Analysing change
29 December 2021
The grand return of the troops
In her newly published paper „The grand return of the troops. Militarization of COVID-19 and shifting military-society relations in Visegrad“, Bucerius Fellow Weronika Grzebalska (and her colleague Zuzana Maďarová) analyze the militarization of COVID-19 through a comparative exploration of how the pandemic was handled in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.
„[W]e argue that rather than serving as a ‘portal’ for civilian resilience, the pandemic constituted an unprecedented ‘return of the troops’ to Visegrad states and societies in terms of its size, scope, and duration, thus strengthening the pressure for re-militarization in the region that has been recorded in the last decade.“
