1658 Jo Shaw politics that operate as key variables. This is an issue which will require careful monitoring over the longer term for clearer comparisons to be drawn of “before” and “after,” or across countries, regions, continents, or regime types. Further work will need to be done to calibrate across the issues of inequality and vulnerability which are central to the analysis in this article. It will be some time before we can see clearly the extent to which the degradation of democratic citizenship amidst the pandemic may correlate to or even cause the adoption of measures that either undermine or protect certain vulnerable groups in relation to how the pandemic impacts upon them. G. Protecting the Vulnerable in a Pandemic Where previous sections have discussed how the syndemic (that is to say, the health and the socioeconomic) impacts of COVID-19 in relation to citizenship have had a disproportionate impact on certain groups, this final substantive section of the paper places those same groups at the center of the analysis by asking how best we can protect the vulnerable in a pandemic and in the recovery from a pandemic. One of the primary critiques of citizenship is that it promises but does not deliver equality, and that this failure to match promise and reality has particularly damaging consequences for certain groups defined by their “vulnerability.”156 Those groups include those within the polity who find themselves unable to articulate an effective claim to “full membership” because they belong to a marginalized group or minority, as well as those who fall foul of the arbitrary and often coercive boundaries of the state-based membership status and for whom any protection provided under international law is also often rather sparse. Some groups, such as migrant care workers, for example, cut across both categories of the excluded.157 Of course, it is clear that human rights norms, both internally and in terms of international law, can be useful tools in terms of contesting failures to protect effectively those with additional vulnerabilities to the effects of the pandemic within states and across the world.158 It is, however, also fruitful to think about the contestation of vulnerability in terms of constitutional citizenship. For example, concepts of social citizenship buttressed by constitutional rights such as those protecting health or human dignity, as well as the right to life, could be brought into play to develop the argument that responses to the pandemic require a new type of social contract that prioritizes the protection of those who are more vulnerable to the effects of the virus.159 This has been a consistent theme of the scholarship on the pandemic which has sought to look forward rather than simply commenting on contemporaneous events. What is needed is work which goes beyond compiling a laundry list of protective measures and which moves towards adopting more holistic approaches. Such approaches need to weigh the cost of different measures for different groups, and to consider not only the classic binary of libertarian and authoritarian approaches to the scope of restrictions imposed in the interests of health and life but also the fundamentally social democratic nature of the protection of public health.160 This way of valuing public health protection stands in contradistinction to the powerful neoliberal ethos that has dominated most socio-economic debates in recent years.161 A social democratic analysis can give communities the For a fuller understanding of “vulnerability” and its contested nature, see the references cited supra note 20. Sonja Avlijaš, Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic, in PANDEMICS, POL., & SOC’Y 227, (Gerard Delanty ed., De Gruyter 2021). 158 See, e.g., thinking about rights to an effective healthcare system, Lisa Forman & Jillian Clare Kohler, Global Health and Human Rights in the Time of COVID-19: Response, Restrictions, and Legitimacy, 19:5 J. HUM. RTS. 547 (2020). 159 See, e.g., the contributions to DEMOCRACY IN TIMES OF PANDEMIC: DIFFERENT FUTURES IMAGINED (Miguel Poiares Maduro & Paul W. Kahn eds., Cambridge Univ. Press 2020). 160 Sylvia Walby, The COVID Pandemic and Social Theory: Social Democracy and Public Health in the Crisis, 24 EUR. J. SOC. THEORY 22 (2021). 161 Bram Büscher, Guiseppe Feola, Andrew Fischer, Robert Fletcher, Julien-Francois Gerber, Wendy Harcourt, Martijn Koster, Mindi Scheider, Joeri Scholtens, Marja Spierenburg, Vincent Walstra & Han Wiskerke, Planning for a World Beyond COVID-19: Five Pillars for Post-neoliberal Development, 140 WORLD DEV. 105357 (2021). 156 157 https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press