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Begin New Search Topic Crisis Management Political Geography Global Focus Publication Year within 5 Years

1. Leading with Resilience: COVID-19 Learnings

Author:
A. Sarah Ilchman and Mirka Martel
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute of International Education (IIE)
Abstract:
Leading With Resilience: COVID-19 Learnings from the Institute of International Education is based on interviews with IIE team members about their experiences navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. This unique publication highlights lessons learned and best practices from three years of managing IIE programs through the COVID-19 pandemic, and brings a personal lens to IIE’s work and leadership in the international education field. The paper focuses on three primary areas: Initial Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Program Learnings, and Organizational Perspectives. It highlights successes and opportunities for improvement across the Institute over the last three years, and brings to the forefront the creativity and flexibility of IIE’s teams in their approach to keeping programs running and participants safe as they navigated the constantly-changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Topic:
Education, Leadership, Crisis Management, COVID-19, Management, and Work
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. An Age of Crises: Prospects for inequality and division

Author:
Roshni Menon
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
Inequalities can shape, drive, and amplify crises and at the same time, be the consequence of crises. The double shock of the COVID-19 pandemic followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by an uptick in income and social inequalities. Moreover, a world enveloped in a series of crises has become the grim backdrop for many of the current discourses on how to solve salient world problems. The complexity and force of how each individual crisis overlaps and interacts with, and sometimes worsens the impact of other crises—including rising levels of inequality and exclusion—is profound and damaging, requiring careful analysis of both consequences and solutions. For instance, surging inflation rates, which began in 2021, as well as the food and energy crises set off largely by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have precipitated and worsened the debt crisis in many lower income countries. Combined with the existential threat of climate change and related and prevalent extreme climate events, a perfect and potent storm of events have been set in motion: even if aspects of today’s cost-of-living crisis wane, their ripple effects will continue to reverberate, in some instances setting off political instability and social unrest in parts of the world. The lessons learned from these crises, and their interaction with inequality and exclusion will be critical to better prepare for the future, and to break the deadly spiral of crises and rising inequality. While disasters—both those created by people and generated by nature—have increasingly become a daily reality for many in different parts of the world, policies at the global, regional, and national levels, have yet to catch up with this new reality. Looking across six areas—food and fuel shortages, inflation, debt distress, extreme climate-related events, and political unrest—there are very few countries that escape the reach of at least one crisis. However, more alarmingly, many countries are exposed to multiple and compounding levels of economic, social, and environmental shock; which can intersect with underlying inequalities and vulnerabilities such that a vicious cycle of income inequality, increasing social stratification, and discontent spreads across societies and generations. New research from the Pathfinders team shows that in those countries for which complete data exists across six crises (90 in total), eight countries are at risk for being impacted by all crises at the same time. 72 out of these 90 countries (or 80 percent) are at high or moderate risk of suffering from at least three crises at the same time. If we limit the analysis to five crises (food price shock, inflation, extreme climate events, debt distress, and protests), 10 out of the 134 countries with complete data are at high or moderate risk of suffering from all five crises and 86 countries (65 percent) from at least three crises. This number may even be an underestimate as typically lower income countries have less capacity to collect data and tend to deal with multiple crises arising from debt and cost-of-living issues. In response to these multiple crises (or polycrisis), urgent, integrated, and coordinated policy interventions are needed, including even greater cooperation and commitment at the global level. Without a sharp change of course, a renewed recommitment to multilateralism and bolder action to address root causes, there will be little change for the better. There is an opportunity for committed countries to advocate for sustained and urgent action to respond to the immediate humanitarian needs of a great majority of the world’s population. Policy solutions can be geared towards the shorter and longer terms: The first includes an urgent set of instruments aimed at reducing suffering as soon as possible and a second set focused on achieving longer-term structural transformation to reduce vulnerability and promote sustainability.
Topic:
Inequality, Crisis Management, COVID-19, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Building Climate Resilience in Urban Informal Settlements through Data Co-production

Author:
Giulia Sofia Sarno
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
Climate change is worsening the number, frequency and duration of natural hazards across the globe, making disaster risk reduction and resilience building among the most pressing challenges ahead. According to UN-Habitat, informal settlements are where the impacts of climate change are the most acute in urban areas and strengthening resilience in these neighbourhoods represents a very complex yet urgent challenge.[1] Today, urban areas are home to 56 per cent of the world’s population and this figure is projected to increase to 60 per cent by 2030 and 68 per cent by 2050, with 90 per cent of the growth by 2050 expected to occur in less developed economies.[2] In these countries, population growth and displacement (including climate-driven migrations) will lead to rapid and unplanned urbanisation forcing a growing number of people into informal settlements. Currently, one billion people live in informal settlements, mostly in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and this figure is expected to grow to 3 billion in 2050.[3]
Topic:
Climate Change, Crisis Management, Informal Settlement, and Energy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. Leadership in police work applied to critical contexts: An integrative review and scientific mapping using VOSviewer and Google Trends tools

Author:
Lucius Paulo de Carvalho, Ana Paula Grillo Rodrigues, and Marcello Beckert Zappellini
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Security and Defence Quarterly
Institution:
War Studies University
Abstract:
The aim of this study is to identify cutting-edge studies on the phenomenon of leadership applied to police work, especially in critical contexts, based on an integrative literature review. The integrative review made it possible to survey publications on the subject in the Scopus, Web of Science, Ebsco Host, ScienceDirect, Core, and SciELO databases. Scientific mapping is complemented with the use of VOSviewer and Google Trends tools. The integrative review resulted in 15 studies that fit the research strategy, bringing different leadership approaches, such as instrumental, transformational, charismatic, consultative, ethical, authentic, military, destructive, and laissez-faire, through qualitative and/or quantitative studies. For bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer, the research corpus was expanded to 63 articles, admitting documents that studied leadership with firefighters, military personnel, and police officers. The analysis showed almost no co-authorship link between the 129 authors. The co-occurrence analysis of keywords reveals that leadership strongly links with law enforcement, police, management, crisis management, emergency management, and decision-making, establishing a close relationship between these concepts and a semantic map that underlies the field of study. The analysis of trends by Google Trends in the science category indicates the stability of interest in the topic of leadership in the world. However, the theme of police leadership produced results close to zero. The findings reveal that few studies address leadership in police organisations, and even fewer if critical, dangerous contexts are examined. The trends analysed indicate that worldwide scientific interest in the subject remains low and the theme must be further explored.
Topic:
Security, Leadership, Crisis Management, and Police
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Exchange Rate Arrangements: Fix, Float, or Manage?

Author:
Nathaniel Cline, Carlos Schönerwald da Silva, and Matias Vernengo
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
The paper tries to provide a concise summary of the main debates on exchange rate arrangements. It a simple taxonomy of exchange rate arrangements, fixed, flexible and managed, and a brief analysis of the main debates about their advantages and disadvantages. It emphasizes the different policy objectives of mainstream and heterodox schools of thought, suggesting that they tend to be more relevant than the specific defense of one particular exchange rate arrangement. In that sense, there are divergences on their preferences within schools of thought. The paper also discusses the causes of currency crises and the role of the dollar in the international monetary system.
Topic:
Economics, Monetary Policy, Crisis Management, Exchange Rate Policy, and Currency
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Governance for Resilience: How Can States Prepare for the Next Crisis?

Author:
Frances Brown
Publication Date:
05-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
The pandemic has presented policymakers with daunting, interlinked, and often unprecedented challenges. From health emergencies that also upend economies to trade disruptions that also pose new multilateral diplomatic dilemmas, the pandemic has generated challenges that seem exceptional in both scale and degree of interconnection. Although the coronavirus pandemic has generated a dizzying series of harsh social, political, and economic firsts, such dilemmas will not be the last. Trend lines around a series of domestic and multinational governance issues, including climate change, migration, rising geopolitical tensions, and citizen alienation from governing institutions, suggest that complex, interlinked crises will be features of the future. While national and multilateral policymakers should work to alleviate the drivers of such crises, they must also strive to prepare their countries to adapt and recover from complex shocks. In short, they must try to build resilience. The need for resilience will be especially acute in developing and fragile states. These countries will need to respond to compounding shocks across multiple domains, without the head start that their developed-world counterparts enjoy. Equally, donors and policymakers from the Global North must also elevate resilience and adaptation as key components of their approaches to supporting fragile states. This call to bolster countries’ resilience is hardly new. Even before the pandemic, the policy arena featured increasing calls for resilience; now, the chorus has become almost deafening. Recent seminal policy and analytic documents—including the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s flagship report,1 the UK’s Integrated Review,2 and the U.S. Interim National Security Strategy3—have underscored that states’ resilience and capacity for adaptation will be key to their future success in the geopolitical arena. In donors’ peacebuilding and development policies, high-level emphasis on resilience has also swelled over the past few years, including in official communications from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,4 the United States government,5 and the European Union.6 In some development practitioner and civil society circles, the need for resilience is so frequently invoked that it sometimes borders on cliché.7 The increasingly ubiquitous recommendation to “bolster resilience” is valuable for at least two related reasons. First, it offers a more specific strategic objective than conversations around “state fragility” writ large, which have often been too broad to generate concrete policy responses. Second, recent, failed international statebuilding projects have underscored that state fragility is not to be “fixed”—instead, it is to be managed and mitigated.8 The emphasis on resilience thus marks a helpful shift away from maximalist policy framing and toward a more attainable one. But concrete insights on how developing or fragile countries actually achieve resilience are less clear and less common. Given the broad consensus that state fragility is deeply linked to governance, for many policymakers, good governance is central. To be sure, many other factors beyond governance—including demographic, geographic, military, and economic ones—affect a state’s resilience. But a country’s governance and political institutions generally undergird all other dynamics in determining how effectively that state can bounce back from setbacks. What exactly does the concept of “good governance for resilience” entail in practice? This paper surveys the evidence. Below, it reviews the governance-related characteristics and capabilities that affect a country’s resilience. For the purposes of this paper, resilience at the national level can be understood as a country’s capacity to respond to, adapt to, and grow from stresses and shocks.9 Resilience focuses on bolstering the overall performance of a system in the face of unpredictable and often interconnected hazards, making it different from risk management, which relates to specific hazards.10 A country’s resilience depends on the internal characteristics that allow for states and their institutions to navigate a variety of disruptions.11 An overarching insight from the evidence is that governance for resilience is complex and often multidirectional. Several characteristics, such as decentralization, have an ambiguous effect on resilience: they enable a country to withstand some setbacks but leave it more vulnerable in other ways. Still other characteristics—including whether a country is a democracy or an authoritarian political system—do not appear have a clear-cut effect on resilience. In contrast, a few governance “super-factors”—such as control of corruption, societal trust, and high quality political leadership—are exceptionally powerful in enabling a country to augment its resilience through multiple pathways. Finally, this paper considers the broader implications of governance for resilience as a policy agenda. The framing of bolstering countries’ resilience is a valuable one, but it also raises several vexing trade-offs and dilemmas. In particular, it prompts the question of whose resilience, in specific, it refers to, since resilience of state institutions does not always mean resilience of all parts of the population. Looking ahead, the policy refrain of “building resilience” in fragile and developing states, appealing though it is, should be refined to encompass these thorny realities.
Topic:
Governance, Crisis Management, Resilience, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. Fragile States Index 2022 – Annual Report

Author:
Nate Haken, Daniel Woodburn, Juliette Gallo-Carelli, Asa Cooper, and Dylan Souquet
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Fund for Peace
Abstract:
The Fragile States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Fragile States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.
Topic:
Territorial Disputes, Elections, Fragile States, Political stability, Violence, Crisis Management, Innovation, and Reconciliation
Political Geography:
Sudan, Libya, Brazil, South America, North Africa, Haiti, Somalia, Mali, Guinea, Sahel, Global Focus, and Lake Chad Basin

8. Starr Forum: Governing the Unpredictable: Disasters, the State, and Futures

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
MIT Center for International Studies
Abstract:
The main emphasis is the State's (mostly US, but some international angles) role in disaster management and the discrepancies between perception, legal frameworks, expectations and aspirations, as well as what that means moving into an anthropocenic era of more frequent, perhaps constant, crisis.
Topic:
Governance, Leadership, Crisis Management, and Statehood
Political Geography:
Global Focus

9. Social Housing 2.0

Author:
Gianpaolo Baiocchi and H. Jacob Carlson
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
The global housing crisis shows few signs of letting up. This report from Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Director of the Urban Democracy Lab, Professor of Individualized Studies and Sociology at NYU) and H. Jacob Carlson (postdoctoral research associate at S4 at Brown University) argues that the solutions can be found in "social housing." This report makes the case that social housing is desirable, viable, and achievable. The intractability of the global housing crisis requires new thinking and action, even if it draws on lessons that are quite old. As housing costs continue to skyrocket, policymakers and social movements have an opportunity to set their communities on a new path—one that guarantees a fundamental right to housing.
Topic:
Inequality, Crisis Management, and Housing
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. Civil-Military Cooperation in Disaster and Emergency Response: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities

Author:
Myriame Bollen and Jori Pascal Kalkman
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Advanced Military Studies
Institution:
Marine Corps University Press, National Defense University
Abstract:
Civilian authorities increasingly request military involvement in national emergencies and (inter)national disasters. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of these new civil-military interactions. The authors first reflect on three themes: (1) guidelines, principles, and goals of civil-military cooperation; (2) domain consensus through civil-military agreement on the allocation of areas of responsibility; and (3) militarization processes. The authors describe how these themes feature in traditional, expeditionary civil-military cooperation and in these new civil-military partnerships. Next, the authors consider the effects of the growing military role in emergencies and disasters on civil-military relations. The article concludes with some recommendations and a research agenda.
Topic:
Crisis Management, Civil-Military Relations, Disaster Management, and Militarization
Political Geography:
Global Focus

11. The role of citizens and geoinformation in providing alerts and crisis information to the public

Author:
Fatime Balog and Tibor Babos
Publication Date:
12-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Security and Defence Quarterly
Institution:
War Studies University
Abstract:
Mankind has been facing constant threats and challenges from natural and civilisational disasters for centuries. The fundamental responsibility of states is to protect the lives, health, and property of their citizens. However, protection against natural and civilisational disasters is a complex task in which the population also has to take part, and the availability of geoinformation is a prerequisite for effective protection. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the combined power of both citizens and technology in the task of alerting and informing the public of the opportunities offered by virtual crowdsourcing, Web 2.0, the role of geoinformation, crisis maps, and drones through the application of a qualitative method, by analysing case studies and by searching for internal connections between different phenomena. Citizens around the world can collaborate and contribute to the sharing and collection of geoinformation to create real-time, interactive maps. These so-called crisis maps support intervention organisations in obtaining information, and they can also be used as sources of information. The use of Web 2.0, crisis maps and drones, as well as the emergence of digital humanitarian volunteering, have fundamentally changed the role of the public when it comes to responding to disasters, including alerting them using geoinformation.
Topic:
Cybersecurity, Citizenship, Crisis Management, and Crowdsourcing
Political Geography:
Global Focus

12. Heroes on Strike: Trends in Global Health Worker Protests During COVID-19

Author:
Sorcha A. Brophy, Veena Sriram, Haotian Zong, Chloei Andres, Maria Paz Mawyin, and Narayanan GL
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
This Accountability Note describes global trends in health worker protests between March 11, 2020 and March 10, 2021. We argue that the frequent characterization of health workers as heroes of the pandemic obscures the fact that health workers themselves describe the challenges they face during this time as violations of their rights as workers, highlighting the obligations of their employers to provide working conditions and remuneration that justify the risk they assume. Using data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project, we first provide a global overview of the growth in health worker protest activity in the March 2020–2021 period as compared to the March 2019–2020 period. Health workers engaged in protest activity with greater frequency during the first year of the pandemic than during the prior year. The eighty-five countries included in the ACLED data set in both the March 2019–2020 period and the March 2020–2021 period experienced a sixty-two percent increase in health worker protest activity (from 2416 protests to 3913 protests). We then provide an overview of the content of the 6589 health worker protests in the ACLED dataset between March 2020 and March 2021, describing protests in 149 countries in terms of five categories: working conditions and remuneration, resources, health system delivery issues, public policy, and other. By far, the largest category of protests during this period are those related to working conditions and remuneration. Approximately sixty-six percent (N=4358) of global protests in the 2020–2021 period expressed health worker dissatisfaction about issues such as: occupational hazards, unpaid wages, risk allowances and job security. Surprisingly, personal protective equipment (PPE) concerns—an issue covered frequently in the media—motivated a relatively low percentage of the protests (less than nine percent). We note this not to downplay the gravity of global PPE shortages, but to situate PPE shortages as one among many health worker concerns during the pandemic. Protests initiated by health workers about health system delivery issues provide an important reminder that even in the middle of a pandemic, not everything was about COVID-19. Sixty-two percent of the health system-related protests during the 2020–2021 period were about issues that were not coded as directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, the vast majority of health workers’ protests around public policy were not about pandemic-related government policy, but about social issues like climate change, immigration, police brutality, and elections. The aim of this analysis is to understand what health workers advocated for during a time of immense pressure, and to identify some broad areas of concern for health sector accountability. Through this analysis, we prepare the groundwork for future research and action, and share preliminary guidance regarding how health sector stakeholders—including government, health worker associations, unions, and civil society—might develop improved systems of accountability.
Topic:
Health, Protests, Crisis Management, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus

13. Impact of Institutions in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters

Author:
Diego A. Diaz and Cristian Larroulet
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
The number and impact of natural disasters are increasing because of climate change and more people living in urban areas (Sanderson and Sharma 2016). The mechanism is simple, at least when considering climatic events: higher temperatures lead to higher rates of water evaporation, which increases the chance of flooding events (Wallace et al. 2014; IPCC 2001). The number of hot days has increased and the number of cold days has decreased in land areas, with model projections indicating that extreme precipitation events will continue to increase, resulting in more floods and landslides. At the same time, mid‐​continental areas will get dryer, which will increase the chance of droughts and wildfires (Van Aalst 2006). The course of action taken by humanity in the next decades will likely play a pivotal role since extreme differences in projections are expected if global temperatures rise 2°C in comparison to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels (Allen et al. 2019). What are the economic impacts of natural disasters? This question has been addressed to a large extent in the literature, but it still does not have a conclusive response. The seemingly natural reasoning that destruction cannot lead to a net benefit for society was explained almost two centuries ago by Bastiat (1850) in his famous broken window fallacy. A shopkeeper’s son, Bastiat relates, breaks a pane of glass in his father’s store. The father, angry due to the boy’s careless action, is offered consolation by the spectators, who claim that the event is positive for the economy since it provides labor to glaziers. While Bastiat acknowledges that the accident brings trade to the glazier since the shopkeeper has to replace the window, regarding the event as wealth‐​increasing conveys a narrow perspective. The shopkeeper ends up poorer since he cannot spend the same money elsewhere, and if the boy had not broken the window, then the labor and other materials that were used to repair the damage would have been used elsewhere, potentially making the tangible wealth of the community grow.
Topic:
Climate Change, Natural Disasters, Crisis Management, Institutions, and Urban
Political Geography:
Global Focus

14. First Response: Initial COVID-19 Actions from the IIENetwork

Author:
Clare Overmann, Lindsay Calvert, and Sylvia Jons
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Institute of International Education (IIE)
Abstract:
At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, IIE launched the IIE Network Engagement Series, which consists of thought leadership webinars and interactive small group discussions, called Day-by-Days. These events offered a platform for practitioners and leaders from the field to share their experiences from the first weeks and months of the crisis. These responses and others are captured in this publication to highlight the practices that worked during COVID-19 and to act as an informal reference on how to handle future crises.
Topic:
Education, Crisis Management, Higher Education, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

15. Annex | ALNAP Lessons Paper: Adapting humanitarian action to climate change

Author:
Véronique de Geoffroy, Paul Knox Clarke, François Grunewald, and Mihir Bhatt
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
ALNAP: Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance
Abstract:
Humanitarian agencies need to reflect on the past, learn from the present and actively imagine the near and increasingly threatening future. From excessive consumption to the over-exploitation of natural resources, polluting activities to large-scale deforestation, humans have already dramatically changed the Earth’s climate and environment. As a result, we are experiencing more frequent and more intense weather events, the humanitarian consequences of which are major. Droughts, flooding and tropical storms cause death, disease, destruction and large-scale population displacement. Public health emergencies are already increasing because of these changes. Conflicts and conflict situations may increase, as may the resulting human migration and displacement. Humanitarian actors working on the ground with climate-related disasters are well placed to observe the intensification of climate-related effects and the increasing complexity of extreme weather events in all regions of the world, including regions where such events were previously rare or unknown. This annex accompanies the ALNAP Lessons Paper: Adapting humanitarian action to climate change, which aims to inform the work of humanitarian practitioners in the face of future climate-related disasters.
Topic:
Climate Change, Natural Disasters, Crisis Management, and Humanitarian Organizations
Political Geography:
Global Focus

16. Fragile States Index 2021 – Annual Report

Author:
Natalie Fiertz, Nate Haken, Patricia Taft, Emily Sample, and Wendy Wilson
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Fund for Peace
Abstract:
The Fragile States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Fragile States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.
Topic:
Climate Change, Authoritarianism, Employment, Fragile States, Economy, Political stability, Conflict, Crisis Management, Peace, Resilience, COVID-19, Health Crisis, Early Warning, and Risk Assessment
Political Geography:
Africa, Europe, Middle East, Tajikistan, Germany, Armenia, Central America, Spain, Lebanon, Timor-Leste, North America, Ethiopia, Southeast Asia, El Salvador, Global Focus, and United States of America

17. The political economy of pandemic preparedness and effectiveness

Author:
Cullen S. Hendrix
Publication Date:
07-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The success of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic has varied greatly. Explanations for the differences fall into four broad categories: political/economic, cultural/social, demographic/geographic, and policy-oriented. This paper uses Bayesian model averaging to assess the explanatory power of 21 potential covariates. It shows that standard political economy variables that predict greater investment in public health, such as GDP per capita and level of democracy; both general and pandemic-specific measures of government effectiveness; and demographic factors that predict increased vulnerability, such as the share of population that is elderly or obese, do not explain the differences in outcomes. The key factors appear to have been interdictability (the ability to tightly control borders and effectively restrict or monitor entrants at a limited number of entry ports), the early adoption of stronger international travel restrictions, and a female head of government.
Topic:
Political Economy, Crisis Management, COVID-19, and OECD
Political Geography:
Global Focus

18. Lockdown Fatigue: The Diminishing Effects of Quarantines on the Spread of COVID-19

Author:
Patricio Goldstein, Eduardo Levy-Yeyati, and Luca Sartorio
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) have been for most countries the key policy instrument utilized to contain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of these policies on the virus’ transmission and death toll, for a panel of 152 countries, from the start of the pandemic through December 31, 2020. We find that lockdowns tend to significantly reduce the spread of the virus and the number of related deaths. We also show that this benign impact declines over time: after four months of strict lockdown, NPIs have a significantly weaker contribution in terms of their effect in reducing COVID-19 related fatalities. Part of the fading effect of quarantines could be attributed to an increasing non-compliance with mobility restrictions, as reflected in our estimates of a declining effect of lockdowns on measures of actual mobility. However, we additionally find that a reduction in de facto mobility also exhibits a diminishing effect on health outcomes, which suggests that lockdown fatigues may have introduced broader hurdles to containment policies.
Topic:
Crisis Management, Public Policy, Pandemic, COVID-19, Health Crisis, and Lockdown Policies
Political Geography:
Global Focus

19. A Collapsing World?

Author:
György Schöpflin
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Editor’s Note: American Diplomacy Journal asked several foreign policy commentators to address the significance of growing chaos in many parts of the world, as failed and failing states are increasingly unable to perform the fundamental functions of the sovereign nation-state. This is one of five articles looking at those concerns. Historically, the world always has been unstable. Colonialism, the Cold War and the Hyperpower decade (the 1990s) created an illusion of global stability. That moment has gone, hence strategies have to be reconfigured. Global connectivity, the autonomy of capital movement, the uneven spread of technology, the rise of resentful elites – resentful of the West’s hegemony – all combine to resist human rights, the democracy agenda, gender mainstreaming and much else dear to liberals. To complicate matters, two tiers of states have the capacity to resist liberalism. There are the civilisation states – China, Russia, India, which make up their own rules, and large regional powers each believed to be responsible for generating one percent of the world’s GDP. Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa are in this category. Japan is in a category of its own. Also relevant here is the economic success of non-liberal states as role models, Singapore, most obviously. This is very hard for the West to accept. The legacy of hegemony and empire live on, above all as a kind of low-grade civilising mission. Those who would thus be civilised do not take kindly to this at all. But they may be open to negotiation if treated with parity of esteem. Stability is not just a Western goal, though its definition can vary. The sense of superiority exists in the non-West just as much as in the West. There are non-Western civilising missions too.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Globalization, Political stability, and Crisis Management
Political Geography:
Global Focus

20. Strengthening Prevention with Better Anticipation: COVID-19 and Beyond

Author:
Emily J. Munro
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Geneva Centre for Security Policy
Abstract:
Prevention strategies warrant more attention and can be a framework to apply to situations with different levels of urgency. The cases of the Arctic, the Sahel and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate the value of prevention strategies in diverse ways. Anticipation is closely linked to prevention, and we should do more to understand how the future may unfold, and then act on the findings to help us to prevent crises and conflict. The interaction of issues often lies at the centre of the policy challenges we face today. It is necessary to unpack these interactions in order to strengthen our responses. Surprises cannot be entirely avoided, but we should place more emphasis on considering the implications of crises and ensure better integration of our approaches across the short, medium and long term.
Topic:
Crisis Management, Coronavirus, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Sahel, Arctic, and Global Focus