Abstract
Like other transnational threats such as climate change, the extinction of biological species, SARS or Ebola, the current COVID-19 confronts the modern utopia of rigid borders between nations and contemporary finance-led neoliberal economic models. Acknowledging the complexity of COVID-19’s root causes, this paper builds on the contradictions between science, expertise and policy in the definition of global human security, and sketches five possible future international scenarios. I argue that in the aftermath of the pandemic any sort of future global, regional and state regulation will need to consider transnational threats not only to ensure the security of individuals, but also to guarantee the long-standing durability of the biosphere as a life-supporting system. To uphold this argument, I develop three sections: (i) the nature of the threat; (ii) the geopolitical tensions that COVID-19 heightens; and (iii) possible future scenarios.
Highlights
Increased interdependence, breaches between public policies and socioenvironmental needs, continuous bets on the supremacy of the financial and economic domains as the only drivers to development, the unsustainability of a modernity project that insists on the separation between humankind and nature, inter alia, are but a few of the complex root causes at the origin of the current pandemic
Dany Rodrik cleverly recalls that the World Health Organisation (WHO) revised its global framework to manage epidemic outbreaks based on previous experiences with HIV-AIDS, SARS, MERS, and H1N1 (Rodrik, 2020)
It should be noted that in recent years WHO’s Director General has repeatedly informed its member states that the world was not ready for the pandemic that was coming: WHO put out several measures of caution on its
Summary
Breaches between public policies and socioenvironmental needs, continuous bets on the supremacy of the financial and economic domains as the only drivers to development, the unsustainability of a modernity project that insists on the separation between humankind and nature, inter alia, are but a few of the complex root causes at the origin of the current pandemic. I argue that in the aftermath of the pandemic any sort of future global, regional and state regulation will need to consider transnational threats to ensure the security of individuals, and to guarantee the long-standing durability of the biosphere as a life-supporting system. To uphold this argument, but without any intellectual ambition of exhausting the complexity of the subject, I develop three general ideas, as follows:. (i) the nature of the threat; (ii) the geopolitical tensions that COVID-19 heightens; (iii) possible future scenarios
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