Adrian de León
10 min readMay 25, 2020

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Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

The Securitization of Pathogens: Covid-19 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This article argues that the novel coronavirus — SARS-CoV-2 — has been securitised by world governments, international health organisations, and the media to ensure the full implementation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The origins of the virus, nor the ever-developing status of its infection rate or its mortality rate, will be discussed.

Medical professionals and epidemiologists have been working with a novel virus whose effects on humans was, and remains, truly unknown.

However, it is argued that the measures which have been favoured by the governments — lockdown and social distancing — have caused irrefutable damage to the economy and to society as a whole.

The content of the article will mostly be focusing on a UK perspective and highlight the link between the securitization of a pathogen and the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is used as a hypothesis to explain the true rationale behind the government response.

What is Securitization?

In International Relations theory, securitization is: “the process of state actors transforming subjects into matters of “security”: an extreme version of politicization that enables extraordinary means to be used in the name of security.”

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