Conspiracy theories and global crises: challenges for sociological theory

The global COVID-19 pandemic situation has brought with it a growing rise of so-called Conspiracy Theories (CTs) around the world. The period of political exceptionality that this crisis has generated has served as a spur for multiple informal and novel social movements, with a base almost exclusively based on online communicative activity, to take the step towards real collective actions of relative affluence in most developed countries. This paper aims to bring together some sociological tools for understanding the social phenomenon of conspiracy theories and to understand its particularity. The proposal is to leave aside psychological approaches - for the time being the predominant ones - as well as avoiding moralistic assessments and to approach conspiracy theories from the coordinates provided by sociological theory. For this reason, a review and compilation are made of the sociological explanations developed to date on these current phenomena.