COVID‐19 and the Meaning of Crisis

Crisis is a concept that has a long history; it has come to denote moments of rupture and to foreground life and death decisions necessary for its resolution. The recent deployment of the concept in broad social, economic and political spheres has not only given rise to an industry of crisis management but has also established it as a framework through which to conceive, survive and reconstruct the world. The politics of crisis and the power of crisis narratives determine who is responsible for the crisis, who are its victims, who are its casualties and, inevitably, what policies need to be adopted and, later, institutionalized, in order to ‘fix’ the crisis and its outcomes. This article examines the politics of crisis narratives and situates the contributions to this Debate within larger debates on crisis under capitalism. These contributions employ the COVID‐19 experience as a lens to examine how moments of crisis allow economic and political elites to displace the blame for the crisis and its structural causes away from themselves and to institute policies which maintain the status quo, limit the scope for alternatives to emerge, and foreclose debates on fundamental questions of power relations which, inevitably, reproduce the conditions for future crises.