Friedmann, V., & Marton, P. (2025). Operating by caesura: Medicalisation, geopolitical othering and biopolitical legitimacy in the (non-)approval of Sputnik V in the European Union Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 1–23.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2024.2442433
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic made biopolitical decisions, including on vaccine approval, a subject of public discussion, challenging governmental legitimacy at the level of its biopolitical underpinnings. We draw on Foucault’s notion of the ‘caesura’ to interpret governments’ responses as wielding their biopower by making medicalised distinctions, first between the ‘vulnerable’ and the ‘non-vulnerable’ and then, as vaccines became available, between the ‘vaccinated’ and the ‘unvaccinated’. However, we show that in the public debates over the approval of Sputnik V in the European Union—that is, over who counts as ‘appropriately vaccinated’—such medicalisation was combined with geopolitically informed boundary-drawing (and othering/inclusion) vis-à-vis Russia, both in the vast majority of member states that refused approval and in Hungary, which granted it. We analyse how the ‘customisable’ mixing of geopolitical and medical arguments constituted distinct legitimation strategies to establish the governments in question as the effective and legitimate loci of biopolitical authority.
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