Masks Down: Diplomacy and Regime Stability in the Post‐Covid‐19 Era

Abstract

Natural disasters can create peaceful diplomatic interactions between conflicting parties, be they warring states or warring domestic factions. Advocates of “disaster diplomacy” argue that while events such as epidemics, earthquakes, floods, windstorms, and tsunamis result in human tragedies, they also generate opportunities for international cooperation, even between enemies. Conversely, natural disasters can also create rifts between friends and allies. Case studies of individual disasters show that while these events sometimes facilitate diplomatic efforts, they may also emphasize existing differences, creating rifts and exacerbating conflicts. The Covid-19 pandemic represents a unique opportunity to test the disaster diplomacy hypothesis on a rare global health crisis that affected many nations of various regime types and with various relations between them. We argue that pandemics and large-scale emergencies can change the rules of the diplomatic game by exposing states’ genuine interests while disregarding international community norms. As such, the Covid-19 pandemic is tearing off the masks from states’ faces, opening paths to cooperation with unexpected partners while creating rifts between yesterday’s allies. We thus argue that post-Covid-19 diplomacy may be characterized by previously rare tendencies such as “trading with the enemy” on the one hand and abandonment of international agreements on the other. Moreover, on the domestic front, such crises tend to exhibit strong fluctuations in regime type, with a clear shift toward populist parties. Additionally, this article provides two alternative explanations for these phenomena and offers an in-depth analysis of two case studies.