefore, liberal governments have to eventually ease the lockdown and restore individual freedoms even at the risk of infection. Ali and Keil (2008) have described this as a “small pox model” where risk is managed by collecting data, compiling statistics and launching medical/non medical campaigns. So, put somewhat crudely if the lockdown was a totalitarian ‘plague model; where under the surveillance of a panopticon individuals are confined in cells (their homes) so that communication, association and infection are prevented then easing the lockdown involves restoring individual freedom while managing risk through contact tracing apps, statistical modelling and healthcare.

State power, however, does not operate like a pendulum oscillating from the totalitarian to the liberal. Rather, it operates on a continuum with varying degrees between the totalitarian plague model on the one end and the liberal small pox model on the other end.. Citizen’s trust in public institutions is a key determining factor for how effectively states can restore individual freedom while ensuring security for all. Technocratic interventions such as, contact tracing apps, location monitoring to check if you are at home self-isolating, data analytics, for example can enable individual freedoms to travel, meet families and get to work but where trust is weak states can take recourse to coercive use of data to monitor and discipline bodies. The difference between contact tracing apps in Germany and India for, example.

The second level of managing risk is to externalise it. This can occur, as living with risk eventually leads to anxiety, stress and inability to envisage a way out. Individuals and groups then take recourse to reactionism. Venting their anger and frustration on others who symbolise a threat to existence of the self. Why do people externalise threats without self-reflection? After all the pandemic as suggested earlier is a consequence of modern life and needs reflection on how we do things and what we can change. Well, reactionism happens - psychologically as fears get translated on to an externalised threat that can be separated or removed. The racialisation of infectious diseases, for instance, strikes at the heart of multicultural cities. Trump’s declaration of “Chinese virus”, the immoral labels attached to the behaviours of migrants in Singapore and London, are likely to lead to spatial strategies of control. Isolating neighborhoods, keeping people out of mainstream society. With the pandemic we can expect that in times of uncertainty and fear some people will suffer the consequences of structural racism, class and gender differences.

The third level of managing risk is built around communities. This means taking decisions and enabling the resources to change spaces and access to essentials in ways that are much more inclusive. Take mobility for example. Our modern approach to public transport is focused on speed but are very fragmented and exclusionary. Streets focused on cars but not on multiple uses for pedestrians, cyclists and so on on. As social distancing is implemented a genuinely inclusive ways of managing public transport would be to localise movement. Instead of isolating neighbourhoods from big road and rail networks, inner streets should facilitate movement so that people can walk to local amenities like schools, groceries and clinics. Thus, empowering workers and users, so that they can travel safely.

This kind of change is transformative. It means finding local solutions for local problems. It means empowering communities first. In other words, managing risk in the new normal means taking long-standing recommendations for inclusive planning more seriously.

London, 16 June 2020

Politics of a New Normal

"The only thing constant is change" and how epochal it has been at the very start of the  new decade. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard to imagine that the politics of who we are and our interactions both personal and political will ever be the same again. I have started the blog Politics of the new normal to account for changes in rule, inequality and socio-political interaction  that are being reshaped in South Asia and beyond through the course of the pandemic. Some of these changes may be temporary, others will become permanent features of our lives, and still others if you recognise them will take sharper more virulent forms through the course of the pandemic.

A contagious microbe- unknown, invisible, unpredictable has exposed most sharply and vividly the areas where modern infrastructure and is its reach is both deficient and irresponsible. Let us start with cities, those arenas of global-local linkages, crammed social neighborhoods and choking transport networks, which became the early breeding grounds of Covid-19 transmission. When governments in South Asia somewhat belatedly decided to lockdown it brought life to a standstill but also showed that in the face of an exceptional threat states have the power to stop life and livelihoods. For some  middle class families this may have come as a relief while for migrant workers it was a relay race against the virus and hunger - which one would get them first. Obviously, to observe a lock down governments need the trust of their citizens above all else - how will I pay my rents? will I get food? what about essential services like health and electricity? Ambitious relief packages were promised to assure people that they should stay at home until health systems could cope. Eventually, though rapid economic free fall meant that cities had to open. There is no risk free option to "open" socio-economic activity in the midst of a pandemic, so exposure to risks get weighted, stratified and its impact sits firmly over existing divisions of class, ethnic, gender inequality.

Pandemics historically have ended rarely with a medical solution and rather more often with a social ending when people have had to take fear in their hands and get back to work. We can expect a similar social ending to the Covid-19 pandemic, with governments taking on a new architecture of rule and power to manage risk. Lockdown is a form of governmentality, an exceptional technique of rule that states take in the face of an existential threat and society accepts as a rational and necessary condition. It involves both persuasive and coercive measure - not in equal proportions but varying contextually. Even as the lockdown is eased we can expect that Covid-19 has already introduced a new governmentality that will regulate and redefine the new normal in South Asia and elsewhere. What laws, powers, exceptions from the lock down can we expect will be removed, will stay and will take more aggressive forms.

We can expect the powers that will be removed will include the restrictions on movement of a wider range of workers (who cannot work from home, typically live on daily wages and short-term and informal contracts). Primarily economic considerations will allow some shops and services to open - liquor shops for excise duty, banks, real estate construction and so on.

What powers will stay? Social distancing will stay. The potent combination of regulation and primal and prejudicial fear will ensure that people keep a distance. This will mean higher prices for travel, food for example. Space an its use has and will change as people embody a clinical regime of physical separation.

And which powers will take more virulent forms? Surveillance for sure. India's Arogya Setu, the dominance of Google, Facebook, Bangladesh and Pakistan state's eagerness to watch over digital activity will only get more sanction under the pretext of contact tracing. Data privacy a term that gained traction in Europe will have little or no meaning in South Asia. Populist democracies and authoritative states are not mutually exclusionary - we now that- and we can expect that Covid-19 will give their legacy of digital surveillance a greater impetus. New elite coalitions of states, tech giants and data analytic wizards will together mine information on people's movements, contacts and by extension their ideas, interests, actions.

We could, however, take a different learning from Covid-19. A more inclusive, decentralised and responsive public health infrastructure has helped. Governments that have shown a duty of care like in New Zealand have dealt with the crisis with more trust from their citizens. In fact 'care' we now understand is the key driver of economy, social life. Finally, we will eventually realise that without the workers who have left the city, now hundred of miles away our cities, our modern luxuries and essential services will fall apart.

We must change, but it us up to us to decide how meaningfully we will go through it.



Ipshita Basu, London, 26 May 2020