In much the same way that a play features actors adopt a particular role while on center stage and quite another backstage, governments around the world are reading their lines in front of the public while engaging in their own agendas off-stage.

Terrorist organizations, like Daesh or Boko Haram in Nigeria, have used the distraction of the pandemic to expand their territory and intensify violence toward minorities. The opportunism doesn’t end with terrorism — several governments, too, have taken advantage of the distraction the pandemic caused to strengthen and assert their political positions by force over religious minorities.

Applying sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1956 dramaturgical theory to today’s world, many governments behave as though they were front-stage actors — giving predesigned impressions to society while using the spotlight of the pandemic to divert attention from their backstage activities, as they step up oppression and violence towards minorities. In this fashion, governments are more readily able to manipulate the public’s perceived reality, just as they would an audience in a play. Separating out the front- and backstage enables actors to give their audience the impression that they are meeting standards expected of them while behaving in an entirely different manner to achieve their underlying interests.

The Stage is Set
The rise in discrimination toward Muslims in India, Hindus and Christians in Pakistan, Christians in Nigeria, and Muslims in Myanmar in the weeks and months since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that several governments have adopted opportunistic policies aimed at quashing dissent and minority representation while using the crisis as cover. Honest government communication with the public on the virus comes as expected; it is much less-imagined that the shadow of a worldwide pandemic would be exploited to direct violence towards minorities. 

Goffman argued in his dramaturgical approach that life is like a theatrical scene, composed of actors and audiences. Social interactions, then, are comprised of a front and backstage: The front stage allows actors (individuals) to guide and manage the impressions their audience would have of them, while the backstage serves as a region where these individuals can act outside their carefully crafted stage characters and roles. While Goffman set out to elaborate this concept at the auto-sociological and psychological level, the metaphor readily applies to the actions of governments during the pandemic.

The theory of impression management (first coined by Goffman and developed by Schimmelfennig in 2002) argues that “performers will be concerned with maintaining the impression that they are living up to the many standards by which they and their products are judged. As a result, the very obligation of appearing always in a steady moral light […] focuses one to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage.” Schimmelfennig further elaborates that actors engaged in impression management will act through the ‘concept of framing,’ wherein actors constantly adjust their own frames to “persuade authorities and bystanders of the rightness of their cause.”

The theatrical space requires all entities to interact through subtleties in the dynamics of relationships that allow an entire government to develop. During the pandemic, the relationship between a government and its society appears to function like any other. On closer inspection of opportunistic governments, however, the relationship backstage adopts an in-group/out-group dimension in which the “in-group” takes actions to marginalize the “out-group”. A recent study conducted by 42 expert social scientists warns that “the greater fear and threat associated with the pandemic are associated with greater intolerance and punitiveness toward out-groups.”

This dynamic is most pronounced in countries with flawed democratic or autocratic governments. Governments in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Myanmar — all prominent countries where violence and discrimination against minorities have seen a sharp uptick during the pandemic — are considered either flawed democracies or authoritarian by the 2019 Democracy Index Report developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit.

In a Goffman-esque view of the world, we are afforded first-class seats to bear witness to the way that disparate governments behave onstage when the world is suffering. António Guterres argues front-and-center that the world must use this pandemic as an opportunity to refocus on the lives at risk during these difficult times. While they occupy the front stage, most governments bellow their agreement. However, backstage, many appear to consider using it to cause further harm.

Pulling Back the Curtains
Mounting concerns over India’s citizenship laws, recently amended by the governing  and majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)) are perhaps the most prominent example of governmental theater during the pandemic. In December of 2019, the right-wing BJP signed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) into law for the first time since 1955 which offers fast-track Indian Citizenship for Hindus, Parsis, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians that fled persecution in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The lack of a path to citizenship for Muslims residing in India sparked national protests, as many protested the clearly discriminatory nature of the amendment.

A recent study published in The Economic and Political Weekly concluded that the CAA and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) “have been used as a political tool to identify and harass Muslims.” On March 4th, The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) convened a hearing to discuss the exacerbation of “Indian Muslims’ discrimination and persecution” by the modification to the CAA — much to the chagrin of officials in New Delhi.

The Spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs rebutted “comments made by USCIRF, sections of the media and a few individuals regarding recent incidents of violence in Delhi” via Twitter. Claiming that these were “factually inaccurate and misleading,” the statement went on to suggest that USCIRF’s comments were “aimed at politicizing the issue,” and requested that “irresponsible comments are not made at this sensitive time.”

For New Delhi’s international reputation, its behavior, statements, speeches, counter-arguments, and other ‘front-stage’ actions must meet with international moral standards and consensus. As a result, the Indian government is denying all arguments made by outsiders that there are clear discrimination and persecution toward the Muslim community, while continuing to pursue its own domestic agenda more clandestinely.

J. Michael Straczynski says, “Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.” On the one hand, it is not easy to gather facts and data from one of the least free democracies in the world, which exercises significant influence over media outlets and shuts down access to the Internet in regions like Jammu & Kashmir. On the other hand, foreign governments — particularly in Washington and London — continue to sound the alarm each time New Delhi takes new actions against its minority Muslim populace. What remains undeniably true is that, prior to the pandemic, the government passed the new CAA, excluding Muslims. During the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, several reputable news outlets reported that Muslims were beaten by police forces for attending public events, or even prayers, during the national lockdown. Many face public harassment and violence from right-wing nationalists, vigilante groups, and party politicians, some of whom falsely blame Muslims for the spreading of the virus.

While outwardly preaching calm and peace, BJP party politicians and the government have pursued a ‘back-stage’ campaign to marginalize or remove India’s Muslim minority.

Same Play, Different Theaters
While India’s case has received greater press, there are many other governments are taking to the back-stage to clamp down on their own minorities — or looking the other way as others do — under the cover of the pandemic. In Pakistan, self-identifying Hindus and Christians were denied international food aid on the basis of religion. Nigeria is witnessing a peak in violence aimed at Christians from Boko Haram and other extremist groups as the government tries to grapple with responding to the health crisis. 

In the United States, the recent U.S. Senate Bill 3744, the ‘Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act’, signed into law by President Donald Trump is an official act singling out the repression of the Uyghur minority in China. It sent a strong message to all governments taking advantage of the opportunity to engage in minority repression during the pandemic — or it would have, except that the President elected not to punish China over their treatment of the Muslim minority group in Xinjiang province as the U.S. and China “were in the middle of a major trade deal” — one which has not yet materialized. It was later revealed that President Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping that he thought building concentration camps for millions of Uighur Muslims was “exactly the right thing to do.”

For all of the new terminology we’ve developed to identify and reckon with the theatrical duplicity and subterfuge that intolerant governments and extremist groups employ to undermine and attack minorities, this is a play the world has seen many times before. Whether it’s a virus or a viral tweet that sparks the firestorm of media and public focus on some other issue, actors with an agenda have always taken advantage of the distractions afforded them to do what they will outside the limelight while preserving their image on the international stage.

Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the raging public health crisis across the world. Entire countries find their healthcare systems overrun and understaffed even as countries in Europe that had once appeared to have largely eradicated the virus see cases on the rise yet again. Citizens must be informed, funding allocated, scientists engaged, and governments responsive and responsible. Yet governments and citizens can have their eyes on more than one thing at a time.

The act may be old, but Goffman’s dramaturgical interpretation is a useful device through which to analyze today’s actors and conflicts. Rather than the cacophony of “he said, she said,”  perceiving the conflict as the stage — and the actions performed both before the audience and behind the curtains — allows us to cut through the noise towards the truth. 

In the same vein, what happens on stage is just as important as what is absent from it. It may very well be that many governments denying allegations that they are engaged in the violation of their minorities’ human rights are telling the truth — but they are certainly failing to take action to prevent others from doing so.

On March 23rd, 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to the world, calling for a global ceasefire in order to prioritize collective action and cooperation in the face of the threat of COVID-19. He urged belligerents to “pull back from hostilities.  Put aside mistrust and animosity.  Silence the guns, stop the artillery, end the airstrikes…Because the virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or faith.” However, the subsequent rise in discrimination against minorities in several countries in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic sends the signal that no real ceasefire has been adopted, and that instead, the virus is fueling xenophobia. On March 16th, calling attention to all French citizens, President Macron claimed that France was at war with COVID-19.

Yet even during World War I, belligerents found a way to put aside their weapons, hate, national interests, and faith during the Christmas Truce of 1914 to join together for a football game in ‘no man’s land’ as ‘human beings’, rather than soldiers on the battlefield. If, even in the midst of one of the greatest and most destructive wars in history, belligerents could find a way to a temporary respite from conflict to celebrate a holiday, it would seem that governments and non-state groups should be able to postpone their political and ideological agendas to prevent the needless deaths of millions — and the economic collapse that follows — on all sides.

It would behoove of the world to reproduce the Christmas Truce of 1914, putting aside political and national agendas for a time, to achieve the greater purpose of eliminating this global threat — not as French in France, Indians in India, Pakistanis in Pakistan, or Americans in the United States, but collectively as global citizens on Earth.

Arnaud Guyon

Research Assistant, PVCR Programme

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Edited by: Daniel Odin Shaw, Cameron Vaské (contributing)

All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.

Photo by Gwen O on Unsplash.