L.I.S.A.: How do you plan to approach the subject, given that the corona crisis is still on-going, and circumstances might change? To what extent do you see similarities to past crises in your research project?
Prof. Dr. Kopper: I must admit that it is extremely challenging to study an ongoing crisis. Yet, focusing on an on-going crisis has its exceptional benefits. Studying events of the past, what happened is already fixed and even though we may approach a question with enthusiasm and curiosity, we would never have the anxiety that we feel while living through a crisis. It could be argued that this raises challenges for scholarly analysis by making it difficult to keep one’s distance from the subject matter, which is without doubt true, but at the same time it also allows for the researcher to grasp how particular decisions, news, and policies resonate and how they are received. Looking back years or decades later makes it difficult to grasp how significant something was for the people experiencing it at the time.
When I designed this project, it was already visible that the pandemic would require a special type of mobilization and cooperation of citizens. While the mobilization of medical personnel and logistical support was crucial, ordinary citizens were called on to be passive, not to go out, to cut personal relations, which in a sense made the pandemic into the crisis of ‘passivity’.
Although at the beginning of the crisis numerous states introduced prohibitions on protests because of the dangers the gathering of crowds posed for the spread of the virus, these decisions were predominantly reversed after they were challenged at courts. Thus, not all protests moved online but actual protests did take place, at times following rules of distancing or wearing of face masks, but more frequently not. The main challenge fighting the COVID-19 crisis, however, did not come from these protests directly. The main problem turned out be the millions who rejected to be vaccinated and to comply and agree with the official plan to cope with the pandemic by immunizing societies. Here, I believe, lies a stark difference to many previous emergency situations.
Of course, except for some clear-cut cases, such as a tsunami or a landslide, defining a threat is always a political issue. Neither is the nature of the threat trivial, nor the stratagy to eliminate it straightforward. Recognizing that an issue is a security threat means not only identifying it as a threat but acquiring legitimacy and consent for introducing emergency measures. Yet, in the case of an ordinary emergency, the effort to cope with it is not undermined – even if a minory of the population disagrees with the way the emergency is handled while remaining passive – because emergencies are typically dealt with by specialized actors, such as firefighters, security forces or the military. This, however, works very differently in the case of the pandemic. Even if only 30% of citizens remain passive and refuse to take up the vaccine, their dissent may undermine the vaccination strategy promoted by authorities and thereby challenges the effort to fighting the pandemic. This made it increasingly clear that the emergency was not only about such measures as declaring a quarantine or closing borders (measures on which authorities readily fall back on by default), or medical measures such as developing efficient vaccines or offering enough beds in intensive care because the crisis was also about legitimate knowledge, namely, to what extent citizens shared and accepted the narratives authorities and experts offered about the nature of the pandemic and the efficiency of vaccines, or relied on alternative explanations, including conspiracy theories.
But allow me here to return to the first part of your question concerning the challenge the project faces due to focusing on an on-going crisis. There are two issues that I’d like to mention. First, as the crisis unfolds, I feel that differences between the cases become in some respects increasingly sharp, and in others more nuanced. Thus, the researcher must be extremely careful not to rush to conclusions and make sweeping claims about how societies differ. Second, the pandemic also poses difficulties to conduct the research itself according to the original schedule. For example, as Japan closed its borders, I had to shift the fieldwork I had originally planned for December 2021 to a later date. Fortunately, much could be researched from a distance, even from one’s home, but I really hope that in the spring or during the summer I will be able to realize the fieldwork I have planned in Japan. Yet, the flexibility needed for this project, I believe, is what we all had to get used to during the pandemic. We all need to be ready to be flexible to re-plan and adjust to changing circumstances.