Confronting the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic should be a priority for critical geographers and social scientists Dragos Simandan, Claus Rinner, Valentina Capurri Abstract: The aim1 of this paper is to encourage critical geographers and social scientists to take a stronger, more explicit, and more intellectually rigorous anti-authoritarian stance against the problematic public response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so effectively, what is urgently needed is to contribute to the emerging body of academic research documenting the devastating political economy of lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, and arguing for a more proportionate pandemic response. This necessitates a genuinely critical approach that (a) avoids the tunnel vision of minimizing only one specific form of harm (COVID-19 deaths and illnesses) and (b) cultivates instead a more encompassing sense of solidarity, grounded in the careful documenting of the multiple, long-term, harms caused by that tunnel vision. Key words: COVID-19; authoritarianism; geographical political economy; critical social science 1 Recommended citation format: Simandan, D., Rinner, C., Capurri, V., 2021. Confronting the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic should be a priority for critical geographers and social scientists. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. Affiliations of authors: Dragos Simandan, corresponding author (Brock University, Canada;
[email protected]); Claus Rinner (Ryerson University, Canada), Valentina Capurri (Ryerson University, Canada). 1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to encourage critical geographers and social scientists to take a stronger, more explicit anti-authoritarian stance against the problematic public response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To be sure, there have already been published academic debates concerning geographers’ reaction to the pandemic, with special issues dedicated to the topic in Dialogues in Human Geography (vol.