This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This assessment rests on, and illustrates the merits of, both an overdue theoretical consolidation of Securitization Theory's (ST) conceptualization of securitizing language, and a new methodological blueprint for the study of 'securitizing semantic repertoire'. Comparing and contrasting the two leaders' respective securitizing semantic repertoires adopted in the early months of the coronavirus outbreak shows that securitizing language, while very limited, has been more intense in the UK, whose repertoire was structured by a biopolitical imperative to 'save lives' in contrast to the US repertoire centred on the 'war' metaphor.

Since the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 countries across the world have implemented various measures to contain the virus. They have restricted public gatherings, mobility and congregation of people at homes and in public places. These restrictions however did not stop another chain of events - the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. In the summer of 2020 people across the globe mobilised to protest the police killing of George Floyd. In the UK the protest for Black Lives took place in all major cities, but they also continued weekly in smaller communities by 'taking the knee'. What interests me in this contribution is how anxieties experienced during the global pandemic contributed to the mobilisation of large-scale political actions for racial justice and how might we consider anxiety as a mobilising force in political space in times of global pandemic in particular in the context of anti-racist protests such as BLM. This forum contribution opens by considering how global pandemic aided conditions for political action for racial justice, before discussing the role of anxiety in political mobilising. Here I first detailed how anxiety is understood in Lacanian psychoanalysis before considering what it tells us about the BLM protests for racial justice and specifically the removal of the Colston statue during the Bristol protest on June 7 2020.

This contribution to the Forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19, develops a conception of uncertainty as constituted by cognitive (awareness of possibilities) and affective (mood in which possibility is encountered) dimensions. Based on this conception, it is suggested that the COVID-19 crisis has led to a qualitative leap in our already growing sense of uncertainty, both accentuating our awareness of possibilities that are unforeseen, and rendering us attuned to the world in anxiety rather than fear.

This is the introduction to the forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19. It summarizes the contributions within a common framework and situates them in the extant literature.

This short article discusses how different fantasy narratives have come together during the Covid-19 crisis in various far-right movements, parties and audiences across the world and how much of these fantasies rely on racialised and gendered notions of a fantastical world-order in which particular forms of emotional governance provide a relief and sense of security to certain societal groups. This involves a close engagement with crisis and crisis narratives in relation to ontological insecurity and anxiety; how such crisis narratives have materialised in fantasies related to borders and corona nationalism, and the emotional governance of these particular fantasies in the hands of populist leaders and their increasingly receptive audiences.

This article argues that how the United Nations (UN) conceptualizes legitimacy is not only a matter of legalism or power politics. The UN's conception of legitimacy also utilizes concepts, language and symbolism from the religious realm. Understanding the entanglement between political and religious concepts and the ways of their verbalization at the agential level sheds light on how legitimacy became to be acknowledged as an integral part of the UN and how it changes. At the constitutional level, the article examines phrases and 'verbal symbols', enshrined in the Charter of the 'secular church' UN. They evoke intrinsic legitimacy claims based on religious concepts and discourse such as hope and salvation. At the agential level, the article illustrates how the Secretary-General verbalizes those abstract constitutional principles of legitimacy. Religious language and symbolism in the constitutional framework and agential practice of the UN does not necessarily produce an exclusive form of legitimacy. This article shows, however, that legitimacy as nested in the UN's constitutional setting cannot exist without religious templates because they remain a matter of a 'cultural frame'.