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Herrschaftsmisstrauen vor COVID-19: segmentäre Ordnungen in Georgien


Zurück zum Heft: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 1/2024
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What populisms and anti-vaccination movements have in common is a radical distrust of established forms of rule. Demagogues like Victor Orban and Donald Trump try to capitalise on this distrust and fuel their anti-democratic agenda. Against this background, mistrust in governance has recently become suspicious, even though it used to be an essential part of civil society politics at least until the 1980s. When, e.g., the German state ordered a population census in 1987, it was met with mistrust among liberally minded citizens who took it as a means of illicit state encroachment. However, the nowadays popular distrust of mistrust dismisses its emancipatory potential. This article is an attempt to bring this potential back to the fore. For this purpose, I focus on a pre-modern form of antigovernance in segmentary societies without an institutionalized centre of power in highland northeast Georgia. In order to assess the role of mistrust in the constitution of politics in these societies and to derive some lessons for emancipatory politics, I draw a comparison to the distrust of power as expressed in the anti-vaccination protests. In my conclusion, I argue that for mistrust to develop its emancipatory potential, it also needs to be directed inwards. The lacking mistrust within populist movement thus appears as a problem of at least equal size to the widespread mistrust towards ›the mainstream‹.