The ‘Shock Doctrine’ thesis was advanced by the Canadian author Naomi Klein to describe the process by which governments exploit crises (disasters or upheavals) to force through controversial policies while citizens are too preoccupied to resist what would previously have been thought unacceptable. The phrase comes from the ‘shock and awe’ visited upon Iraq in the 2003 invasion and the subsequent remodelling of the country’s economy. In other words, a crisis (9/11) becomes an opportunity (mass privatisation and fresh new markets for US companies).
It’s an idea that the legal academic Dr Hannah Quirk persuasively adopts in her essay: Shock Therapy and The Criminal Justice Casualties of Covid-19 (King’s Law Journal, Volume 32, 2021–Issue 1). The ‘crisis’ is the pandemic and the ‘opportunity’ here is a chance to knobble trial by jury. ‘The criminal justice system has not been short of controversial, and mostly unsuccessful, privatisation and procurement scandals,’ she writes; adding the idea of
