ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a social drama in which churches, government, and individual actors have played prominent roles. While neo-conservative evangelicals have resisted governmental and scientific overreach in the name of "faith over fear”, liberal religious groups have joined in government and medical efforts for the good of the commons, offered comfort and assurance to those suffering, and called for support of the poor at home and abroad. Religions have turned right and left, from apocalyptic "resets” of global order to new calls for social justice. In this context, the root metaphor of the epidemic has been called up as a historical construct that helps to conceptualize, analyze, and act upon the COVID-19 crisis. Searching the past helps us see that not everything about COVID-19 as a social drama is a new or unheard-of challenge. For example, there are new evocations of the black death of 14th-century Europe that became a crisis in the church, as well as the great Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which upended the confidence of the European Enlightenment. Another way to appraise the dimensions of the COVID-19 outbreak is to call on the varied approaches characteristic of the sociology of religion, that is, to consider how ideology and belief are socially constructed in order to account for new intellectual responses to societal challenges. Does religion always produce the "collective effervescence” Durkheim posited? Does religious change always arrive downstream of cultural change, or can it also become an independent variable? This article attends primarily to the sharp responses of conservative religious expression in the face of attention-getting upheaval, which has readily translated into right-wing political action and electioneering. But the social uplift and altruism of liberal religion is not neglected either. Thus, this article provides an account of how science and governmental action have both been challenged and embraced in response to COVID-19. As such, it is not an empirical study stemming from new Pew-like social polling. Rather, it is a wide overview rooted in sociological methods and theory for tracking religion historically and presently in America in a manner that aims to inform a discussion of how COVID-19 has impacted religion and religious expression, and vice versa.
ABSTRACT
This article seeks to explain the dynamics of resource depletion in North Korea’s fishery. We utilize insights from the common-pool resource (CPR) literature and show how theories from comparative politics that explain why states sometimes do not formalize property rights but prefer their informal exercise can be fruitfully applied to North Korea’s fishery. Utilizing a process tracing methodology, we demonstrate that the North Korean state possesses the necessary capacity to limit resource depletion, but has largely failed to do so. We argue that broad access to the commons maintains relations of enmeshed dependence between the dictator and those utilizing the fishery, balancing regime social control concerns with the party-state’s need for revenue. Further, in recent times, foreign actors have been allowed into the sector, providing a lucrative source of revenue without creating issues for internal control. We consider the alternative explanation that the North Korean state lacks the capacity to prevent CPR depletion, but demonstrate its implausibility given the preponderance of available evidence, not least the response of the regime in Pyongyang to the COVID-19 pandemic, where it has demonstrated considerable capacity to control the country’s fishing fleet.