When the topic for this special edition of Global Discourse was devised back in mid-2018, we had no idea how pressing the issues of housing, health, precarity and well-being would become across the globe as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. The criticality of housing and its impacts on human health and well-being have been noted for decades. Indeed, the United National (UN) Declaration of Universal Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, states unequivocally that:

"Informal housing residents’ well-being in cities of the Global North and South: a reply to ‘Informal housing and residents’ well-being in Caracas and Sydney: a comparative study of residents’ experiences’ by Quintana Vigiola" published on May 2022 by Bristol University Press.

In his article on ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’, Richard Shweder (2022) discusses a federal criminal case in the United States that resulted from a practice that the sect calls female circumcision. Various parents and medical practitioners were indicted under a federal statute that made the practice criminal. Eventually, though, a federal district court held that Congress lacked authority – an ‘enumerated power’ under the United States Constitution – to enact such a criminal law. At first glance, the decision looked like a big victory for federalism, the division of authority between the federal government and state governments. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in this area has left a rather gaping loophole: Congress can enact a ‘jurisdictional element’ that tries to connect the regulated activity to interstate commerce. As a consequence, unconstitutional laws can be made constitutional with seemingly cosmetic changes. That is, in fact, what happened to the law that was used to indict the Dawoodi Bohra women. This response explores whether federalism arguments can be repackaged outside of the ‘enumerated powers’ doctrine. It suggests that federalism may play a role in determining whether the government has a “compelling interest” in regulating a practice under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Because of federalist traditions in the United States, certain interests may be compelling for state governments, but not the federal government. If that were the case, a challenge to a federal law regulating or prohibiting ‘female circumcision’ might succeed where a similar challenge to a state law would fail.

Over the years, the trade performance of CARICOM states has decreased as a result of poor direct investment inflows, increasing global competition and the dependence of CARICOM states on their long-standing relationships with Europe and the US. The East Asian market is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world and has been highlighted as a potential region for CARICOM states to diversify their export markets. China is the largest entity within this market and is one of the world’s largest trading nations. China’s economic prowess has growing influence, and coupled with the erosion of CARICOM’s traditional trading relationships, it is essential to explore the possibility of engaging in deeper economic relations with China. Ultimately, this article proposes the creation of a comprehensive economic and trade agreement between CARICOM and China, based on a model agreement developed between Canada and the European Union. Therefore, this article will: outline the current economic relationship between CARICOM and China, and assess its impact; identify the parties’ interests; explain the concept of a comprehensive economic and trade agreement; explore the possible effects of entering into such a comprehensive economic and trade agreement with China; and, lastly, offer considerations on provisions that can be included to ensure the viability of the agreement.

China's trading and investment relations in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have grown exponentially over the last two decades or so, to a point where China has outpaced the US as the number one trading partner for some LAC countries 1 and is the second-largest trading partner in Latin America. 2 This means that China is an important political and economic force within the Caribbean, requiring examination from various specialisms.

This article transects and articulates different disciplines and lines of thought in order to understand the redefinitions of the boundaries of political power in times of COVID-19, and the practices which may outlive the potential normalisation of the crisis when an efficient vaccine is discovered. We claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is an original form of governmentality by unease articulating three dimensions. First, the basic reaction of modern states when faced with uncertainty is to apply national-territorial logics of controls. Second, bureaucracies consider the virus as a danger to security and organise public health emergencies according to the rules of the game of national security, creating tensions between internal security, public health and the economy because policymakers may be unsure about the priorities and may prioritise border controls. Third, resistance against the chosen national policies show that people are not led by a politics of fear and/or protection, but rather their own concerns about themselves with peer-to-peer surveillance as a key element of their compliance. Contact tracing technologies and strategies of border controls are key elements to analyse. We do so in different contexts: the UK, the EU and Turkey.

One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the warping of our sense of time during lockdown), to name but a few. This generalised state of disorientation has substantial effects on wellbeing and decision making. In this paper, we review the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis and use state-of-the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. Just like standard, spatial cases of disorientation, the non-spatial forms of disorientation prevalent in the current crisis consist in the mismatch between our frames of reference and our immediate experience, and they result in anxiety, helplessness and isolation, but also in the possibility of re-orienting. The current crisis provides a unique environment in which to study non-spatial forms of disorientation. In turn, existing knowledge about spatial disorientation can shed light on the shifting landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To protect against COVID-19, the UK Government imposed a national lockdown that shut schools and business, and required people to stay at home. This lockdown instituted a social coordination problem: it demanded the individual bear a cost – a significant restriction to their movement – in order to achieve a collective good. Initially there were remarkably high levels of social compliance with the lockdown restrictions, but the Government defense of Mr. Cummings corresponded with a notable drop in both levels of compliance and levels of trust in government. By considering the logic of social coordination problems, this paper offers an explanation as to why these drops in compliance and trust were to be expected.

This paper presents results from a comparative and qualitative discourse-historical analysis of governmental crisis communication in Austria, Germany, France, Hungary and Sweden, during the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown from March 2020 to May 2020 (a ‘discourse strand’). By analysing a sample of important speeches and press conferences by government leaders (all performing as the ‘face of crisis management’), it is possible to deconstruct a range of discursive strategies announcing/legitimising restrictive measures in order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic where everybody is in danger of falling ill, regardless of their status, position, education and so forth. I focus on four frames that have been employed to mitigate the ‘dread of death’ (Bauman, 2006) and counter the ‘denial of death’ (Becker, 1973/2020): a ‘religious frame’, a ‘dialogic frame’, a frame emphasising ‘trust’, and a frame of ‘leading a war’. These interpretation frameworks are all embedded in ‘renationalising’ tendencies, specifically visible in the EU member states where even the Schengen Area was suddenly abolished (in order to ‘keep the virus out’) and borders were closed. Thus, everybody continues to be confronted with national biopolitics and body politics (Wodak, 2021).