PANDEMIC AND HUMAN RIGHTS: REFLECTIONS ON THE WAR METAPHOR AND ITS (AB)USES

Authors

  • Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira
  • Carlos Roberto Drawin
  • Domingos Barroso da Costa
  • Ana Carolina Dias Silva

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5752/P.1678-9563.2020v26n3p1080-1100

Keywords:

Pandemic, Human rights, War metaphor, Necropolitics

Abstract

We wonder if linking the Covid-19 pandemic to the signifier “war”
could wither away the legal force of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, hitting it to its core: human dignity. We pick up on Clausewitz’s
considerations, for whom war consists of the continuation of politics rather
than of an unexpected episode, to get to Foucault, who unveils that power
relations produce a regulation of life and death, what cast us again in the
field of vulnerability, one that the war metaphor either arouses and conceals.
At the dramatic moment of the pandemic, the call for war, the supportive
call against a common enemy, although justified as an emergency measure
and necessary appeal, may also be of avail as the necropolitics obverse
(Mbembe, 2016), the visible death produced by the virus enshrouding the
invisible death of the excluded and disposable, the usual “killable” ones.

 

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Published

2021-10-22

Issue

Section

Artigos / Articles / Artículos