Re-articulating citizenship in the times of uncertainty: Hybrid narratives of Covid-19 responses in sub-Saharan Africa
Table of contents
Project description
The Covid-19 pandemic is not just a global health crisis. It also causes severe ruptures for citizens’ freedoms and livelihoods. The unprecedented restrictive measures have entrenched existing state-citizens dynamics in diverse political systems, and resulted in their re-articulation in the face of novel uncertainties. This project produces new knowledge on the ways in which states justify their tutelage, neglect and coercion related to the Covid-19 measures, and on their resonance with the ways in which citizens make sense of situations and decide on their compliance with and resistance to the measures introduced. In addition to deepen our understanding of the complexities of current pandemic the project establishes a general approach of enacted citizenship in the context of hybridity, which offers a way to conceptualize the dynamic relationship between state and citizen, where multiple, co-existent social orders and logics are drawn upon.
We ask: How are state-citizen relations entrenched and re-articulated under the Covid-19 pandemic in Tanzania and Uganda? and answer through three sub-questions: a) What institutional orders do states use as sources of legitimacy for their tutelage, neglect and coercion of citizens in response to Covid-19? b) What sources of authority do citizens draw upon to make sense of Covid- 19, and to decide between responses of compliance with and resistance to the state’s pandemic measures? c) How do tension, conflict and coalescing between alternative orders of justification and sense-making manifest in the enacted citizenship that emerges under the Covid-19 pandemic? We scrutinize Tanzania and Uganda as examples of neighboring countries that presented remarkably different responses.
The research material consists of (1)public speeches of relevant authorities and newspaper articles collected from February 2020 onward, and (2)narrative interviews of citizens on selected urban locations effected by restrictions. The findings generate new knowledge on the state-citizen relationships in the unique situation of Covid-19 in particular, but also provide novel theoretical contribution produced in a global research team.
