Unity in fragility: nonviolence and COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed extreme forms of biopolitics, as well as the urgency to reconsider our relationship with the planet. Although biopolitics draws attention to the technologies of domination by public authorities, we cast the concepts of bios and politics in the wider framework of nonviolence. In this framework, bios is the set of practices (praxis) of ordinary citizens. And politics is power created by harm reduction, or actions in daily life that testimony the desire not to harm others or the planet. We leverage nonviolence at three levels, scaling up from the individual to social behaviour and to the planet. The first level concerns nonviolence as self-sufferance and as praxis to claim back the sovereignty of the body. In the second level, nonviolence is collective mobilization - building social capital, self-governance, and solidarity. The third level provides the vision of a diverse ecological citizenship with a sustainable relationship between human beings and the planet.