Communities of Rupture, Insecurity, and Risk: Inevitable and Necessary for Meaningful Political Change?

Through drawing upon the Covid-19 Pandemic as a contemporary case study, this chapter argues that moments of socio-political rupture and risk are necessary for the summoning of meaningful social movement to lobby state governments to tackle social inequality and exclusion. To contextualise this discussion, the exacerbation of global ruptures and the intensification of free-market economics will be explored as the mechanical and ideological cogs that have enabled the rise of poverty, deprivation, and social inequalities to intensify across British communities. It is under the basis of a neoliberal and global political economy through which new identities have emerged: Identities that are predicated on risk in a global and industrialised society, and a rising subjectivity predicated on ontological insecurity (Beck, 1992;Giddens, 1991). These changes will constitute much of the basis for discussion. To begin, this chapter will introduce the reader to the backdrop of the socio-economic context within which from the late 1970s, British society entered a liaison with neoliberal capitalism, the values of which rapidly entrenched themselves within mainstream politics, ideology, and identity. It is from this contextual backdrop that enabled the local and global ruptures including the British Government’s response to Covid-19 that collectively has increased deprivation and heightened within the public and community sphere to what Giddens (1991) refers to as ‘ontological insecurity’. Additionally, through drawing towards the works of Stacey (1969), it will be argued the moments of rupture and disruption such as what was observed within the height of the Covid-19 pandemic awakened people’s consciousness towards multiple social and economic injustices and fuelled the subsequent response