Document Type

Article

Publication Title

UCLA Law Review Discourse

Volume

70

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

This essay analyzes the wartime framing of “fighting” a war on COVID-19—to “fight that invisible enemy,” coronavirus. How might lawmakers address social crises, such as COVID, with the urgency of an emergency without reinforcing our overly-militarized, securitized, and policed state? The problem with a securitized approach is that the notion of security combines conceptual ambiguity with heightened urgency and this indeterminacy can shape and even distort legality in exceptional moments.

I examine the use of the security framework in the context of war-related legal authority to address the pandemic and steps necessary for building a post-pandemic recovery. Importantly, this project fits within the body of scholarship that is redefining national security law studies—by questioning what is meant by “security,” by “racing” national security, and by interrogating what the concept of “security” foregrounds and erases. This broader body of scholarship questions whether security is an inherently statist concept? What kinds of expertise it empowers and whose knowledge matters in identifying threats? What is the relationship of security to legality? Does security require exceptionalism? How do we cabin “emergency” law?

I draw on historical analogies, outline the benefits and shortcomings of a security law approach to COVID, and propose an alternative paradigm to meet the current moment with an ethics, politics, and law of care, rather than a framework of war, militarization and securitization, as these latter approaches often promote “law and order” over justice.

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