Authors

Discussion

The political media communication that has been surrounding the pandemic in Slovakia in 2021 offers analytically and theoretically interesting case. Slovakia was considered as one of the poster examples of response measures, surrounding communication, and public compliance in the early stages of the pandemic. The year 2021 meant deterioration of the situation as Slovakia became one of the problematic parts of the world with increasing infections and deaths, while also the public compliance with the measures has been decreasing. For instance, Slovakia is currently one of the countries with the lowest vaccination rates in Europe. The employed theory is “conflict-sensitive communication” and thus this paper represents a novel expansion of peace-and-conflict oriented theory to a health-communication context. Then, the analysis aims to outline directions for mitigation of the situation in the country. The subsequent discussion reflects on idiosyncrasies of Slovakia but also on theoretical take-aways of the analysis where the derived lessons may generalize to other countries with similar issues such as Russia, Bulgaria, etc.