COVID-19, Biopolitics, and Ideological Overreach—A Review of COVID-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret

This article critically evaluates COVID-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, with particular attention to this book's ideological undercurrents and conceptual framing of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using biopolitical theory, critical discourse analysis, and poststructuralist critique, the article interrogates the ways in which the pandemic is employed as a rhetorical vehicle for proposing large-scale economic, social, and technological reforms. It identifies an overarching tendency in Schwab and Malleret's narrative to conflate governance with moral imperatives, to instrumentalize identity politics, and to normalize digital surveillance in the name of health and safety. The analysis contends that rather than offering an all-inclusive "reset" to create a better world, the book consolidates a techno-managerial worldview which actually masks newly-developed and pre-existing ideological biases under the guise of pragmatism. The article advocates a more pluralistic and critically aware approach to post-pandemic global restructuring, a more ethical delineation of the biopolitics of surveillance, and a more conclusive worldview toward the COVID-19 crisis.