COVID-19, Global Governance and Resilience

The pandemic has had the effect of highlighting both how close together the world has become and also how far apart it still is. It highlights both the dangers of living too close together and the need for common, global solutions. The extent to which it has changed the global landscape will be seen in years to come, however, we already start to see how norms of global governance are being challenged. How we manage health pandemics in a ‘smaller world’ and how we coordinate between multiple actors and institutions raises significant questions concerning not only the instruments but the very rationality of global governance. For a while, theories of complexity, the post-human, non-human actors and nonlinearity have been popular in IR and other disciplines. Yet how we govern in a world of complexity and what role is given to resilience in relating human behaviour to complex systems should now be under critical scrutiny. Is it still possible to ‘govern from a distance’ and encourage individual responsibility? Are we really seeing a move beyond modernist concepts and practices or are these more complex entanglements bringing back such things as state intervention, use of experts and realist notions of scientific practice?