The Freedom Convoy, Conspiracy Theory and COVID-19: Pandemic Politics

• In Event: Gossip, Conspiracy, and Disinformation in World Politics

Abstract

Far-right populist movements and demonstrations that foster and rely upon conspiracy theories are a critical but underexamined site of international politics in the COVID-19 era. Protests against public health and other COVID-19 restrictions transcend the borders of sovereign states and form transnational knowledge controversies—political struggles over power, truth, legitimacy and knowledge, in which actors engage in the discursive contestation of epistemic and political authority. The Freedom Convoy, a sequence of protests, blockades and online campaigns that began in Canada but spread all over the globe, provides an illustrative example of transnational knowledge controversies that animate populist movements based on conspiratorial thinking and ‘stigmatized knowledge’ (Barkun 2015). In this article, we document and conceptualize the discursive contestation of epistemic and political authority in the Freedom Convoy in terms of transnational knowledge controversies about health expertise, emergency governance, pandemic multilateralism and internet regulation. The analysis of transnational knowledge controversies and the stigmatized knowledge that animates them, we contend, reveals an epistemic crisis at the heart of liberal world order and democratic politics, in which the struggle between the perceived forces of globalism and anti-globalism is destabilizing the boundaries between national/global, politics/science and liberalism/illiberalism.

Authors

• Corey Robinson, University of Glasgow

• Scott Watson, University of Victoria