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10 State Crime J. 4 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/stecrjl10 and id is 1 raw text is: STATE CRIME, STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND COVID-19 Neve Gordon and Penny Green Three weeks after the COVID-19 outbreak, the Hungarian parliament conferred for- midable executive powers on Prime Minister Viktor Orbdn, allowing him to rule by decree (Guardian 2020). In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that surveillance tools developed by the secret services to monitor Palestinians in the occupied territories would be used to track citizens infected with coronavirus (Tidy 2020). Meanwhile, the Chilean government sent the military to public squares that had until recently been occupied by protesters, while in the Philippines police arrested over 40,000 people within the first 11 days of the country's lockdown on charges of violating quarantine policies (Gebrekidan 2020; Cheng 2020). These are worrying trends. While the introduction of emergency measures to address the global pandemic is undoubtedly necessary, such forms of intervention underscore how many governments have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to introduce measures that undermine democratic principles and violate the civil and political rights of both citizens and migrants. Such state crimes are characterised by government over-reach where the executive arm uses its powers to undercut basic freedoms. Yet the crimes of government over-reach have, to a significant extent, been overshadowed by more structural and attritional forms of violence-less com- monly understood as state crimes. We frame these largely structural crimes as products of government under-reach. Government under-reach, it is important to emphasise, should not be identified with the absence of government intervention. Rather, it denotes forms of intervention designed to implement certain kinds of deregulation and austerity measures that have led to the evisceration of welfare policies and the erosion of the social safety net. This, to be sure, is not a new phe- nomenon. Long before the outbreak of the COVID-19 emergency measures, cro- nyism and mass disinvestment in public services and infrastructure inhibited the human rights and life chances of millions. Indeed, during these exceptional times emergency measures have not only been exploited to curtail civil rights and democratic freedoms, but they have also been Neve Gordon, Queen Mary University of London. Penny Green, Queen Mary University of London STATE CRIME 10.1 2021

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