An embarrassment of changes: International Relations and the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic poses fundamental challenges to the ways that the discipline of International Relations makes sense of our world. Framing the pandemic as both a social disaster and as part of an ongoing polycrisis, this work argues that existing responses to COVID-19 are, whatever their insights, partial and limited, predicated on assumptions about how we know the world now shown to be problematic. This situation calls less for some defined incremental change and more for a period of uncomfortable disciplinary reflection on the boundaries, purposes and value structures that shape IR.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• coronavirus‌
• International Relations
• social disaster
• polycrisis
• pandemic‌

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sara Davies talks of infectious diseases being securitised (Davies 2008; see also Kamradt-Scott and Mcinnes 2012). Elsewhere Davies distinguishes between a statist/security agenda and a globalist/human rights agenda in the study of global health (Davies 2010).

2 See Fletcher and Mcknight (2021) on the role of race in experiencing COVID-19.

3 For a history of the concept of crisis, see Koselleck 2006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathew Davies

Mathew Davies is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

Christopher Hobson

Christopher Hobson is a Program Convenor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, and also holds positions as a Visiting Associate Professor in the College of Global Liberal Arts, Ritsumeikan University and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Cyber Civilization Research Center, Keio University.