Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many states granted themselves emergency powers or declared full-fledged states of emergency. This paper focuses on pandemic emergencies in France and Canada in order to subject debates about the state of exception to comparative and conjunctural analysis. Adding to already existing exceptional state powers justified in the name of antiterrorism, pandemic states of emergency risk becoming normalized in both contexts. However, due in part to different histories of politicizing earlier states of emergency, sanitary emergency powers have reinforced existing political crisis tendencies only in France, not Canada—at least not yet. This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the reviewers as well as Ahmed Allahwala, Roger Keil, and Karen Wirsig for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this text.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stefan Kipfer
Stefan Kipfer teaches in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Jamilla Mohamud
Jamilla Mohamud has completed the Master's in Environmental Studies Planning Program at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.