Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Romanians in London during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores how migrants expressed their mistrust through COVID-19 conspiracy theories, showing both their destructive and generative role.

Paper long abstract

Speculating about the ‘nanocip’ inside the COVID-19 vaccine and later about geopolitical events like the invasion of Ukraine, Romanian migrants routinely employed conspiracies to make sense of their lives in London. These narratives drew on what Carey (2017) calls the ‘bureaucratic imagination’, articulating scepticism not only toward the pandemic, but also toward party politics and state authority more broadly. This translated into a surprising electoral outcome in 2020. Although previously supporting liberal candidates, a quarter of Romanians abroad voted for a new far-right party, now a major political force in Romania. Seen through conspiratorial reasoning, this electoral activation becomes less surprising.

Conspiracies coupled Romanians’ long-standing mistrust of the state with their novel discontent over the outcomes of migration, while also enabling them to imagine alternative futures. These speculative futures crystallised around the idea of a ‘plot of land to live off’ in Romania, a common migrant aspiration that often attracts ridicule and envy. Conspiracies about the post-pandemic world reframed these contested homes as spaces of refuge, removed from state intrusion and the inequalities of global capitalism.

This paper highlights how mistrust functioned simultaneously as a generative social force – enabling critique and political dissent – and as a destructive one, reinforcing exclusionary moralities and supporting far-right political parties. By tracing this Janus-faced dynamic, it aims to emphasise the continued importance of mistrust as a form of sociality shaping political possibility in a polarised world.