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Sean Creaven, University of the West of England, United KingdomAbstract
Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are established by research as effective for controlling pandemics. COVID-19 incentivized much research into the effectiveness of NPIs, which confirmed their efficacy, indeed indispensability, for pandemic management. Yet the success or otherwise of NPIs in bringing the COVID-19 pandemic under control has obviously depended on the level of public compliance with these restrictions, especially in the pre-vaccination era. However, the NPIs were rather less successful in curbing the pandemic than commonly thought because their efficacy was compromised by substantial levels of public non-compliance. This paper contends that public non-compliance with NPIs may be explained to some degree by a concept of decivilization. Decivilization is not theorized here as regression of the modernization process, as Norbert Elias understood it, but rather as integral to the neoliberal mode of capitalism. Decivilization denotes cultural, social and political mechanisms at work in our globalizing world (especially neoliberalization, class polarization, and individualisation) that undermined the stringency of NPIs due to the harms they have inflicted on the social compact. This paper concludes that effective responses to future pandemics will depend not on technological solutions but on challenging decivilizing processes.
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Conference: ACSS2025Stream: Sociology
This paper is part of the ACSS2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Creaven S. (2025) Decivilization: Public Non-compliance With NPIs During the COVID-19 Pandemic ISSN: 2186-2303 – The Asian Conference on the Social Sciences 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 457-476) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-2303.2025.38
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-2303.2025.38
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