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Perfect Pretext : Populist Authoritarian Seizure of Pandemic Emergency Powers in India and the Philippines

Taylor & Francis

Using Frankfurt School Critical Theory, we examine the political outcomes of how Asian populist authoritarian regimes seized the COVID-19 pandemic context for regime maintenance and power consolidation. The pandemic revealed interesting India-Philippines parallels highlighting three inter-connected political-economic development patterns contextualising analogous state responses to COVID-19. First, how neo-liberal economic policies pursued through old and new technologies of domination accompanied phenomenal economic growth rates without addressing structural socio-economic inequalities. Second, how parallel predisposing conditions of failed political promises, increased rent-seeking opportunities, and corruption under constricted neo-liberal democracies, gave rise to populist authoritarian leaders. Third, how combined neo-liberalism and populist authoritarianism conditioned conflictual and contested government responses to the pandemic, bolstering power consolidation and regime maintenance, on one hand, and ensuing political contestations on the other. Populist authoritarianism persists during pandemics through three significant connected elements of ideological domination propagated through mass media, the hetero-patriarchal family, and educational system.

Article; Postprint

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0445438

Arts, Faculty of; Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for

Reviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/