Editorial: “Performing control” of the COVID-19 crisis

Power is performative and performance is power. Our collection testifies performance of crisis and of power in the inevitably uncontrollable situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Political will and collective subject were articulated to address the crisis and the enemy that was slowly becoming more possible to tackle. Neither the process of the virus nor its response was even: in each context, leadership was performed, and it evoked contestation. The Research Topic “Performing control” of the COVID-19 crisis includes 11 articles analyzing the responses to COVID-19 in nine countries. In 2020, we expected to see curbing-in nationalism and performance of statehood, contestation between the various levels of administration and expertise. The articles, carried out by 19 researchers from the universities in eight countries, give testimony of the early pandemic and develop new methods to study social media and government relations from Europe to Aoteaora New Zealand from a diversity of discursive-rhetorical perspectives (Table 1).

One of the main performances dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic was the strategy regarding the limits and the justifications of sovereign power. Considering Judith Butler's approach with affect theory, Lehtinen and Brunila argue that the management of the pandemic reveals both the political ontology of war central to the foundation of our political communities and how this ontology is used by the nation state to manage feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Arguably, this frame leads to failure, influencing a potentially racist and nationalist affective climate in which the “enemy” is no longer felt to be the virus, but members of other nations as well as minorities.

Pandemic-performative power relations were different in each of the case countries. Even in the European Union the restrictive nature of the policy options chosen, and the severity of their enforcement mechanisms varied considerably across countries. However, the structural determinants of each country shaped policy-making decisions more than the factors related to the magnitude of the crisis at stake, as the article by Egger et al. underlines by analyzing several countries' first responses.

Most of the articles studied social media to understand pandemic performances of control. The first of the cases was Italy. Blasio and Selva highlight the emotional repertoire mobilized by the Italian government in its communication: the ability to display empathy toward citizens' sufferings, the will to engage in dialog with social stakeholders, confidence in expertise, and the pride and determination to negotiate within the EU. In this early stage, the performance of the prime minister in expressing his emotional states has nurtured the conception of post-COVID statehood, consolidating his individual leadership and flawing the spaces of political conflict.

Through a contrasting case in which a nation shielded itself from the virus, Gilray analyses the Aotearoa New Zealand response to COVID-19, considered by popular assessment to have been successful, by a mixed methods and data approach. The research identifies three distinct nodal points that unfolded as key to the nation's ability to control the pandemic—the hegemonic “us”; iwi regionalism; and the rhetoric of kindness, although not without aspects of the antagonisms that also beset other nations. In also less affected Finland, Koljonen and Palonen analyse the interaction between the citizen's “hashtag landscape” and the Sanna Marin's all-female government, comparing regular government and authorities' info sessions and Twitter flow. The research shows the Finnish government's attempt to communicate to different audiences and to express control in the 1st year of the pandemic.

Contestation between local and federal levels (Germany) and the capital's locals and the president (Czech Republic) appears also through onsite/online mobilisations and images. Volk's analysis of local, state and federal level communication in Angela Merkel's Germany emphasizes the different political styles of performing and contesting institutional control and reveals that political performances of control were closely linked to articulations of democracy as an empty signifier, and to claims for safeguarding democratic principles as such. Hartikainen, studying Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš' Facebook profile in the two peak moments of the crisis in the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, explores how a technocratic populist can visually perform the authenticity and connection to “the low” as key to a populist performance while also maintaining the performance of expertise that is central to technocratic populist success.

The performance of control also strengthened stereotypes in the dynamics of crises. The Hungarian government's Facebook communication during the first wave of the pandemic revealed to Linnamäki a reinforcement of the traditional gender roles division: care work was performed as a female task, police and military masculinity were called on to tackle the control of potential disruption of the system of care. Analyzing Romanian early pandemic media narratives, Chiruta uncovered how historical patterns of stigma vis-à-vis Roma communities in Eastern Europe were activated by sensationalizing the episodes in the pandemic involving the Roma minority, employing a logic of polarization to assist the authorities in retaking control of the pandemic and health crisis in Romania.

Palau-Sampio article from Spain shows that along with social media platforms, pseudo-media contributed to producing and disseminating misleading content during the pandemic. She points to the framing of measures to stop the virus as harmful and ineffective, especially regarding vaccination. Clear links emerged with the far-right ideology and a polarized discourse with belligerent, offensive expressions to refer to institutions and to disseminate conspiracy theories and disinformation.

In the Research Topic, particular attention is paid to how (social) media was used, and it opens up many avenues to study the discursive performance of control. For example, Koljonen and Palonen combine Laclaudian discourse theory with LDA topic modeling in a novel way. Studying Sweden, Turunen et al. apply Valentin Voloshinov's classical theory on reported speech, developed in the 1920s, to the concept of digital authority in the Twitter-sphere of the 2020s. In this last article of the set, the authors draw on data from four Swedish state agencies during the first 15 months of the COVID-19 crisis. Findings underline that retweets are generally used to affirm and spread information, thus strengthening the digital authority of the origin of the tweet, whilst replies and quote-tweets are used to undermine the credibility of the sender and the content of the original tweet, often by resorting to irony. Criticism increased as the pandemic advanced.

The comparison emerging from these papers underlines the value of first-response studies and interpretive approaches to pandemic, hybrid-mediatized politics providing more nuanced understandings of the relationships between the pandemic and democracy in a situation of an ultimate lack of control.

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