Paper short abstract:

This paper considers “polycrisis” amongst UK Freedom Movement activists, in relation to an (allegedly) unfolding Great Reset. I argue for close engagement between specific crisis rhetorics and their respective contexts, and suggest parallels between “crisis thinking” and “conspiracy thinking”.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on fieldwork conducted around the UK and via the social media platform Telegram, this paper explores how UK Freedom Movement members conceive of their activism in opposition to an (allegedly) unfolding “Great Reset”. A ‘conspiracy attuned’ social movement (Davis 2024), the Freedom Movement first emerged in opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and mass vaccination programmes. However, it has since embedded itself as a network of campaign groups, political parties and “off-grid” communities. Understood to be a secretive plot to abolish national democracies and establish a technocratic world government, I demonstrate how the “Great Reset” operates as a unifying conceptual framework for the Movement, in making sense of, and opposing, a wide range of policy measures. Framed thus, traffic zoning measures such as Low Emission Zones or “15-Minute City” schemes, “Central Bank Digital Currency” proposals (CBDCs) and “chemtrail” sightings are each encountered by activists as part of an ongoing Great Reset polycrisis (Henig and Knight 2023).

From this ethnographic backdrop, the paper advances two key points of discussion. Firstly, I suggest that engaging the contextual specificities of crisis-talk might be effectively prompted by asking the question: “for whom is this a crisis, and for whom is it not?” Secondly, following Janet Roitman’s understanding of crisis as a ‘narrative device’ which ‘eradicates contingency’ (2013, 85), I (provocatively) argue that rhetorics of crisis share certain characteristics with epistemologies of “conspiracy thinking”.