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11 State Crime J. 285 (2022)
Exposing the Crimes of the Neoliberal State in the Governance of COVID-19

handle is hein.journals/stecrjl11 and id is 286 raw text is: EXPOSING THE CRIMES OF THE NEOLIBERAL STATE IN THE GOVERNANCE OF COVID-19 Roberto Catello Abstract:Two of the most promising developments to emerge from the failed attempts to contain the spread of infectious disease outbreaks since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) a pandemic on 23 January 2020 are (i) an acceleration of the critique of neoliberalism and (ii) a reinvigoration of the state crime vocabulary. As Henry Giroux (2020) argued, the pandemic has exposed the plague of neoliberalism and revealed the need for a new language to make sense of the current crisis. In this article, I argue that the language of state crime has both the termino- logical and the conceptual capacityto inform such a sense-making endeavour and, relat- edly, that the academic literature on state criminality can complement critiques of the global neoliberal order in the context ofthe failed governance of the COVID-19 pandemic. Keywords: austerity; COVID-19; neoliberalism; public health; state crime; structural violence State Crime and the Critique of Neoliberalism: Merging Vocabularies Nowhere is the need to merge analyses of state crime and the critique of neoliber- alism more evident and urgent than in England and the US, the countries that were rated by the Nuclear Threat Initiative's (NTI) Global Health Security Index (2019) the two most prepared nations to deal with public health emergencies prior to the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Not only has the Global Health Security Index proved not to be predictive of coronavirus pandemic preparedness-as England and the US led the Index by score only, and not by actual response (Abbey et al. 2020; NTI 2020)-but these two countries also consistently feature on the list of the hardest hit countries among the G7 nations as well as worldwide (Islam 2020, 2021). For the sake of brevity, this article will mostly focus on the England rather than the US, though many of the themes found in it are relevant for the US context as well. This is because, in both countries, a combination of organi- zational deviance at the state level and neoliberal policy attitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have led to disastrous results when it comes to crisis Liverpool Hope University. Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/ DOI:10.13169/statecrime.11.2.0285

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