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Disaster Capitalism in the Wake of COVID -19 Malini Balamayuran1 Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted and impacted people’s lives profoundly all around the world. The United Nations has urged all governments to embrace a cooperative and human rights-based approach, when adapting measures to cure and curb the worldwide pandemic. A plethora of subsisting commentary presents the view that moments of crisis generally elongate a state of exception for capitalist corporations and businesses to grow and evolve widely. Particularly, the in-depth analysis of ‘disaster capitalism’ by Naomi Klein presents the view that any crisis situation is manipulated by the largest corporations and businesses to put in place a series of desired freemarket policies that may otherwise have taken decades to take effect. This article primarily examines the ways in which the responses to the COVID-19 of the neo-liberal governments favor the capitalist corporations’ agenda that were deferred or deprioritized in prepandemic times. Based on the primary and secondary sources, it has been found that neo-liberal governments have attempted to manipulate this current global health crisis to serve the way that automatically boosts higher profits for corporations and businesses. Therefore, this study concludes that the current global health pandemic has extended the agents of capitalism another perfect chance albeit at an immense human and environmental cost. Keywords: Capitalism, Free-Market Policies, Disaster Capitalism, Corporations, COVID-19 Introduction The COVID -19 outbreak, the worst global health crisis since the Second World War has infected more than 76 million and killed approximately 1.6 million even before a period of one year has elapsed. The efforts to find an effective and safe vaccine for the benefit of the global population are still underway. The cascading consequences of the pandemic felt widely have 1
Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.