Changing Democracies in an Unequal World

Pubblicato con licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non Commerciale-Non opere derivate 4.0 Internazionale (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) nella collana Sociologia

The Covid 19 pandemic has, among other things, fueled an international debate on whether the world will be different, more equal, or if it will stay the same after this crisis. It has raised questions on the role of the State, on the weight of the political sphere in an era when political power seemed to be losing the battle with the economic power. It has put globalization to question due to the risks derived from frequent travels and open borders on the one hand and from the restructuring of the strategies of international alliances on the other. It has implicitly evidenced that countries are not only made by individuals fiercely competing with each other on the basis of their own individual merits but that they are societies, made of people who form a community that will have more chances of overcoming a crisis if the state and its political institutions manage to organize and mediate the response to their legitimate (in this case actually vital) interests.
But the pandemic has hit a world where inequalities where already high under every respect: economic, social, political, geographical and of course also from a gender perspective. A globalized world of economic and political superpowers where nation-state politics as well as civic communities were trying to reorganize themselves in order to find their voice. Today, we wonder how the pandemic will affect these inequalities and the fiber of democracy itself.