Rethinking Minimum Guarantees after the Pandemic: The Invisible Violence of Neoliberal Rationality

This essay suggests that the pandemic brings unprecedented economic and social challenges while simultaneously opening the door for the renegotiation of minimum guarantees that human rights discourses conceptualise. The particular conditions of the pandemic have the potential to crystallise slow and structured forms of violence, and widen our imagination of the possibilities for human rights discourses. This is especially the case because neoliberal rationality doesn’t have the hegemony over social movements and human rights imagination, as it may have done in the 90s.