ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the nature of contemporary state–society relations into sharp relief. After initial denialism by political leaders in some countries – Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the United States, for example – most countries adopted similar World Health Organization (WHO)-proposed protocols, making physical distancing and mobility restrictions mandatory. The genesis of this book project was an invitation for researchers and scholars to write short, blog-style reflections about the ways in which governments in their parts of the world were handling the pandemic, and how populations responded. Formal lockdowns were established in most countries, but for many residents in the crowded cities of the Global South, where multiple families must share a single toilet or a small dwelling, and where every day is a hustle and a struggle to secure food, social isolation was quite literally impossible.
