Ever wondered why the prices of commodities keep rising? In the realm of commerce, the change of prices is a constant. However, when the prices of a multitude of goods and services rise collectively, a phenomenon known as inflation emerges.  If you feel like your money doesn’t stretch as far as it used to, that’s the erosion of currency value over time that we call inflation. But here is the twist – even when inflation is slowing down, prices aren’t necessarily falling; but rather, increasing at a slower pace.

Recent times have witnessed a noteworthy shift in economic discourse, marked by a renewed concern over inflation. After a prolonged period of perplexity surrounding persistently low inflation, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic instigated a substantial departure, introducing an era characterized by stubbornly high inflation. This surge in prices is linked to various factors.

These factors for the inflationary trend can be interpreted along the lines of supply and demand. On the supply side, disruptions stemming from COVID-19, such as logistical challenges and workforce shortages, converged with spikes in energy and food prices induced by geopolitical events, notably the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Simultaneously, on the demand side, substantial financial injections into households and enterprises by governments during the pandemic aimed at mitigating the impacts of lockdowns and layoffs resulted in an increased money supply, potentially contributing to the inflationary surge.

This economic shift, has exacerbated financial burden as a result of pivotal commodities experiencing substantial price increments—such as housing, energy, and food, particularly for those whose income has not kept pace with inflation. In many countries around the world, peaking inflation had threatened governments with social unrest, noteably in Sri Lanka ,Pakistan and numerous countries in Latin America, as well as protests in relatively high income countries like the U.K.

As inflation persists, in this month’s book bundle we examine books that demystify inflation, delve into unexplored trends, address common policy mishaps, and offer solutions to aid both policymakers and citizens to sustainably navigate these seemingly precarious times.

Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It unravels the complexities of the most significant inflationary upheaval in over four decades, a phenomenon that has gripped headlines and left many grappling with the tangible impacts on their finances. Against the backdrop of the cost-of-living surge triggered by the COVID pandemic, the book sounds the alarm about the potential resurgence of a “Great Inflation,” with some observers expressing concerns of an even more ominous descent into hyperinflation that has historically devastated nations.

In response, the authors, Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames, engage readers in a captivating discussion that not only answers pressing questions but also charts a course for preparing for an uncertain future.

The authors draw on their expertise—Forbes as the chairman of Forbes Media, Lewis as an internationally recognized authority on money and taxation, and Ames as an accomplished author and journalist—to challenge prevailing misperceptions that have contributed to the current crisis.

They confront the widely held belief that central banks can spur prosperity by conjuring money “out of thin air” and debunk the notion that a certain level of economic “stability” necessitates “a little inflation.” These ideas, treated as sacrosanct in Washington for decades, are scrutinized in detail in Inflation exposing why they are flawed and how they have fueled the existing challenges.

The book critically examines the heedless money-printing and underscores the perilous path such policies could lead us down. Through a compelling blend of examples drawn from contemporary headlines and historical episodes, Inflation offers a real-world exploration of the subject, directly addressing the everyday concerns of individuals dealing with the tangible consequences of rising prices. Moreover, the authors provide practical steps that readers can take to protect their wealth.

Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames, Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It (Encounter Books, 2022) ISBN: 9781641772433, 196 pages

In The Inflation Myth and the Wonderful World of Deflation, Mark Mobius embarks on a journey that might just prove everything we conventionally know about inflation wrong, presenting a thought-provoking narrative that questions the very foundations of our economic understanding.

In a world marked by rapid technological advancements, Mobius contends that our traditional metrics for measuring inflation are no longer adequate, urging readers to reconsider long-held beliefs about the economic phenomenon.

Mobius explorates of the shifting landscape of technological innovation driving the creation of cheaper and superior products. The heart of his argument lies in the assertion that these transformative changes are not accurately reflected in the ways we currently measure inflation. The book boldly contends that our contemporary understanding of inflation is nothing short of a myth.

One of the book’s standout features is its illumination of the political dimensions of inflation measurement. Mobius exposes the unsettling reality of governments manipulating and exploiting inflation figures to align with their economic agendas. He delves into the extreme challenges involved in gathering accurate data for inflation measurement, highlighting the inherent inaccuracies that result from these endeavors.

A crucial point of contention raised by Mobius is the fallacy of relying on currencies as a measure of inflation when these very currencies are continually being debased by the governments that issue them. This revelation challenges readers to reconsider the reliability of traditional economic indicators and prompts a deeper examination of the intricate relationship between currency devaluation and inflation.

Most significantly, Mobius underscores the impact of technological advancements and automation on the continuously falling costs of goods and services. The book articulates how these advances contribute to a deflationary trend, contrary to the prevailing narrative of perpetual inflation. Through compelling arguments and well-supported evidence, Mobius encourages readers to recognize the transformative power of technology in reshaping our economic landscape.

Mark Mobius, The Inflation Myth and the Wonderful World of Deflation (Wiley, 2020) ISBN: 978-1-119-74142-8, 256 Pages

Another important myth-busting source is We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years. In the book, economist Stephen D. King delivers a compelling exploration of the resurgence of inflation, exposing the desperate gullibility of central bankers, finance ministers, and the collective failure to learn from historical lessons. The book dismantles the widespread assumption that inflation was a relic of the past, revealing a new economic reality that threatens to exacerbate wealth inequality on a global scale.

In a world where investors, monetary authorities, governments, and policy makers had collectively believed inflation to be a thing of the past, King highlights the startling emergence of a poisonous economic reality. This new reality brings with it the ominous specter of increasing wealth inequality, forcing individuals worldwide to confront the profound implications of this unforeseen turn of events.

King, having been among the few to sound the alarm ahead of the latest inflationary upheaval, delves into the roots of the current situation. We Need to Talk About Inflation becomes a beacon, shedding light on the key lessons from history that policy makers either ignored or chose not to heed. From the days of ancient Rome through the American Civil War and up to the asset bubbles of today, King traces the common threads of inflation, attributing its resurgence to policy errors, sovereign greed, and a collective loss of faith in currencies.

The book stands as a sobering reminder that the economic challenges we face today are not unprecedented; they are deeply rooted in a historical continuum of bad judgment and misunderstanding. We Need to Talk About Inflation serves as a crucial intervention, cutting through centuries of oversight and misinformation to offer actionable insights that can be implemented now.

Stephen D. King, We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years (Yale University Press, 2023) ISBN: 9780300270471, 240 pages

Paul Mattick’s The Return of Inflation: Money and Capital in the 21st Century emerges as both a historical retrospective and a contemporary analysis, offering a profound examination of what is undeniably the defining economic concern of our time.

Mattick’s work delves into the surprise surge in price increases. Amidst the varying perspectives on the current economic landscape, there is unanimous agreement on one aspect: the imperative to curb inflation, even if the methods to achieve this goal are a subject of contention.

The Return of Inflation distinguishes itself by placing contemporary events within the broader context of capitalism’s history. Mattick skillfully entwines the past and the present, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the economic forces at play. An exploration into the nature of money serves as a foundational element of the book, offering readers a concise and jargon-free grasp of recent inflation trends and the strategies implemented to manage them.

What sets this book apart is its ability to demystify the complexities surrounding inflation. Mattick takes the reader on a journey through the historical antecedents of inflation, shedding light on the evolving dynamics of the economy. Through this lens, the book illuminates the state of our contemporary economic landscape, offering insights that bridge the gap between past and present.

Mattick’s insightful exploration provides a nuanced perspective on the current economic challenges and offers a valuable resource for those seeking clarity on the defining economic concern of our time.

Paul Mattick, The Return of Inflation: Money and Capital in the 21st Century (Reaktion Books, 2023) ISBN: 9781789147919, 184 pages

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any of us still remember the images of empty store shelves that surfed the internet during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The images struck fear into the hearts of the public, which was worried about the onset of a food crisis. Sadly, similar images may resurface as news of India’s ban on non-basmati rice exports broke on July 20.

This is not the first time that India has imposed restrictions on its rice exports. In 2022, the Indian government imposed a 20% export duty on non-basmati white rice to ensure its domestic availability. This decision came at a time when the world was struggling with the economic impacts from Russia’s war in Ukraine while also recovering from the effects of the pandemic.

India is not the only country to impose export restrictions on certain food products. Other countries have taken similar measures over the past three years to protect their economic needs amid a growing global food crisis.

Food restrictions since COVID-19

When COVID-19 erupted in 2020, it caused chaos. People were in a state of panic as they rushed to stores to grab whatever they could get their hands on before the lockdown. This led to the disappearance of many food items such as rice, canned goods, meat, etc.

The food shortage alarmed governments worldwide, prompting intervention and restrictive measures to protect domestic markets from a potential food crisis. Restrictive measurements included price controls, export taxes, bans, and quantitative export restrictions.

According to a World Bank research paper, the aim of restricting food exports is to protect domestic markets from the developments occurring in the global markets. By reducing or banning exports, governments ensure that their domestic needs will be protected from global food crises.

To keep track of food export restrictions, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has created a Food and Fertilizer Export Restrictions Tracker. Since 2020, wheat, rice, and sunflower seeds/oil appear to be the most banned items in terms of export restrictions. Countries that have banned these products include Romania, Russia, India, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Cambodia.

IFPRI has compiled a full list of countries that restricted exports of certain food products since COVID-19 and has kept track of their developments.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative

On July 22, 2022, Russia and Ukraine, along with Turkey and the UN, signed the Black Sea Grain Initiative. The agreement allowed for the safe transportation of grain and foodstuffs from Ukrainian ports. According to the European Council, the initiative managed to safely export about 33 million tons of grain and foodstuff to 45 countries, making a significant contribution to the fight against the global food crisis.

On July 17, Russia withdrew from the initiative when its request for increased food shipments was not met. This sparked a wave of global condemnation since Russia is unilaterally blocking Ukraine’s main export route. According to the European Council, the Russian invasion is further exacerbating the global food crisis.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of “weaponizing food.” Last year, Yale historian Timothy Snyder claimed that Russia’s move to starve the world is “a new level of colonialism.”

The prices of key commodities such as wheat and corn have skyrocketed, raising global concerns around hunger. Coupled with India’s ban on non-basmati rice exports, global warming, and rising inflation rates worldwide, a humanitarian food crisis is looming.

The impact of export restrictions on global food security 

As most governments impose restrictions on food exports to protect their domestic interests, the entire world suffers the consequences. According to a World Bank’s recent report, the global food crisis has worsened as food trade restrictions have increased.

Since June 5, 2023, 20 countries have implemented 27 food export bans and ten countries have implemented 14 export-restricting measures. The effects of these restrictions are driving up food costs and creating instability in the market. In addition, Aljazeera has reported that the local food prices in many developing countries continue to rise due to the devaluation of their local currencies.

The chief economist at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization Maximo Torero has warned about rising food prices which he believes will lead to a potential global food crisis if the trend is not reversed immediately.

A potential food crisis?

Following India’s steps, the United Arab Emirates and Russia have declared bans on their rice exports. On July 28, 2023, the UAE announced that it will temporarily suspend rice exports for four months. The next day, Russia also declared a ban on rice exports until December 31, 2023, to protect its domestic market.

Over three billion people worldwide rely on rice for their livelihood and its demand continues to grow. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, told Reuters that India’s ban could exacerbate food price inflation.

The World Food Programme (WFP) recently reported that more than 345 million people are struggling with food insecurity in 2023. In just two years, the number has jumped from 135 million to 345 million. Unfortunately, this number will continue to grow as countries continue to restrict food exports amid conflict and climate shocks.

The WFP warns that we are facing a global food crisis of “unprecedented proportions.” Unless governments cooperate to meet people’s immediate food needs, the world is destined for a global hunger catastrophe.

In his compelling book When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies in the West,  David Keen delves into the profound impact of disasters that were once perceived as distant occurrences but are now striking at the heart of the prosperous West. With crises like global warming, migration challenges, threats to democracy, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the repercussions of the war in Ukraine converging, Western societies find themselves caught in a continuous state of fear and distraction.

Keen argues that these disasters should serve as a catalyst for reform, urging us to address the systemic issues that give rise to such catastrophes. However, he reveals how frequently they are exploited for political and economic gain, sidestepping the root causes.

The interplay of various crises, whether gradual or sudden, perpetuates a toxic political landscape that exacerbates the very problems it stems from and enforces a continuous state of crisis amongst society. Politicians often take advantage of the alarm to legitimize their contribution to the disaster-producing system by creating alternate realities and “lesser evil” arguments.

A troubling aspect is the tendency to vilify those striving to alleviate the emergencies or shed light on their underlying factors. Without amplifying alternative perspectives and voices, we risk being ensnared in a self-perpetuating cycle of emergency politics, hindering true resolution and manufacturing its own justification and legitimacy.

From the economy, politics, society and war to the environment, migration, and health, When Disasters Come Home highlights nine major high profile, six abrupt and three slow-burning disasters. Lastly, it also discusses the mass contemporary flight from reality as a disaster in and of itself.

Keen’s book offers a thought-provoking exploration of the complex dynamics between disasters, politics, and the imperative need for reform. Through his incisive analysis, he challenges readers to critically assess the interconnections and potential consequences of the current crisis-ridden world.

David Keen, When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies in the West (Polity Press, 2023) ISBN: 9781509550630, 288 pages

Written by Dilara Özer.

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ll eyes have been turned on the Chinese leader Xi Jinping ever since the 20th National Congress in October 2022, renewed his term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, securing his position to advance his agenda for at least the next five years. His re-appointment completes a comprehensive power grab that has been gathering pace and highlights Xi’s dominance over the Chinese political system.

With its rivalry with the U.S. heating up, understanding Xi’s China is now more important than ever. Even more important is understanding the man himself considering his rigorous power and hold over the country, as well as the potential weight of his decisions in shaping international affairs.

Who is Xi Jinping? Although he came to power a decade ago, he remains an enigmatic leader who is often approached as a dictator in Western publications. His unprecedented power has been unmatched since Mao Zedong. Sinologist Kerry Brown, professor at King’s College and associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific program at Chatham House, helps dispel some of the enigma as Xi: A Study in Power comes as an easy-to-read primer on this influential leader.

Brown provides an overview of Xi’s motives and his prevalence in contemporary China. The book is part biography which covers Xi’s life from his family’s reversed fortune in his early childhood to his more recent rise to power and ambitious campaigns in China and abroad, and part analysis of his power and the impact of his rule on the West.

Xi: A Study in Power gives the reader an understanding of Xi’s vision for China’s future and what it means for the rest of the world. The book highlights that Xi has prioritized the stability of Chinese society and the astounding economic growth of China, while ensuring that nothing challenges the political status quo and the prevalence of the Chinese Communist Party.

Brown assesses the topics with China at the forefront that have had ubiquitous media coverage around the world, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on Xi’s power, protests in Hong Kong, and the reports of the cruel human rights abuses taking place in the Xinjiang region. He also analyzes how these events have been served to the Chinese public within the tightly controlled media to withhold Xi’s ambitions.

For those whose interest has been sparked by the latest global developments involving China but are overwhelmed with the inescapable number of new speculations, Xi: A Study in Power is a good place to start to understand China through its sensational leader. The book is sure to leave the reader with a heightened curiosity on the topic and sufficient information to build upon.

Kerry Brown, Xi: A Study in Power (Icon Books, 2022) ISBN: 9781785788086, 256 pages

The COVID19 pandemic has surely been the most challenging and costly shock of the past few decades. For some, it was even the biggest shock of the post-Great Depression era. Global economic activity in 2020 went down by 3.3% – and even up to 10% declines for some including the UK. On the other hand, in today’s new post-pandemic era, it is of the uttermost importance that we have learnt from our experiences of 2020 and 2021.

Lockdowns and closures led to unprecedented supply and demand shocks, and further negative long-term effects on investment and expectations. Global lockdowns, factory and business closures, travel restrictions, and school and public service closures, all led to astronomical declines in economic activities. Supply chains were broken, production processes were stopped, and business closures and unemployment rates skyrocketed. Unemployment surge and rising inequalities followed. The poor, low-skilled, and vulnerable were impacted disproportionately by COVID19.

The most eye-catching effect of the pandemic was the increasing inequalities trend all over the world with quarantines and lockdowns contributing to the trend of the past decades. COVID19 widened the gap between the poor and the rich. Inequalities between nations and within nations have all risen. But, how exactly has the recent COVID19 pandemic widened the gap between the poor and the rich? And, what are the implications for the future?

Rising inequalities

The authors of the “World Inequality Report 2022” show that global income and wealth inequalities are at their highest levels since the peak of western imperialism at the beginning of the 20^th century. The COVID19 pandemic was, surely, one of the most significant factors behind this rising trend. (Figure 1)

Pandemic lockdowns and business closures have also affected skilled and unskilled labor, and high-income and lower-income jobs unevenly. The stimulus packages that followed also helped the rich non-symmetrically. Asset price increases, for instance, have added to the wealth of the already “overly rich.” (Figure 1)

According to Oxfam, a UK-based international NGO, the 10 richest people on earth have doubled their wealth, while the rest of the world and, in particular, 99% of humanity has been worse off during the pandemic. Global inequalities have overall increased twofold between 2019 and 2022.

Oxfam 2022 report shows that growing inequalities have even been a key factor in increasing mortality rates during the pandemic

Various reports, from the UN, the IMF, the OECD, and Oxfam as well as World Investment Reports (WIRs) on the World Inequality Database (WID) demonstrate that gender, income, wealth, and racial inequalities, as well as cross-country inequalities, are getting worse. Oxfam 2022 report shows that growing inequalities have even been a key factor in increasing mortality rates during the pandemic.

Policy implications

The need for more equitable and inclusive development and a more balanced distribution of income flow between land, labor, and capital is more evident today. There is an ever-greater need for re-organization of the roles and income flows amongst all production factors.

Meanwhile, the world is moving towards a new era where state capitalism is also more evident. Governments play a central role in new multinational corporations. In particular, the rise of China (and Asia broadly) with its own socialism and state capitalism is a new eye-catching case not to be missed. New measures are needed to ensure inclusive development. Social, psychological, human, and democratic capital accumulation processes and economic transformations remain as the challenges of this new era.

Expansionary policies and government interventions are deemed necessary during the financial turmoil and the following real economic crisis, in order to mitigate the real costs of a recessionary shock. Another noteworthy implication of the pandemic was that it led to this type of interventionist Keynesian policies and the ensuing public debt burden, as well as macroeconomic stability.

However, these expansionary monetary and fiscal policies implemented by the major world economies seem to have exacerbated income and wealth inequality. The World Bank estimates another 100-150 million people have been pushed into poverty. Oxfam estimates this number to be around 160 million people. These figures are proportionately much higher in the least developed countries (LDCs) and the Southern Hemisphere.

A new form of globalization also seems to be in order. While the new post-pandemic era has brought forth the need for more government influence and regulation, it has also resulted in a new and much more complicated form of globalization trend. The post-1980s liberalization and opening up has gained international economic, financial, and technological aspects, and globalization is no more solely a political issue.

However, this latest globalization trend has also brought cross-country dependency and spillover effects, which are self-evident in particular during crises and recessions. More synchronized negative impacts are therefore inevitable.

The way forward

The post-pandemic era is becoming well-known for an acceleration in the rise of the developing world. China and Asia are two particular examples here. Developing economies have increased their share in the global economy, since at least the global financial crisis of 2008. The COVID19 pandemic has expedited this process.

The pandemic has also shown that capitalism is dysfunctional when labor is inactive.

The pandemic has also shown that capitalism is dysfunctional when labor is inactive. There has since been more focus on income and wealth equality, the rise of states and their institutions, and public interventions. The social and human development aspects of the discussions, and the search for alternative ways of getting out of the crisis are more widespread today. Economic growth and development discussions have been less cost-efficiency related, with an emphasis on the need for fairer and more inclusive development that ensures the continuation of labor.

The pandemic’s implications for rethinking in economics, as a critical assessment of the retro-Keynesian and neoclassical schools of thought, is also noteworthy. The classical approach of a sole focus on high productivity in the long run and low inflation, and efficiency and markets acting as invisible hands have been proven incompetent, especially during recessions. The Keynesian public interventions to correct the markets, stabilizing economic activity on its trend growth, and the pure focus on maximum employment have also proven nonfunctional.

Almost immediately after the announcement had been made that a new variant of COVID19 – Omicron, as it was later named by the World Health Organization – had been identified, wealthy northern nations rushed to impose travel bans on a number of southern African countries and, later on other African nations as well.

In some very undiplomatic language from African governments, the move was labelled racist, hypocritical, unsupported by science, “travel apartheid” and even “swart gevaar” – particularly because these same northern states did not impose similar bans on each other, despite their infection rates being hugely higher than in southern Africa. The opprobrium was subsequently also extended to countries of the global South that also imposed travel restrictions on southern African states.

It is difficult to believe that the quick actions of the governments imposing the restrictions were not racist; it is even more difficult to believe now it is known that many of these countries already had cases of the Omicron variant before it had been identified in Botswana and South Africa, and seemingly without any spread from southern Africa.

The drama around these travel restrictions began when, on November 23, scientists from Botswana uploaded three Sars-CoV-2 genome sequences to a public database that looked different from the other 96 uploaded that day, which were of the Delta variant. The database had been receiving regular uploading of such sequences since March 2020. On the same day, a South African team uploaded seven genomes that were almost identical. Scientists around the world began discussing the new variant and, within three days, the WHO had named it Omicron.

The teams from the two southern African countries alerted the world because of the need for rapid responses to COVID19 and its various variants, despite the fact that they understood the risks, as indicated by a tweet from a member of the South African genomics team, Tulio de Oliveira. Announcing the variant, he added that the world should support these efforts by South Africa “and not discriminate or isolate it! By protecting and supporting it, we will protect the world!”

Nevertheless, by November 24, dozens of countries imposed travel restrictions not just on South Africa and Botswana where Omicron had been detected, but also on other southern African countries with no confirmed cases: eSwatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Angola and Zambia were subsequently added on, and, later Nigeria and Egypt.

This did not prevent Omicron being referred by western media as the “South African variant” or “the virus from Africa”. A Spanish publication, Tribuna Albacete, published a cartoon of a boat with the South African flag named Omicron filled with caricatured Africans shaped as viruses, approaching Europe, thus combining its racism, xenophobia and hatred of refugees into one image.

Some of this racism was reminiscent of the outbreak of HIV in Africa. In 2001, the head of USAID opposed funding ARVs for Africans, suggesting we would not be able to maintain a disciplined treatment regime because we did not “know what watches and clocks are”.

Many African leaders – especially in southern Africa – have responded with (in some cases uncharacteristic) anger. South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, were, perhaps, most forthright on the issue. Ramaphosa, during a recent tour of West Africa, called the travel restrictions “harsh”, “unfair” “arbitrary and discriminatory”, “unscientific” and “counter-productive”, and suggested that the leaders of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire agreed with him. He also evoked the colonisation of Africa to make his point.

“[The world] says, ‘No, we know what is good for you, we just want you to do fill-and-finish [of vaccine doses], that’s it,” Ramaphosa said at the opening of the Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security. “We say, ‘We no longer want that. You did that long ago when you colonised us, and when you raped and pillaged our countries’. We say ‘no’ now, we have the capability [to manufacture vaccines] and we want to make full use of it.” Africa, he said, wanted to do business with the West on a respectful basis, but “maybe that is why we were colonized, because we respect too much, and [now] we say, ‘Respect us as well.’”

The South African president said he agreed with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres that the travel restrictions were “travel apartheid.”

The South African president said he agreed with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres that the travel restrictions were “travel apartheid”, and drew attention to a term previously used by South Africa’s apartheid government: “Swart Gevaar” – Black danger/threat. “It is an Afrikaans language term used by our former oppressors to scare the white population about the perceived threat of black majority rule, and to keep themselves in power.”

His criticism was not limited to northern states; he accused certain African states of behaving “like our former colonizers”. He was referring to Rwanda, Mauritius, Seychelles and Egypt, which followed the European example and also imposed travel restrictions on southern Africa.

On 4 December, the U.K. added Nigeria to its “red list”, followed by other states. The Nigerian health minister responded with similar language to Ramaphosa, and Nigeria’s aviation minister, Hadi Sirika, announced on 12 December that he planned, in retaliation, to ban flights from Argentina, Britain, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

For Africans in general, and southern Africans in particular, there is no question that the response of northern states to the detection of the Omicron variant is racist, with no concern by, especially Europeans, for the destruction of African economies and livelihoods. Suddenly, overnight, many middle- and upper-class Africans discovered the cold, unwelcoming reception, and lack of concern for African lives, that poorer Africans had discovered for decades in their attempts to migrate to Europe.

Death to 2020, which is described as a “mockumentary,” is a critical interpretation of the most important political and social events of 2020 from the perspective of the show’s producers. It is a show, because although the events taking place in it are real events that we all experienced in 2020, the interpretation of these events is fictionalized in a way to make the whole thing a satirical and funny TV show.

In a nutshell, Death to 2020 is a cleverly written, well-executed, and well-produced TV show that reminds us of old-school satirical TV shows that mocked their own times

The plot of the show is as follows: the main political and social events of 2020 are chronologically retold and summarized for the audience while the fictional characters of the show, who are kind of “confused” in their own ways, start commenting on the events as if they were part of an absurd reality show.

The mockumentary takes the U.S. presidential election of 2020 as the most salient event in the regular schedule of a globalized world. The U.S. election is the most commented event in the show along with the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic. According to the show – and it is hard to disagree – the election was between two candidates who were too old and unqualified to be the president of the world’s last declining hegemon, and created an impossible dilemma for the voters.

The campaign process of the U.S. elections shows two different Americas according to the show. However, polarization and increasing anger between the two sides are not something unique to American society. The whole world is being divided into factions and polarized, while ordinary people are becoming increasingly radicalized. This polarization is exacerbated by social media companies, which sell their users’ private information for a profit. It is, in fact, hard to disagree with these arguments.

Covid-19, which was a shock to everyone in 2020, is dealt with in depth in Death to 2020. In general, the Western world and particularly two leaders – Donald Trump in the U.S. and Boris Johnson in the U.K. – are criticized in the mockumentary. It is true that the timing of the pandemic could not have been worse: both national countries and international institutions were going through a process of dramatic change.

Technology is speeding up everything, polarization and xenophobia have hit a peak, economic recession and trade wars threaten regular people all around the globe, authoritarian tendencies are on the rise even in democratic states, climate change has become ever more serious, and many more problems of the so-called modern age have come together – all this, when the virus hit the world.

As a result, the timing and the scale of the pandemic gained great popularity in conspiracy circles. Although, this is mocked in the show, when one wonders about the origin of the virus and conspiracy theories around it, it is not that surprising that there are suspicions about its origins and timing.

Other issues are mentioned as well such as the massive Beirut port explosion, the Harvey Weinstein legal case which sparked the #MeToo movement, Brexit, Megxit (the break of Prince Harry and his American wife Meghan Markle from the British royal family), the growing popularity of social media and particularly YouTube and Netflix, and the role of WhatsApp groups and other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok in spreading false information, creating paranoia, and consolidating the age of the post-truth.

When one looks at all these headlines and many other shocking events around the world that are not featured in the show, it is not hard to see what a crazy and perplexing environment we live in. The only conclusion one can reach is that we are all stuck in a powerful whirlpool that resembles a black hole.

Loaded with gallows humor, Death to 2020 is an appropriate retrospective of the year. Reality has become so surreal and absurd that there is nothing left but to mock it all. In the end, Death to 2020 is worth watching in order to come face to face with our new reality.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is facing mass demonstrations across the country calling for him to step down, in the context of the government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and growing allegations of corruption. “Bolsonaro has a knack for creating enemies out of his supporters,” Prof Anthony Pereira was quoted as saying recently, in the context of demonstrations in Brazil against the government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

But will the protests be enough to bring Bolsonaro down, especially when the rift between the left wing and the right wing in Brazil remains so pronounced? COVID19 mismanagement might create a common ground, but only within the pandemic context as, behind the scenes, Bolsonaro and his supporters have benefited from his right-wing, neoliberal agenda.

Brazil has the highest COVID19 death toll in Latin America and the second highest globally, exacerbated by an absence of planning and complete disregard for the country’s collapsed healthcare system. It is not merely the inequalities inherent in Brazilian society which have influenced the collapse, but the government’s refusal to consider any measures other than a strategy to achieve herd immunity through infection, under the pretext of curbing people’s freedoms. While Europe is waking up to the complexities of curbed freedom of movement despite available vaccines due to countries pursuing different policies, in Brazil the people are facing a totally different scenario.

Brazil’s former health minister Luis Henrique Mandetta was fired by Bolsonaro after challenging his unscientific approach to the pandemic. With Bolsonaro disregarding health professionals’ advice, and playing a dangerous game regarding the availability of vaccines, which have reduced the death toll especially in the case of the elderly and the vulnerable, Brazilians are concerned about their wellbeing and the government’s refusal to provide for their health.

In March, Brazil sent a delegation to Israel to view the process of an experimental medication being developed for COVID19, with an adviser to Bolsonaro stating the visit would “yield partnerships that will make a difference in combating the health crisis and in the resumption of the Brazilian economy.” By May, Brazil was seeking deals to acquire surplus doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine from the U.S. and U.K.

Brazilians are concerned about their wellbeing and the government’s refusal to provide for their health.

Since August 2020, Brazil engaged diplomatically with Russia to obtain the Sputnik V vaccine, which was later suspended by the country’s national health service, Anvisa, on account of alleged “lack of consistent and reliable data,” despite favorable reviews in the leading health journal, The Lancet. Reuters has recently reported the definite cancellation of a contract with Russia for 10 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine.

However, the coronavirus pandemic has forced a different sort of reckoning among Brazilians, although the process may be temporary until an outcome is achieved. Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the pandemic happened amid growing accusations of corruption. A poll in July revealed that 54 percent of Brazilians would support the impeachment of Bolsonaro, while 51 percent disapproved of him, indicating growing resentment since his tenure started in 2019.

The statistics reflect a possible turning to the left, which is not impossible especially with the return of former president Lula da Silva to the political scene. Polls indicate a probable win for Lula in the forthcoming presidential elections. and Bolsonaro has already accused the Supreme Court of favoring his opponent.

Given the rise of the left in Latin America – Chile is the most prevalent example at the moment of the right wing’s spectacular fall – Bolsonaro is guaranteed U.S. support for the time being. In July, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Burns met with Bolsonaro to discuss the political situation in Latin America, and the Brazilian leader specifically mentioned Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina in comments discussing the visit.

COVID19 might trigger more widespread displeasure among Brazilians, but the military, as well as Bolsonaro’s neoliberal policies favoring privatization are also a force to be reckoned with. For a definite shift to occur, the left will have to continue leading the mobilization struggle in Brazil, which would then encourage the already occurring decrease in support for Bolsonaro, who has exploited the masses for the interests of the privileged.

But there are indications that, across Brazil, a more profound reckoning might be happening. Just as in Chile, the rise in transport fares triggered a vast outcry against right-wing President Sebastian Pinera, resulting in drastic losses for the right-wing and the rewriting of a new constitution to replace that of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, Brazilians may want to reconnect politically with their past.

The burning down of the statue of Borba Gato by a group of demonstrators recently; a memorial which represents the colonial violence which ravaged Brazil’s indigenous people, is a case in point. The action was intended to ignite debate about Brazil’s past and the glorification of the colonizers, but the action itself was powerful enough to steer political thought towards opposing Bolsonaro’s dictatorship nostalgia.

Brazil lags behind in terms of dictatorship memory and justice, and despite not having the highest death toll when it comes to dictatorship victims, 50,000 people were imprisoned and 10,000 forced into exile. Bolsonaro’s government abused the democratic mandate to recreate dictatorship oppression. COVID19 may well be the moment for political change in Brazil, yet the pandemic must not obscure the reasons behind the Brazilian people’s dissent.

The corona virus pandemic has affected and devastated the world. Every country in the globe has been affected by the virus which does not distinguish between developing or developed countries, rich or poor.

COVID19 has changed the lives of millions, disrupted, and even uprooted the lives of many others. There are not many people in this world who have not experienced the devastation of COVID19. Countries that fared well during the first wave have failed in their responses to their second waves such as India.

As the pandemic raged in its first wave, India’s strict lockdown policy between March 25 to May 31, 2020, proved to have worked to limit the number of cases and even bringing the average down to 20% of its peak compared to the population of India of 1.3 billion people. India was an exporter of vaccines, shipping 66 million doses since January, while its own cases rose.

However, India is devastated with its second wave of COVID19 infections leading up to 23 million infections with 250,000 dead in mid-May alone according to The New York Times, while the actual figures are much higher and go unreported.

Hospitals are overwhelmed and depleted of oxygen tanks which have become as valuable as gold as people are dying on the streets. Funerals have been held en masses where resources for the funeral pyres have also become hard to find and afford.

It is devastating for families that must cope with their loved ones going through the ravages of the pandemic while families that live in diaspora have no way of helping their loved ones back home including the frustration of cancelled and banned flights from and to India.

For Indians living in the diaspora, the anguish of helplessness for their family members grows day by day.

For Indians living in the diaspora, the anguish of helplessness for their family members grows day by day. The constant anxiety that our loved ones are at severe risk has made many scrambling to secure oxygen tanks for family members and send funds that can give them a chance at life, so they do not end up like thousands who had been rejected and turned back by multiple hospitals.

My mother for one, calls upon her family a few times a day just to see if her cousin who lives with a pre-existing condition and nieces and nephews are safe. The most tragic confrontation with COVID19 my family has faced in India is my aunt’s contracting the virus, who became a widow a few months ago with the loss of my uncle. Her situation was so dire that the doctors at the hospital had no indication that she would make it out of the hospital alive.

If it was not for a family member living in the United States, who had direct connections to the hospital’s doctors and staff, they would not have treated her with attention. We have been blessed that her condition had turned around, that was not the case for so many as her sister, who accompanied her at the hospital, had to witness numerous people leaving the hospital in body bags.

Up until recently, another personal scare was when my close friend in Delhi sent a voice note that her entire family has been affected and her father is in the hospital in serious condition. Luckily for her and her family, her father made it while many did not. There have been countless stories I hear from friends who have lost loved ones already.

One of my friends who resides in London, England, has lost three members of his family in India. One was his cousin who left behind two little girls who will never know the love of their father again.

However, politics prevail over life in this case as the failure of the second wave falls completely on the rights-wing Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narinder Modi. Instead of following COVID19 guidelines of wearing masks and social distancing in public places, he held mass political rallies and allowed religious zealots to hold mass festivals that became super spreaders.

It came to the point where Narinder Modi and other political leaders tried to prevent social media sites and other media sources from showing images of the apocalyptic scenes of people dying in the streets and the cremation sites.

Previously, the state of Punjab where our family is from was not as affected until outside residents started to come into the state for medical treatments at the hospitals. This has pushed COVID19 cases in the state of Punjab further. It is more upsetting to have learned that Narinder Modi and his government has denied the state of Punjab to facilitate an oxygen corridor to procure oxygen tanks and gases from Pakistan who is a traditional ‘enemy of India’ since its inception and partition of 1947.

This is despite Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan offering to help India in providing medical aid.

The chief minister of Punjab Amrinder Singh and many other politicians have repeatedly asked Narinder Modi’s government to procure the lifesaving equipment from the city of Lahore, Pakistan which is only 31 miles from Amritsar, Punjab, instead of waiting for oxygen, health equipment and other medical aid from the state of Jharkhand, 1,088 miles away. It is tragic that the right-wing Indian government cares more about maintaining their political egos than accepting much needed help from a neighboring country that they see as their ‘enemy’ while millions of people have been affected with COVID19 and thousands are proclaimed dead each day.

It is heartbreaking and tragic to witness the thousands of lives lost each day to COVID19 from afar. The thought that maybe someone we know, or a family member can easily become one of those statistics is a constant anxiety.

The fear that the next phone call from the motherland will bring intense news of sadness makes us all feel we should have done more in the past to be with them. Only if we can take a flight back home and console them that they are not alone, we stand with them shoulder to shoulder, from afar.

The issue of vaccine diplomacy is increasingly impacting pandemic-driven foreign policy decision-making. Evidence suggests that medically advanced high- and upper-income countries – those that developed their own vaccines against COVID19 – exhibit different foreign policy behaviors and crisis management techniques in terms of global vaccine distribution and international cooperation. The situation is becoming even more complex considering the fact that there are not only states that act as primary and unitary actors, but also non-state actors (e.g., vaccine producers) that influence international relations.

There are a few selected examples that show the different foreign policy behaviors of state and non-state actors regarding vaccine diplomacy. The U.S., for instance, pursues rather multilateral mechanisms for vaccine administering, largely financially supporting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVAX initiative to provide vaccines to the poor and underdeveloped countries.

However, the U.S. is reluctant to direct commitments for vaccine distribution before the inoculation of American citizens is completed. Russia, on the other hand, mostly focuses on bilateral negotiations and agreements. Through the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the country manages global manufacturing, promoting, and distributing its Sputnik V vaccine worldwide. To date, more than sixty countries have approved Sputnik V and the number is gradually increasing.

The U.K.-Sweden company that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is currently experiencing delivery delays over which the European Commission has launched legal actions given that the vaccine is in high demand in the EU. Despite such actions, the company reaffirmed its commitments to COVAX. Finally, Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine producer signed an advance purchase agreement with the African Union’s 55 member states but also committed to a not-for-profit basis vaccine distribution through the COVAX facility although no earlier than 2022.

In all cases, policy-making has already moved to crisis management aiming to achieve health security, but also to produce results on a profit basis that are equally acceptable to both national audiences and the international community.

Both, state and non-state actors pursue their own goals when it comes to the way they act on the international stage, while balancing between promoting national interests, making international commitments, and seeking commercial advancement.

In all cases, policy-making has already moved to crisis management aiming to achieve health security, but also to produce results on a profit basis that are equally acceptable to both national audiences and the international community. The hypothesis here is that vaccine diplomacy lies in the space of the rational choice approach which is a method for assessing a nation state’s individual, goal-oriented foreign policy decision making and behavior.

In this regard, vaccine diplomacy appears to be an effective practice that puts together various international actors, collective entities, and issues that they all address within the space of a rationalist approach. The rational choice approach model includes: (1) strategic communication and strategic interaction; (2) negotiation and bargaining; and (3) international treaties and agreements that lead to international commitments. Taken together, these elements compose and define vaccine diplomacy, making it an essential mechanism of international cooperation.

During a pandemic, crisis-driven vaccine diplomacy can become the core element of international relations and international cooperation. Here is why. The ideational and material accounts of international cooperation are influenced and orchestrated by leading and medically advanced countries.

Foreign policy behaviors among and between actors and the issues they address promptly leads to complex interdependence, making international cooperation the only option at a time punctuated by the crisis. It’s foreseeable that communication, negotiation, and bargaining lead the way to increasing the number of international treaties and commitments.

The role of communication and strategic interaction in promoting international cooperation is critical. On the one hand, there is bilateral interstate communication which is often less transparent but presumably more effective considering the small number of parties involved in the diplomatic negotiation. On the other hand, there are large international organizations that are the agents of international cooperation.

International organizations are more observable and transparent. They also secure the membership and conditional participation of less developed countries in the communication process. Either way, bilateral or multilateral communication facilitates cooperation among states in which rational approaches prevail. This might explain the impressive number of Russia’s bilateral agreements in vaccine distribution, and the multilateral COVAX initiative. Either way what promotes global health, puts the global health security forward.

Negotiations and bargaining are the elements of statecraft and statesmanship that help pursue interests and propose solutions. From the rationalist approach perspective, it could be that negotiating sides don’t delve into ideological or political differences as these might put constraints on the negotiation outcome. . Even countries or groups distinct from one another are motivated to work together. Such countries or groups desire solutions and attempt to find the potential to compromise using bargaining strategies and scenarios to identify mutual benefits and maximize their international advantage rather than seeking absolute gains within the win-lose paradigm.

From a practical perspective, when countries or companies produce more treaties and agreements on the distribution of vaccines, this signifies that the effort to combat the pandemic on a global scale is underway. Thus, vaccine diplomacy negotiations and bargaining, emerging from strategic communication and strategic interaction, appear to be the tools of rational choice in the context of complex interdependence at the levels of bilateral and multilateral relations.

In February, Israel gave the first inklings that it will once more resort to its brand of humanitarian diplomacy – a scheme where the government provides humanitarian aid to countries in need, in return for diplomatic support in the international area. Honduras was the first country mentioned in Israeli media as having agreed to receive coronavirus vaccines from Israel while pledging its support to the settler-colonial state.

Guatemala also followed suit. Both countries confirmed the arrival of COVID19 vaccines last month. Israel is not producing vaccines – its purchased surplus is being used either to reward countries for their diplomatic support, or to procure any future allegiances as needed. Guatemala was the first Latin American country to open its embassy in Jerusalem in 2018, mere days after the US inaugurated its premises in the city which the international community still holds subject to final status agreements. Honduras has also pledged to do the same.

Israel was able to embark upon this strategy due to an agreement with Pfizer signed last January, in which medical data would be shared by the pharmaceutical company in exchange for vaccine stockpiling. With absolute contempt for the inequalities highlighted throughout the pandemic and especially now in terms of vaccine supply, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated Israel would be “a model state” in light of this agreement, which also puts Israel at the helm in terms of vaccination rate and population reach.

Israel is the only country to broker such a deal with Pfizer, and one that breaks the protocol of data protection at that. The World Health Organization criticized “bilateral deals” in the vaccine race, yet failed to call out Israel on account of its deal with Pfizer.

Brazil has also sought Israel’s medical expertise. An official Brazilian delegation which includes Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday to review a new treatment developed by Israel and which is in the early stages of clinical trials.

Latin America has long been perceived by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a region where potential allegiances can be consolidated. In 1947, 13 Latin American countries supported the UN Partition Plan. Historical ties and early support for the Zionist project in the aftermath of the Nakba, as well as Israel’s role in supplying right-wing dictatorships with weapons and aircraft, illustrate an ongoing diplomatic relationship that was mostly opposed by Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, particularly after Israel’s 2009 aggression against Gaza dubbed Operation Cast Lead.

While former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman visited the region in 2009 to boost economic ties, it is a more recent endeavour by Netanyahu that  signalled the beginning of Israel’s allegiances, at a time when the world was promoting Israel’s security narrative. Latin America is also one of Israel’s largest weapons buyer.

In 2020, Netanyahu had stated, “We are currently developing ties with Latin America. It is a great market in a large bloc of important countries. There is a breakthrough here.” Colombia, which was on Netanyahu’s itinerary last year, was described as a country offering “unconditional support for Israel.” A statement that is of little wonder, considering the US relationship with Colombia and the latter’s track record of human rights violations, which the US finances, of course.

One of Israel’s strongest diplomatic weapons is its humanitarian missions. In November 2020, for example, Israel responded to calls for humanitarian assistance following Hurricane Eta, sending contingents to Guatemala, Honduras and Panama. The international humanitarian assistance – a policy adopted in 1958 – has since become a veneer for the more pressing atrocities against the Palestinian people.

The discrepancy between a country whose officials are facing possible investigation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the humanitarian response has so far not raised eyebrows. Israel has successfully managed to dissociate from its colonial violence, promoting itself, with the help of the international community, as a benevolent entity. The colonial violence Palestinians face on their own land has long been hushed under another veneer of humanitarian aid, albeit this time under the auspices of the UN’s institutions.

Since the vaccine rollout, Israel has been reticent to assume its obligations towards the Palestinian people and provide vaccinations for the population, stating that the Palestinian Authority was responsible for healthcare. The decision to provide vaccines for Latin American countries while refusing supplies for Palestinians was taken unilaterally by Netanyahu, and opposed by Benny Gantz, in a move that signals electoral competition as Israel heads towards the polls again this month.

Israel’s Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz defended Netanyahu’s decision. “It’s un-humanitarian not to give vaccines to someone in need,” he said. “The doses donated to each country number in the few thousands.”

US Senator Bernie Sanders unequivocally rejected Netanyahu’s decision, criticizing Israel’s diplomacy at a time when Palestinians, who have one of the lowest vaccination rates, should have clearly been a first option.

That said, the Palestinian Authority has certainly ridiculed itself over the vaccine dispute. After voicing opposition to Israel’s withholding of vaccines from the Palestinian population, the PA proceeded to vaccinate 10 percent of the privileged instead of prioritizing frontline healthcare workers and the vulnerable, going as far also as to send vaccines to Jordan following a request from the Royal Court. The action was not undertaken due to surplus, but rather a vivid example of the PA’s disregard for the Palestinians’ health welfare.

The Palestinians deserve better. Instead, they are faced with Israel’s renewed effort to persuade the countries it helps procure vaccinations for, to move their embassies to Jerusalem as a reciprocal gesture. The PA, on the other hand, lives up to the name it has carved for itself in terms of corruption, ignoring the drive behind Israel’s latest humanitarian diplomacy and embarking upon its preserving its hegemony while under the illusion of cementing allegiances with countries that have already fostered economic ties with Israel, anyway. This in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords, which suspended annexation until a convenient date and seeks to permanently alter the remnants of Arab support for Israel.

As usual, the PA fails to make the connections. But Israel’s venture in Latin America is not merely tied to the coronavirus pandemic. It is a planned strategy – one that utilises humanitarian aid in the same way Israel has already applied to other countries, and which will not raise any objections within the international community. After all, abusing of data protection for a greater good, or a greater corruption, has long been normalised, and world leaders will not stand against Israel as it provides the much needed date for Pfizer and the vaccine drive worldwide.

In terms of the Palestinian people and Jerusalem, perhaps the PA has forgotten its initial calls for mobilisation against the Trump administration’s unilateral decision to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The vaccine procurement is just one sliver of the wider scenario. While the PA mismanaged its first procurement and turned itself into the laughing stock of its own people, Israel made diplomatic inroads based upon earlier foundations. A cause for indignation indeed, for the Palestinians to have a leadership that calls foul over Jerusalem only for a temporary limelight, while slinking back to the diplomatic shadows and allowing Israel monopoly over both vaccines and the capital city.

People are facing an ever-increasing number of existential threats (i.e., Coronavirus, global warming, economic instability). These threats, which tend to invoke feelings of anxiety or threaten people’s livelihood, appear to be readily accompanied by conspiracy theories that offer alternative explanations for official narratives.

For instance, the current Coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump’s loss of the U.S. presidency, and even the installation of new 5G technology infrastructure, have all been riddled with numerous—and at times connected—conspiracy theories.

Further compounding these threats, conspiracy entrepreneurs such as Alex Jones and David Icke regularly contribute to the growing stream of conspiracy theories in circulation. In the same vein, the world has also beared witness to Donald Trump’s attempted utilization of conspiracy theories for political gain.

With conspiracy theories seemingly taking the spotlight in public discourse, it would be prudent for interested people or policy makers to take stock of what we know so far about: Why people are drawn to conspiracy theory explanations in the first place; whether they are on the rise; the potential harms they may bring to society; and—importantly—what can be done to combat these potentially harmful beliefs.

Why are conspiracy theories appealing to some people?

Many political and social psychologists agree that people may be drawn to conspiracy theories in an attempt to satisfy important and seemingly unmet psychological needs.

We all have the need to feel secure and in control of our lives, and belief in conspiracy theories appear to be born out of a frustration of this need. For example, threatening events, economic vulnerability, feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, and stress have all been demonstrated to be catalysts for conspiracy beliefs. Conspiracy theories are said to offer a means to alleviate negative feelings, by providing an explanation for people’s disadvantaged positions.

Everyone can feel anxious and powerless at times, and the current pandemic is a threat to everyone in some way or another, but not everyone is drawn to conspiracy theories. Why?

We also have a need to understand our environment. However, we do not all perceive the environment we share in the same way to one another. There are many biases in our thinking styles that can make us perceive our environment in a skewed fashion, which can make conspiracy theories seem appealing.

Are more people believing in conspiracy theories than ever before?

On prominent social media platforms, misinformation and conspiracy theories were found to spread at a much faster rate than the truth. It is no wonder, then, why it can seem that there are more and more conspiracy theories in our midst.

In fact, research has shown—at least for the U.S.—that conspiracy theories have ebbed a flowed throughout most of modern history.

The number of conspiracy theory explanations for threatening events do seem to be increasing, but this is probably more a product of the ever-increasing existential threats that we face, as opposed to a rise in people believing in them.

In fact, research has shown—at least for the U.S.—that conspiracy theories have ebbed a flowed throughout most of modern history. So perhaps more people are entertaining conspiracy theories as a way to explain recent significant global events (particularly Coronavirus), but this uptick will likely decrease as the pandemic subsides.

Are conspiracy theories harmful?

Until now, conspiracy theories were probably perceived by the public as relatively harmless. In some cases, this is probably true. For instance—as far as I am aware—no direct harm has ever come from the belief that the U.S. moon landings were faked. They may make people trust governments a bit less, but when has a government ever had the full trust of its people anyway?

In light of recent events, however, people are now all too aware of the dangers that some conspiracy theories can bring to society. People who believe in conspiracy theories regarding Coronavirus, such that it is a manmade virus and/or a mechanism to control the population, are less likely to take preventative action to stop the spread of the virus. This poses a serious threat to the global effort of fighting off the pandemic.

Conspiracy theories also evidently pose a threat to democracy itself. For weeks Donald Trump riled up his followers with countless baseless conspiracy theories regarding his loss of the U.S. presidency. Then, on January 6, 2021—in part driven by QAnon conspiracy theorists—democracy in the U.S. was temporarily stopped in its tracks as insurrectionists stormed Capitol Hill. This event shocked many people around the world, and provided further evidence of the harm that conspiracy theories can bring to society.

How can we reduce these harmful beliefs in the public?

In light of events at Capitol Hill, social media companies in the U.S. have recently taken a hard-line stance against conspiracy theories and misinformation. This is long overdue considering what we now know about the implications of conspiracy theories.

Incidentally, Donald Trump and some of his allies no longer have a social media presence, and many QAnon accounts were also removed. A week after this action was taken, a staggering 73 per cent reduction in misinformation being spread on Twitter was reported.

These are obviously good first steps to take, however, although they may cut off the supply of some conspiracy theories, they will not stop the demand for them.

It is a mixture of frustrated psychological needs coupled with a cognitively biased understanding of world that can spark a person’s initial attraction to conspiracy theories. Perhaps, then, it might be more fruitful for governments to “cut the head off the snake”, as it were, and try to vanquish the temptation of conspiracy theories in the first place. Political psychologist, Dr. Aleksandra Cichocka, has recently argued for such an approach, stating that “it is better to stop misinformation taking root than to try and weed it out”.

Alleviating people’s existential concerns will likely help to reduce the temptation to resort to conspiracy theory explanations as a means to psychologically satisfy their predicament. For instance, in the U.K. and U.S. the economic wealth gap is only increasing, and peoples’ social safety nets in these countries are waning too. This can lead to more feelings of stress, anxiety, and powerlessness; feelings of which we know are catalysts for conspiracy beliefs.

Therefore, improving these areas of people’s lives may prevent conspiracy theories being endorsed as a means to alleviate negative feelings. That is to say, governments should look to assuage to people’s existential concerns, otherwise conspiracy theories may take on this role instead.

The Gaza Strip, a 45-mile coastal enclave that is home to more than 2.1 million Palestinians, 75% of whom are refugees, was one of the last territories to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic due to its 13-year-long isolation and siege.

When COVID-19 first appeared, some believed that Gaza was largely immune to the virus and that it would be saved the brunt of the global pandemic. Children born in Gaza in 2007, the year the siege was officially imposed, are younger than 13 years old now. This is how long the siege has been – a siege that ironically initially protected Gaza from the global pandemic, but, alas, for not very long.

The same siege that halted the arrival of the pandemic to Gaza for a few months has turned Palestinian lives into a continuing misery. Since 2007, Gaza has been practically cut off from the rest of the world. However, Gaza’s siege and its temporal protection from the virus didn’t last long: the first case of transmission inside the community was recoded in Gaza in late August 2020.

The recent spike in the number of COVID-19 patients in the coastal enclave is worrying for several reasons.

A fragile health infrastructure

Following three major Israeli onslaughts on Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014, dozens of health facilities have been targeted by Israel, including medical crews, ambulances, hospitals, and laboratories.

In 2014, an Amnesty International investigation revealed that the Israeli forces deliberately carried out attacks against health workers in Gaza, which resulted in the death of six individuals.

“The harrowing descriptions by ambulance drivers and other medics of the utterly impossible situation in which they have to work, with bombs and bullets killing or injuring their colleagues as they try to save lives, paint a grim reality of life in Gaza,” said Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa director of Amnesty International.

The targeting of the already fragile healthcare infrastructure has had catastrophic implications for the people of Gaza. Today, in Gaza, desperately needed medication and drugs are not available for thousands of patients, including cancer patients. Currently, thousands of Gaza cancer patients receive treatment in the West Bank, where they apply for Israeli permits to cross into Jerusalem.

In many cases, they receive a rejection for “security reasons,” an explanation used by the Israeli authorities which can be very loosely interpreted.

Israel’s policy of denying Palestinians from Gaza permits to visit the West Bank for medical or social purposes amounts to collective punishment. Hundreds of Palestinians passed away waiting for these permits and thousands of Palestinian families have been separated because of this Israeli policy.

Furthermore, many basic drugs are not available in Gaza. Thirty-two percent of basic drugs are not available on the shelves of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, and 62% of drugs and materials used by medical laboratories are missing.

In a twist of irony, the only oxygen generator in the Middle Area of the Gaza Strip at Al-Aqsa Hospital stopped working on November 10, 2020.

The Gaza Strip lacks oxygen generators, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and hygiene products. The recent donations of some of this much-needed equipment by Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Malaysia, and Turkey could mitigate the crisis, but they will not solve it.

In a twist of irony, the only oxygen generator in the Middle Area of the Gaza Strip at Al-Aqsa Hospital stopped working on November 10, 2020, making the situation worse for patients who are in need of oxygen, especially COVID-19 patients.

Spike in COVID-19 cases

Worrying numbers have been emerging from the Gaza Strip in the last few days, with hundreds of people contracting the virus daily. Nearly one in four tests conducted by the Ministry of Health was positive on November 22, 2020. As of December 6, 2021, 43,134 Palestinians from Gaza tested positive, 404 passed away, and 9,308 cases remain active.

The spike in the number of cases can’t be viewed in isolation from the reality of Gaza, where 75% of its population are refugees who live in eight refugee camps. Being one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with an average of 5,000 people living in one square kilometer, has largely contributed to this end. In addition, there has been a considerable lack of commitment towards social distancing, hygiene measures, and wearing masks.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the catastrophic situation in the Gaza Strip requires the international community and concerned parties to intervene immediately to stop an imminent catastrophe, and pressure Israel to allow the entry of medical supplies otherwise denied under the pretext of security.

The World Health Organization (WHO) should pressure the Israeli authorities to end their restrictions and to make sure that the coastal enclave and the Palestinian Territories get their share of vaccines being manufactured.

Germany should include the Palestinians in its vaccine distribution plans as pandemics have proven that they don’t discriminate against people and transcend the boundaries of entities and states.

Unfortunately, Germany has recently decided to include Israel in its vaccine program, but not the Palestinians who live under the complications of occupation, siege, the restrictions imposed on their movement, and a collapsing healthcare system.

Germany should include the Palestinians in its vaccine distribution plans as pandemics have proven that they don’t discriminate against people and transcend the boundaries of entities and states.

The recent spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in Gaza has pushed the local Hamas authorities to impose a curfew on Fridays and Saturdays in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus. Such measures can limit the spread of the virus, but with 35% of tested cases coming back positive, the situation seems more catastrophic than previously thought.

Death and poverty

Even before the outbreak of the pandemic in the Palestinian territories, hundreds of patients lost their lives at checkpoints and due to the lack of permits or the closure of borders. The outbreak of COVID-19 in Gaza made the situation at the borders even more complicated, with the Rafah Crossing connecting Gaza with Egypt being closed more often to curb the spread of the virus.

The repeated closures of the borders only made life worse for Palestinians planning to leave or return to Gaza, especially patients, many of whom ran out of money while waiting for the borders to re-open.

In economic terms, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), even before the outbreak of the pandemic in the Gaza Strip, 26,000 Palestinians had lost their jobs by March 2020, with the unemployment rate standing at 45.5% among the general population and 62.1% among women

The increasing unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip has added a greater burden on the Palestinians, especially the younger generation, with tens of thousands of them ending up without jobs in a place that largely depends on aid.

Not only this, COVID-19 has impacted Palestinians outside Gaza, with Palestinians losing their jobs and having to return back to the coastal enclave against their will, creating further economic pressures on their families.

Gaza can’t bear yet another health catastrophe, let alone a pandemic with its fragile health system and the lack of access to medicine and pharmaceutical products following 13 years of siege.

The only way to save Gaza from the pandemic is for the international community to intervene through the WHO to make sure that people in Gaza have access to healthcare against COVID-19.

Without such intervention and with Gaza’s already worn-out healthcare system, the prospects for Gaza look grim. The deterioration of health conditions in Gaza will only fuel the possibility of an outbreak of another confrontation – and during a pandemic outbreak, this is something that nobody wants to see.

Recently hashtag #Covid20 become a trending topic in social media, with people raising concerns over the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 virus, which seems to have appeared in London in Mid-September.

Many nations, including Turkey, barred the flights from and to the U.K. The new variant suddenly became the focus of the Coronavirus debate and the pandemic’s future. In this article, I will summarize what we know about this new variant and what it can cause.

As they replicate, viruses develop small changes in their genetic code known as mutations. While not all mutations are useful to the virus or change its characteristics, they sometimes lead to considerable changes.

By tracing these changes, one can gain insight into how the virus spreads. The U.K., which holds %45 of all coronavirus sequences done globally according to the GISAID database, is the leading country in this genomic epidemiology approach. Hence it is no surprise that this new variant labeled B.1.17 is spotted there in the U.K.

Although the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not a fast mutating virus, several thousand mutations have been observed so far. B.1.17 is interesting because it has 23 mutations, of which 17 change the virus’s proteins, which can directly affect its behavior.

The first, possibly, confirmed change is the increased transmission of the virus. Scientists in the U.K. noticed that this variant spreads more quickly in England as it is more commonly observed in infected patients. Early estimations suggest that this variant transmits %50-70 faster.

This rate explains why there is a spike in the COVID-19 cases in England. At this point, I need to warn the reader that this may turn out to be a false alarm.

What does this mean? If the virus is really more contagious and spreads to the world, lockdowns will become longer and more severe.

B.1.17 may have become more common in England not because it is spreading faster but because it was lucky. If the virus is spread by superspreaders or at a densely populated area, it might have become more common without being more contagious. Laboratory experiments, which have already started, will provide a definite answer to this question.

We should note that another variant that appeared in South Africa known as 501.V2, which has the same particular mutation as B.1.17 (mutation N501Y) seems to be spreading at a more rapid pace. So we need to be prepared for the faster spreading virus.

What does this mean? If the virus is really more contagious and spreads to the world, lockdowns will become longer and more severe. %50 faster transmission is a considerable number; therefore, the pressure on the hospitals will increase.

To flatten the curve, we will keep the relaxed lockdown periods shorter. It will also make the number of vaccinated people more critical. It is currently estimated that to get herd immunity and return to normal %60-70 of the population need to be vaccinated.

But if this variant becomes dominant and, as feared, is spreading faster, then the number of vaccinated people should be increased. Hence vaccination will become even more critical.

Another possible change implied by the data collected so far is that this new variant may be more prone to infect children. Again we need to wait for more data to be sure. Typically children are far less likely to get infected and therefore pass the virus compared to adults. This is what makes possible the operation of some primary schools in many countries. But this variant may make children equally susceptible to infection.

Given this possibility, governments should get ready to have at least one more online education semester, even at the primary school level. Although child deaths are not expected to increase rapidly, an increase in their infection may lead to more child deaths. The emotional nature of these deaths may put more pressure on governments for lockdowns.

Again we should note that it was reported that the South African variant is affecting younger people more when compared to other strains. Thus, it will not be surprising if B.1.17 affects young people more.

At this stage of uncertainty, the companies’ claim about the effectiveness of the vaccine may be based more on business strategy rather than actual science. mRNA vaccines, such as the ones developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, create the spikes of the virus in our body.

What about the effect of B.1.17 on the vaccines, which will be shortly used to boost immunity in the population. Vaccine firms and most experts claim they do not think that new strain will impact the immunity developed by the vaccine.

At this stage of uncertainty, the companies’ claim about the effectiveness of the vaccine may be based more on business strategy rather than actual science. mRNA vaccines, such as the ones developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, create the spikes of the virus in our body.

As a result, the antibodies developed by our body with the help of these vaccines target the virus’s spikes. By sticking to the spikes, antibodies prevent the virus from entering the cells, hence causing the illness.

However, we need to note that 8 of the mutations which resulted in B.1.17 changed the proteins forming the spike. This may result in a change in spikes shape in a way that will result in failure of the antibodies sticking to it.

Did this change happen? Probably not, but we do not know for sure. We should note that B.1.17 faster infection rate may result from a failure of gained immunity by other ordinary variants. Hence, people got infected with this variant a second time. We need to have more data to draw a conclusion.

Now let us look at the bigger picture. What can we learn from the emergence of this and other variants of the SARS-CoV-2? First, we need to realize that new variants of the virus that are deadlier or resist the vaccine resistance are possible. Governments should develop policies aiming at minimizing the chance of the emergence of dangerous variants of the virus, which seems to be lacking at the moment. The most effective way is, of course, lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing.

As more people get infected, the chances of the emergence of such dangerous variants will increase. This is another reason why herd immunity was a bad idea. Second, these viruses usually emerge in animals. Infected people should distance themselves from animals, and governments should implement policies that minimize contact with the animals. Let me remind the reader that the dangerous variant Cluster 5 emerged in minks in Denmark.

The second lesson is that there may be some variants of the virus, perhaps undiscovered for the moment or did not yet emerge. We have to be aware of this possibility and prepara for it. There is now a “cold war” of vaccines in the world.

Many countries invest in a single vaccine. This strategy is very bad because if these particular vaccines fail in some variant, all the population will suddenly lose its immunity. It is better to invest in multiple different vaccine technologies to increase the emerging herd immunity’s versatility, making it more robust against the new variants.

The third lesson is that there is still no global consciousness to act fast in the time of the emergence of new viruses. While many countries barred the flights from and to the U.K., the variant already spread to many countries such as Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, and Italy.

The idea of barring flights is futile in the long run. Early detection of a new variant is very important in stopping its spread, so genetic epidemiology should be practiced widely. Developed countries should help the developing countries to acquire this technology.

Apart from claiming and adversely affecting innumerable lives across the world and nose-diving the global economy, COVID-19 has occasioned a new political dimension in the global politics arena: vaccine nationalism.

It is unfortunate that at a time of a ravaging global pandemic – one that has transcended and traversed national and geographical borders with catastrophic ramifications – the world is also witnessing a global vaccine nationalism craze. Wealthy countries are at the forefront of this vaccine nationalism by branding themselves the embodiments of civility, moral consciousness, and the safe-keepers of human dignity.

On September 5, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, lamented the threat of vaccine nationalism. He warned that “vaccine nationalism will prolong the pandemic, not shorten it.” Needless to say, vaccine nationalism is an affront to our moral and public health imperatives, and our shared human values.

The WHO COVAX Initiative

Ever since the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, multiple groups of scientists and researchers consolidated their efforts to find a vaccine. These scientists converged at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and began multidisciplinary and multinational research to find a vaccine. Furthermore, since January 30, 2020, CEPI established a global network of laboratories to centralize assessment of COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

Vaccine Nationalism is a Step in the Wrong Direction

Echoing the Trump administration’s criticism and contempt for global institutions like the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and, most recently, the WHO, the U.S. has receded into itself, riding a wave of rancid nationalism and nativism in its internal politics. Hence, the U.S. initiated its own Operation Warp Speed (OWS) to seek COVID-19 vaccines for its own citizens. Moreover, the U.S. committed to buy 100 million doses of vaccines developed by Moderna, a U.S. pharmaceutical company. However, Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine candidate has prompted an antibody response in all clinical trial participants rendering it unfeasible for now.

It is time for governments to suppress their nationalism and “our country comes first” reflexes since COVID-19 is a global threat requiring a global, coordinated effort.

Russia, the other major country that undertook its own national effort to find COVID-19 vaccines, struggles with credibility in terms of its vaccine productions. Ever since Vladimir Putin declared in a televised announcement that Russia has approved the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine, there has been nothing to show for its effectiveness and reliability as a vaccine. The Sputnik V vaccine was planned for mass-production in early October. This has not happened. Indeed, Russia has been shady and evasive when it comes to Sputnik V, rendering it just another geopolitical bluff and yet another aspect of vaccine nationalism. Furthermore, the WHO recommended caution in regard to Russia’s vaccine since its clinical trial findings and progress were not disclosed. The bottom line is that Russia hasn’t effectively proven whether the Sputnik V vaccine can treat or protect against COVID-19.

With vaccine nationalism on the rise, wealthy nations are hording crucial and potential vaccines – including their research and development procedures. Moreover, wealthy nations have locked deals with drug manufacturers exacerbating the cynical and amoral rush for vaccines: the U.S. has a deal with Moderna; EU member states have a deal with AstraZeneca; the UK and Canada have deals with GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi. Vaccine nationalism seems to be a healthy competition among wealthy nations; however, COVID-19 is a planetary threat to our intricately interconnected global society. Even if one nation finds a vaccine and immunizes all its citizens, this will not lessen COVID-19 threats to the global health and economy.

A concerted global effort, such as COVAX, can offer a solution to the whole world, not just to a few countries. Let us also remember that a vaccine might not be an all-encompassing solution to COVID-19: while we have vaccines and immunizations against diseases like Polio and Measles, they still linger and are even making a comeback in the U.S. with deadly cases.

Global Cooperation against COVID-19

As of November 3, 2020, more than 47 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 and more than 1.2 million lives have been lost – with more infections and testing, these numbers will definitely rise further. Yet, the world has not found a definitive solution for COVID-19 due to political and geopolitical imperatives, and, most recently, due to the effects of misguided vaccine nationalism. Vaccine nationalism is a threat to global health – it is, for all intents and purposes, an Orwellian global nightmare unfolding.

It is time for governments to suppress their nationalism and “our country comes first” reflexes since COVID-19 is a global threat requiring a global, coordinated effort. While it is “healthy” for every country to seek its own solutions in this Hobbesian international order, a single COVID-19 case is a threat to the whole world. Reason and morality should dictate that the only solution for a substantial and long-lasting solution to COVID-19 is a global-reaching effort, predicated on cooperation and solidarity. On the contrary, vaccine nationalism is a step in the wrong direction.

The dream of natural gas bonanza in the Eastern Mediterranean naturally boosted littoral states’ expectations of economic benefit from ownership, exploration, exploitation, and transportation of natural gas reserves discovered in the region. Accordingly the international community – at the beginning – hoped that exportation of Israeli gas to Europe (possibly via a sub-sea pipeline to Turkey) could advance cooperation among regional states, make a political solution easy for already existing disputes like the Cyprus Question, and strengthen interdependence between Europe and the region.

These positive expectations led the Obama Administration to believe that the interested parties, which were potential stakeholders as buyers and sellers of natural gas as well as beneficiaries of energy firms, could be convinced to invest in a new Mediterranean cooperation. However, after 2011, neither did the USA show its willingness to support regional economic cooperation on the Eastern Mediterranean gas basin, nor did they support the newly found gas reserves by Israel. The Greek Cypriot Administration (GCA) and Egypt led the reinvigoration of an inclusive gas partnership. Geopolitical conditions radically changed after the Arab Spring and stakeholders of Eastern Mediterranean gas basins adopted competitive agendas in the ongoing conflicts. Since then geopolitical rivalry, not economic rationality, has become the main determinant of the limits of Eastern Mediterranean energy cooperation.

This competitive geopolitical atmosphere was first used by the GCA to violate the legitimate rights of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). On one hand, the GCA signed so-called EEZ agreements with Israel, Egypt, and Libya without taking the consent of the TRNC therefore, ignoring the economic, political, and legal rights of Turkish Cypriots, and also unilaterally dividing its so-called EEZ into blocks and inviting energy companies like ENI and Total to explore and drill offshore reserves around Cyprus. This is a violation against a part of Turkey’s continental shelf in so-called blocks 1,4,5,6, and 7. On the other hand, Tel Aviv exploited geopolitical faultlines in the region to marginalize the rights of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and TRNC in the maritime zones of the Eastern Mediterranean and to exclude them from the institutionalized attempt of regional energy cooperation (the East Mediterranean Gas Forum).

Energy firms are reminding us of the economic rationale behind the drillings

Within this framework of geopolitical rivalry, the economic side of the story, the expectation of benefits as well as the feasibility of the cost of investing in East-Mediterranean natural gas dreams, are forgotten. As is known until now, the projects excluding Turkey and the TRNC from the energy deals have not produced any tangible economic results. Therefore it is not wrong to assume that East-Med-like projects have turned out to be an illusion that was shattered recently when energy companies like Exxon-Mobile, ENI, and Total stopped their drilling operations in blocks 6 and 10 and postponed them till March/April 2021 because of the current energy landscape.

The most remarkable feature of the current energy outlook is falling oil prices. At the time of writing, the Brent crude is 42.30 USD which is not enough to motivate key energy companies to take high financial burdens and even higher political risks of investing in East-Med partners’ pipeline dreams. As one can remember oil prices began dropping in January because of the fall of demand to hydrocarbons in Asian markets affected by the coronavirus outbreak. Before European markets were hit by Covid-19, a price war begun between Russia and Saudi Arabia. The USA, feeling the negative impact of dropping oil prices on its national oil industry, had to pressure Riyadh to reach a deal with Moscow on production cuts.  Since then oil prices have gradually risen. However, this sign of improvement is not expected to change market conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean energy game because of two reasons:

The first reason is related to the current hydrocarbon surplus in the energy markets. Even before the coronavirus crisis there was more supply than demand for oil and gas and Covid-19 is just amplifying this problem. The Asianization of energy markets (reversing the route of East-West energy trade) has been proposed as a remedy but there is no such aspect of Asianization in trilateral Eastern Mediterranean energy partnership plans yet. Indeed, energy experts from the stake-holding firms, like ENI, have already announced their doubts about the economic and technical feasibility of the East-Med pipeline (1200 km off-shore, 500 km onshore length connecting Greece to Italy as well as 1550 km off-shore, 20 km on-shore pipeline connecting Greece to Bulgaria).

Moreover, some actors like France that are eager to take part in East Mediterranean geopolitics by providing security support to stakeholders in dealing with risks against critical infrastructure, are faced with the problem of maritime sustainability when the Covid-19 pandemic hit their naval deployments in the region. Hence security costs associated with the longest and expensive East-Med pipeline project become more apparent under the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, it can be expected that international energy companies will lose their incentives to continue drilling activities in the Mediterranean. While energy companies are postponing drilling operations, Greek Cypriot and Egyptian authorities keep talking about the expansion of natural gas production from the East Mediterranean reserves. Thinking about the capabilities of planned pipelines like East-Med, expanding national gas production can be counterproductive even if it will be realized. Besides, WHO voiced the possibility of a second wave of Covid-19 which may further restrain global hydrocarbon demand.

The number of emails commencing with or entailing the phrase “we live in unprecedented times” or a variation of this has surely mounted to unsustainable levels since the onset of COVID-19 as a global crisis. But it is no exaggeration to say that history has reached a point of imminence, a point where the viral pandemic, the failure of neoliberal democracies, and the smartphone-to-internet-to-media-exposure of police brutality has necessitated a climax that has been building for some centuries. The murder of George Floyd links at the last bolts of a long chain of events that is fastened to the colonial empire.

The problem is now clearly systemic, has always been systemic, but its institutional hold is being foregrounded. The new politics of antiracism is not, in fact, new. In Ibram X Kendi’s 2019 book How To be an Antiracist, an Amazon top-seller on the subject of race, Kendi defines that “‘Racist policy’ says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is. ‘Institutional racism’ and ‘structural racism’ and ‘systemic racism’ are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.” The nature of the power-structures that uphold racist policy is not the subject here, but that this policy is as much a problem of cultural weight as political.

Even so, the move for equity in representation is valuable. The movements and decisions of galleries, publishers, and other cultural institutions are in this way no less acts of policy than those of the state. What the galleries, the publishers, the film studios police, is not the rights of individuals in relation to the law, but the way individuals think about their rights. When a gallery or civil building is stocked with neoclassical evocations of Columbus and other colonial figures, with the works of white-American and white-European artists, the presence of “Black artists” and “artists of color” is very often represented in a skewed pop-urban way. And the political dialectic here – of featured guest, of novelty, of difference – has the effect of distancing. If this does not fade when the patron leaves the gallery, when the book is put down, when it continues to govern: it is a cultural policy.

In 2019, Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus was installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. The 43-foot tall cement composite sculpture became one of the most visited installations in the gallery’s 20-year history. Nothing in its curatorship suggested novelty: it was left unadorned by signage in the central space of the hall, an immense monument for the memory of trans-Atlantic slavery, against the legacy of the empires it built. Its presence was calm, quiet, reflective, its message clear. This seems an example of a cultural policy that has moved beyond its blurry definitions, a resolute artistic display without pretense. The artwork was demolished this year.

Black-authored books have surged in sales. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the first Black-British-authored book to ever top the U.K. bestseller list. But it remains consistently difficult, even in literary circles, to find individuals with an awareness of African authors from a region with such a rich literary output as Nigeria, beyond Chinua Achebe and more recently Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. When British and American publishing houses remain predominantly white, it does not take a wide stretch of the imagination to feel a sting of situational profiteering.

As recently as 2018, controversial author Jordan B Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life also topped bestseller lists. The allegedly reluctant Canadian star-theorist is known for his refutation of postmodern gender politics, and his denial of the concepts of patriarchy, Islamophobia, and white privilege – all points he aims to disprove through philosophical logic. Unsurprisingly, he has often been canonized by the alt-right, a complex, clustered movement defined by narcissism and violent acts of white supremacy.

The complete stoppage of film production and theatrical releases, due to the coronavirus, has spawned several articles and ideas about the future direction of cinema. The inability to work with other people on set (actors, camera, sound, costume, art departments, etc.) seems an insurmountable challenge to current production methods and the massive economic consequences have created a pessimistic outlook on working in what is generally referred to as ‘the industry’ (and in some ways, erroneously since there are multiple types of them around the world- including within the U.S.).

Alternatively, with a significant portion of the world in lockdown, there has been a massive and exponential increase in the online streaming of new, different and classic cinema as well as a potential expansion of audiences, viewers and markets. The history of cinema is filled with examples of new technologies and cataclysmic events, such as war, radically altering both production and distribution methods.

The advent of sound, post-war Italy and the invention of video are three significant periods in film history that resulted in massive shifts in how films were developed and produced. We are now approaching another significant period that could see a different approach to both the production and distribution of cinema.

Changing Production Methods: A Short History

The silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by F.W. Murnau showcases the possibilities of a cinematic and storytelling language that has reached a plateau of beautiful and evocative cinematography with lighting and shadows as well as shot selections (e.g. wide, medium, close-up) that both contribute to and open up the narrative. The performance of this film is understated and effective in capturing emotion through movement and expression with minimal use of inter-titles – in comparison the first sound feature with synchronized talking called The Jazz Singer (1927) was released the same year with a completely different approach.

The fictionalized film Singin’ in the Rain (1952) gives a technicolor history lesson of Hollywood’s then past and how the advent of sound created a myriad of new problems: bulky, static microphones that picked up unwanted sounds; previously silent film stars suddenly with unusual or accented voices; and a shift in writing from showing the story to ‘telling’ it. These are some of the more obvious dilemmas that occurred with a sudden and dramatic shift to ‘talking pictures’- the result was a loss of stardom for many silent actors and more profoundly a period of stagnation especially in terms of storytelling and cinematography during the 1930s.

The end of WWII lays the foundation for another radical shift in film production methods. Italy had been devastated by the fighting that had seen the Fascists dominate only to be dispersed with the country turning into a battleground between Italian Partisans, invading Nazi regiments and U.S. troops coming from the south. Classical monuments, local neighborhoods and entire cities were left in ruin. London stoically survived, Paris was left psychologically battered but relatively untouched, Berlin was divided by the victors and Japan was rebuilt. Rome and the rest of Italy were largely left to mend themselves. This created a myriad of locations for Italian filmmakers who had been trained in the studio system of the 1930s (ironically with the benevolent association of Vittorio Mussolini who was the second son of the Italian Fascist leader ‘Il Duce’).

Using large scale cameras, scripted stories and experienced technicians that used the style of the previous decade mixed with a dramatic use of non-professional actors, the use of actual locations of devastated war-torn cities and a myriad of extra people and sights, this confluence of time, place and talent became known as Italian Neo-Realism, and includes directors such as Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open City – 1945) and Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves – 1948). This cast a long and influential shadow over cinema during the next several decades in terms of both production style and the preponderance of themes related to poverty and desperation.

The Sony portapak (1967) is in many ways the start date of the video revolution – a small, affordable video camera with separate VTR (video tape recorder) attached by a cable. The resolution was low by contemporary standards and it originally only recorded in black and white but the technology was still seized upon by artists and filmmakers.

The ability to pick up a camera, shoot and see whatever you wanted without the (burdensome and expensive) process of learning the art of cinematography and waiting for several days to see the footage, appealed to visual artists who alternated between using it for documenting performance art and as part of the work itself.

The Korean artist Nam Jun Paik famously created works that made use of video monitors in live multi-media performances such as TV Bra For Living Sculpture (1969) as well as large-scale gallery installations. The early video had its aesthetic despite its limitations – often hand-held with extreme contrast and sometimes brash colors.

Video did not immediately replace film (in fact 16mm documentaries were still the standard in the 1970s and common in the 1980s)- but it has eventually come to dominate every form of Film and TV production just over half a century after the portapak.

Virtually every documentary is now shot on video (it has long been the best choice in terms of cost, accessibility, and flexibility), and almost every feature film is now shot in high-end digital video (albeit in the ‘cinematic’ style of traditional 35mm). Ironically the contemporary genre of ‘artist film’ to be projected in a gallery is the one area where 16mm or 35mm film is now used (mostly as a defining aesthetic to differentiate itself from what is now the dominant medium of video).

We have been living in an electronic age for several decades and home video has also exploded and spread from videotapes (the 1980s-1990s) to DVDs (2000s) and more recent instantaneous streaming.

More Change To Come?

When larger crewed productions resume, the sheer volume of canceled or delayed projects seems likely to be drastically reduced due to several factors such as minimized or canceled budgets, compromised locations and the inability to travel to certain regions or countries. Co-productions between countries has been the norm in the 21st century in terms of access to lucrative tax incentives for shooting in a certain state or country but this will likely change. There will be enormous political pressure and accountability in terms of funding and grants, and potentially difficult questions in terms of human logistics as well as things like location insurance and access to buildings and landmarks.

In this context a new kind of cinema is ripe to be born both in terms of production and distribution; museums and galleries could take on a larger role in financing and promoting feature films and there could potentially be a kind of re-convergence between art and cinema.

The immediate inclination to create films without a crew points back to some of the early formalist work done by visual artists such as Hans Richter in Germany and Fernand Leger in France (who would take their painterly style and apply it to the new medium of cinema in the 1920s), or by the previously mentioned ‘video artists’ of the 1960s and 1970s where lo-fi works created a new kind of aesthetic. There are numerous examples of filmmakers working this way already and the current conditions could accelerate these trends, such as increased CGI and animated elements, or collaboration that is structured around a post-production exchange of footage, clips, music composition and interactivity.

The slowdown in the pace of life has also allowed many people to fill up their time with reading, listening and watching films again as opposed to simply flicking through clips (something that is surprisingly common in the 21^st century – even among students of film).

Streaming sites have been enormously successful over the last half-decade and sites such as Mubi and the Criterion Channel offer more of a world cinema perspective alongside ‘classic’ Hollywood fare. The current streaming bonanza could potentially benefit a direct distribution model for tens of thousands of films (through new and different streaming channels) that have played at film festivals but had a limited reach to their target audience.

The concept of theatrical distribution has also been a hot topic for several years provoking much discussion and writing – the idea of going to the cinema as a kind of over-priced specialist event (like the Opera) or supporting your local ‘independent’ theatre that seats less than 100 as a kind of good-will gesture, have both been exposed as flawed business models that have been struggling to keep afloat.

Many smaller cinemas in Europe and North America have closed in the last decade and those that have survived are often pushed into watered-down programming choices in an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, while essentially offering a version of the same content that crowds the larger cinemas.

A decline in large-scale film productions could benefit filmmakers who may be shooting a more intimate and new kind of cinema. In many ways streaming sites, film festivals and museum (cinematheque) programs have already been the last bastion in offering an informed, diverse and experimental choice of feature films outside of the multiplex cinemas. Now may be a time to increase collaboration (streaming festivals online), look for innovation (broadened types of hybrid releases) and even switch economic models (tailored distribution).

Paradoxically the global lockdown could potentially create a new, more organic interest, and resurgence in the communal experience that promotional ‘entertainment’ centers and the non-profit independent cinema have been struggling with.

Around the world, religion has come into focus as a central point of controversy and praise during the COVID-19 pandemic. Strict social distancing policies have raised thorny religious freedom issues and religious communities have faced criticism for noncompliance to the lockdown. At the same time, faith communities have also received praise for their relevance to the psychological and social needs of people in distress.

Amid this patchwork set of religious responses to the pandemic, one issue has become increasingly evident: religion has become deeply national during the course of the last several decades. But will COVID-19 lead to increased nationalist exclusionary and defensive attitudes among the religious, or might the pandemic be the cure that leads to radical social reorientation with a new emphasis on collective solidarity?

The Alliance of Religion and Nation in the Pandemic

To date, most of religious responses to the pandemic have played out at the national level, varying within the same religious tradition. For example, Muslim communities in France and Germany have accepted the shutdown of mosques with no strong resistance, but the same restrictions generated an internal controversy within Muslim groups in the UK and have been strongly opposed in Iran and Pakistan. Similarly, some  Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and Orthodox Christians in Greece have resisted the lockdown while others have complied with it.

The fact that religious communities are acting and reacting at the level of the nation-state is not really surprising. After all, the state has been the key political institution to address the social, economic, and health issues raised by the pandemic. For long-time observers of international politics, however, this trend far predates the current global crisis. Even in countries with historically minimal state inference like the United States, the exceptional powers to monitor and control citizens and activities in the name of security have steadily increased since 9/11 and will not go away. That is why the current situation illustrates once more the key status of state institutions to face global challenges, in this case public health.

An Alternative Path to Solidarity?

The national community functioning as the meaningful collective entity will not disappear with the coronavirus. Populist movements on the rise before COVID-19 were already expressing such a trend. It is then tempting to predict that post-coronavirus, we will witness the exacerbation of intolerance, as well as social, religious, and cultural tensions.

Religion is, however, also uniquely positioned to open up new paths of thinking about individual responsibility and community. Coronavirus has brutally made us conscious of the danger of what President Herbert Hoover called “rugged individualism” by showing that the attitude of one endangers the safety of others. Religious groups have long-standing experience in striking a meaningful balance between preservation of the community and personal fulfillment. It is therefore not surprising that some religious responses signal the growing awareness among us that “nobody is an island.”

While across traditions the debate has been raging about the limitations of religious practice caused by the lockdown, this highly publicized resistance hides the fact that most of religious voices across traditions have supported the lockdown because of its ultimate goal of saving lives, which is central to all religious teachings. At the same time, religious groups have worked to keep the community spirit alive to avoid personal isolation and despair. They have been the first to insist on the need for social solidarity to counter physical distancing. Since the beginning of the lockdown, religious communities have engaged in multiple activities online, from worship to psychological care, to financial support and assistance for the distraught members of their congregation and beyond.

Religion and the post-COVID Order

Ultimately, it is unclear how the chips will fall after the COVID crisis subsides. The positive potential of religion is certainly present.According to research in cultural psychology, groups exposed to risk show greater respect for the common good and tend to prioritize societal interests. In this respect, faith communities have moral resources to help rebuild trust in political communities, seriously weakened by the ongoing crisis.

In liberal democracies, the state responses, including the existing dilemma in the US of reopening or not reopening shed an unforgiving light on the supremacy of the market as the panacea to economic crisis and social inequalities. But religions have the resources to shape alternative responses. As emphasized by Pope Francis, value is not simply monetary, and it may be time to rethink global economy by including other human factors in our scenarios for development and growth. Additionally, political success is not exclusively grounded in material prosperity. It also entails public morality and protection of human dignity toward which religions have much to offer.

On June 1, all American religious leaders were to participate in a  national day of mourning for the victims of COVID19. The protests of the last two days against racial injustice after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis have brought together the issues of racism and  pandemics. As expressed by rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism, “We could treat all of these things as separate … but I do think there’s an intersection” given the pandemic’s outsized effect on communities already struggling with racism.” In the same article,  Rev.Jacqui Lewis from New York City Middle Collegiate Church  said:” Grief is not enough. Prayer is not enough,“ (…) “It’s a baby, first step for denominations to decry the violence. The next step is, what will you do to make sure your congregations are not racist?”.

Only the next months will tell us how these different trends will unfold. Early indicators show that the pandemics is affecting the privileged relation between some religious groups and their state: the state restrictions over religious practices in Russia have eroded the trust between the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin, while the support of Trump by white evangelicals has started to weaken. What is clear is that the religious global solidarity over COVID19 has not yet overcome national concerns.

Humans are neither biologically open nor resistant to all diseases, nor do they have equal opportunities in terms of protecting their health, staying at home, isolation, treatment, and rehabilitation for various socioeconomic reasons. Although measures such as staying at home, which have been implemented all over the world, seem to be meaningful especially for the middle classes with fixed income and job guarantee, the pandemic will predictably cause many self-employed people and workers to lose their jobs and will completely deprive them of their income. As socioeconomic inequalities seriously affect access to health services and the likelihood of getting infected will vary in direct correlation to people’s socioeconomic status in society, this cycle will increase exponentially during the pandemic.

Increase in Unemployment Will Lead to Poverty

Who will be most affected by the current crisis? According to a recent analysis by International Labor Organization (ILO), full or partial lockdowns as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting approximately 2.7 billion workers globally, currently representing 81 percent of the world’s workforce. In the second quarter of 2020, working time equivalent to 195 million full-time workers will be lost, and the workers will seriously pay for this loss. One billion 250 million workers work in the sectors that are at “serious and destructive” risk due to the pandemic. Similarly, according to this report, craftsmen and artisans working on their own, and small business owners will suffer a great loss. Nearly 25 million people are expected to remain unemployed till the end of the year, and a contraction of three per cent in the world economy is expected at best, six percent with a moderate estimate and 10 percent if worse.

The pandemic has led many people to work remotely. However, everyone is not equal in terms of work conditions. Workers are exposed to different risks depending on their income and whether their economic sector is under lockdown. Some of the people working in low-income jobs such as healthcare, shipping, transportation, and critical supply chains (food, medicine, delivery, primary industry, and services) continue to work. Employees in these sectors are exposed to a higher risk of infection since they cannot work from home.

On the other hand, many low-income workers, especially those working in the service sector, cannot work from home, and the work in these sectors is on halt because of the lockdown. A study in the U.S. shows that there is a close link between the opportunity to work from home and the income of the job. According to this, only 9.2 percent of workers in the lowest quarter of the income segment (lower 25 percent) are eligible to work from home. In comparison, this rate is 20.1 percent in the second quarter income segment, 37.3 percent in the third quarter segment, and among those who have the highest income, the rate is 61.5 percent.

Though staying at home slows the spread of the virus, it’s not an option for some. A general lockdown means unemployment and loss of income for millions working in low-income jobs. When the rescue programs launched by governments are considered, it is evident that the share allocated to these segments is incomparably lower than the percentage allocated to save capital. Governments rescue programs continue to prioritize capital and allocate scarce resources to saving big businesses. In the coming global economic crisis, these programs may deepen inequalities even further.

A contraction in the economy and loss of jobs directly affects the lowest socioeconomic group and creates irreparable rifts in the social structure. Therefore, it is essential to implement practices prioritizing the elderly, the disabled, widows and orphans, unemployed, and under-skilled as well as temporary workers. However, the impact of economic inequality is not limited to this; socioeconomic factors also have direct effects on the manifestations of the disease.

Inequality in Disease and Health

A closer look at the data provided by inequality studies shows that health and disease are not distributed equally among people. Generally, diseases or illnesses of the wealthy and the poor are different from each other. Problems like addiction, chronic diseases, occupational and professional diseases, work accidents, and infant deaths have a direct relationship with poverty. We also see that serious crises, such as the coronavirus pandemic, increase the health burden of those at the bottom in the social pyramid, causing further disastrous effects such as violence, crime, and suicide.

Socioeconomic inequality appears to be the first phenomenon directly affected whenever a large-scale crisis occurs. This is also true for the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis should be carefully managed for economically poor and precarious parts of societies.

In the article titled Income Inequality and Health, Jennifer M. Mellor and Jeffrey D. Milyo, show the link between socioeconomic inequalities and addiction, psychological disorders, and chronic diseases through empirical data. Similarly, William A. Vega and William M. Sribney find that life expectancy of the top 20 per cent was 5 years longer than the bottom 20 per cent thirty years ago – now it has risen to 12 years for men and 14 years for women.

In their report for the International Food Policy Research Institute, Rob Vos, Will Martin, and David Laborde estimate that a one per cent contraction in the global economy will increase the number of the poor and also the number of people without food security by two percent (i.e. 14 million people). The world economy is expected to shrink by three per cent at best and six to seven per cent with a more reasonable estimate. This situation poses a threat in accessing food, and this pandemic will push more than 50 million people in the world to absolute poverty.

In a note titled The Social Impact of COVID-19 published on April 6 by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, it states that if correct social policies are not applied, inequality, exclusion, discrimination, and global unemployment in the medium and long terms will increase. The note highlights that comprehensive social protection systems should be implemented, basic income security should be ensured, and social capacity should be enhanced. In another report, the need for sharing responsibilities and addressing the problem in a multidimensional way is also expressed.

Why the Pandemic Kills Afro-Americans and Poor People

The poor population, having limited or unqualified access to health services even under normal circumstances, constitutes the most vulnerable populace in times of a pandemic. Newspapers in the U.S. have been covering news and analyses that the pandemic has become more prevalent among Afro-Americans in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and mortality rates are higher.

According to data published by several states and major cities reported in the New York Times on April 7, 2020, the numbers and ratios of infection and death are quite high among the Afro-American population in the United States. A family physician and epidemiologist, Camara Phyllis Jones, explains this to be a result of unequal wealth distribution. The main reason behind this is thought to be the structural racism in America.

Afro-Americans are not the only ones suffering from this inequality, but also other poor people. As stated above, poor people have more chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and lung failure that can cause complications due to getting COVID-19. Since their access to health services is already low, losing jobs will cause further devastation for these people in the near future. These socioeconomic inequalities sharply uncovered by the coronavirus in the U.S. more or less reflect a general trend in the rest of the world.

The Cycle of Debt

Since the 1980s, the share of the highest income group in the world contributing to economic growth has increased continuously. This has led to an increasingly comfortable life for the upper classes. It became evident once more in a recent study by Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi that the upper class gets more shares from the economic resources and income. In other words, while the financial wealth of a minority increases, the financial debt of the masses increases as well. There is a very close connection between the two.   

A similar situation is seen in states, which borrow continuously to maintain public services and order. The wealth accumulated in the hands of the group at the top constitutes the primary source of these debts. A significant proportion of the taxes collected by the state from the public to carry out public services goes to pay the interest on these debts. Thus, once again, it functions as an element that increases the wealth of those at the top. For this reason, many countries have reached unpatched deficits in public budgets that have been financed by debt in recent years.

…that many had the plague in their very blood, and preying upon their spirits, and were in themselves but walking putrefied carcasses whose breath was infectious and their sweat poison, and yet were as well to look on as other people, and even knew it not themselves…

From A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel Defoe

A pandemic has hit the world and it is profoundly changing the political, economic, social and spiritual aspects of life in the 21^st century. Across the political spectrum, this is a period of the unknown; the ‘neo-liberal’ or ‘leftist’ perspective that has clamored for change away from an over-industrialized, air-polluting and ultra-capitalist world has remained largely ambivalent about the radical developments and grounding of global capitalism. On the other hand, the ‘nationalist right’ has been forced to open the money-box and pour it on the welfare state while simultaneously nationalizing railways (in the U.K.) or getting car manufacturers to produce health care equipment and beer companies to produce hand sanitizer (in the U.S.).

The solution to ‘defeating’ this pandemic is slow, methodical and inexact- everything that is the opposite of post-modern life and what it is built upon. One could argue that isolation is not the biggest obstacle (society already does much of its work and leisure online) but rather the leap into the great unknown. People have become so used to planning and preparing every detail of life that to not do so has created a crisis of the mind. Doing things fast, exact and in a precise manner has suddenly changed to an approach that is slow, inexact and without a timeline that countries, businesses, or society can control.

Politics

The immediate impulse to revert to late 19^th and early 20^th century ideas of rigidly defined borders and petty protectionist nationalism has been disastrous. Closed borders and blocked shipments of goods such as key medical supplies within the EU and over the U.S.-Canada border are just a few examples of surprising non-cooperation between allies and political trading blocks. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been largely ignored by the very countries that were instrumental in setting it up, and shockingly there is little trans-national coordination compared with previous viral situations such as Polio (the 1950s onwards), SARS (2002-2004) and Ebola (2017-2019).

In many ways, this is symptomatic of the last three decades of global politics. Tighter security and borders were a hallmark of the late 1990s and early 2000s and there has been a severe backlash against the concept of an interconnected and multi-cultural world. A revival of neo-fascist movements has become increasingly mainstream in the last decade and the conflict of the early 1990s in the Balkans has proven to be less an aberration and more a template of what can happen when extreme nationalists mix a mono-cultural mythical history with populist politics. Recent news stories of cruise ships unable to dock; slurs directed at people of Far-East Asian descent in North America; foreign nationals unable to secure any kind of accommodation in India; and people from large urban areas being met with hostility in rural areas of France are just a handful of examples of pre-existing instincts laid bare. In this context, the domino effect of locking down borders (however necessary this may have been to stop the spread of coronavirus) and being wary of foreigners seems less of a shock and more of a disjointed continuum of the last few decades that has reached pre-WWII levels of paranoia and prejudice.

Economy

One of the many things made evident in the last months has been the amount of money Western governments can pump into the citizenry – hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds, and euros have been injected into the employers, employees and anonymous workers in these nations, seemingly from nowhere. The stigma and social-Darwinist approach to a kind of hyper-capitalism has been removed overnight. Physical work is still needed (obviously, health care workers but also jobs such as delivery drivers and grocery store workers) but much of the ‘office’ work that involves a pyramid of people has quickly proven to be unnecessary. Working from home has long been accepted in certain segments of the American work culture but now other European and Asian nations are being forced to re-examine an office culture that often places showing up and ‘looking busy’ over actually doing the work needed.

Poverty is rampant with post-industrial cities and smaller regions dealing with unemployment and wages that cannot keep up with a high cost of living as well as housing that is often substandard.

All of this has not happened in a vacuum – in the U.K. the homeless population has been on the rise for the last decade. Poverty is rampant with post-industrial cities and smaller regions dealing with unemployment and wages that cannot keep up with a high cost of living as well as housing that is often substandard. In the U.S., the divide between rich and poor has been growing for the last half-century at alarming rates and an informal economy of freelance, temporary work and ‘under-the-table’ jobs is integral to a system that is now broken.

Society

Innovation often comes out of calamity and a need to resolve a problem. For instance, New York City at the turn of the century is a potentially thriving metropolis that is burdened by the hundreds of thousands of horse and buggies (and subsequent manure-waste problem that leads to disease and blocks growth). Within a few years technological and business innovations make the car an affordable option for the masses (Ford’s Model T) and the previous problems are eliminated almost instantly.

Faith

Social distancing, washing regularly and the use of a mask were all things recommended during the black plague of Europe and the ‘Spanish’ Flu or 1918 pandemic. During the medieval plagues a segment of Christian society took to beating and punishing themselves (self-flagellation) as well as others in cruel and barbaric ways. During the 1918 pandemic, there was much resistance to the disbanding of Church gatherings (in the U.S. many clandestinely got together in fields) and the Hajj went ahead as normal.

In comparison the current closure of Mosques, Churches, Synagogues and Temples has largely been followed without incident around the entire world. Religious and community leaders have been among the most rational in the balance of faith and science (keeping one’s prayers while following social distancing to avoid the virus spreading) Rather than adversely affecting the frequent, spiritual minded visitor, the closure of places of worship may strengthen the transcendental and moral resolve that already exists. In comparison, the more secular-minded may have difficulty in not being able to visit a place of worship in a time of immense socio-political and economic change. In other words, those that are looking for some spiritual meaning to make sense of this are lamenting not being able to go (such as the closure of Easter Mass throughout the world), even though they usually would not care or pay attention to a place of worship and its function in society.

A subtle yet distinct change of tone concerning words and actions of faith can be observed over the last few weeks in the U.K. and other European states. People are ‘praying’ for others (something that in my years of living in the U.K. I have never heard before) and expressing humanitarian solidarity. The doomsday, end-of-world scenario is a view on the fringes of society – in contrast to the people of every major faith around the world where the message has been fairly consistent and clear: this is a test that we have to deal with and come out stronger and more humane as a tribal group, country, religion or ummah.

The coronavirus pandemic has locked down almost all societies around the globe, with people even frightened of standing close to one another. If we interpret the situation we are in, it would not be an exaggeration to say that fear manages the world right now. People around the world seem to have entered an awkward period of waiting, frozen in a moment of history. Everyone is the producer and consumer of this climate of alarm for their own lives and personal safety. During these days of global hysteria, what we need to consider is whether the next step awaiting us in this global environment of trepidation is pointing to the end of an era or the beginning of a new one.

The novel coronavirus or COVID-19, which appeared in China in December 2019 and has been on the global agenda for months, is set to be the pioneer of a change that will reshape the world according to many commentators. Some are more cautious and say it is too early to come to such a conclusion. Others argue that this virus was produced in a laboratory and that new power structures will be created using such methods instead of nuclear war. On a relevant note, many are saying that the United States will no longer be a global power and China will take its place. Some experts on the other hand are contending that the United States will become stronger following the end of this pandemic. It is not feasible to claim that COVID-19 will establish a new balance by shaking the geopolitical scales. However, by looking at the data currently available, we can predict the direction this tremor may take us.

China’s Strategy

First and foremost, the emergence of this virus in Wuhan and its rapid spread perceivably makes China the source of the problem. From this point of view, China’s speed in understanding, analyzing and identifying the virus as a threat factor, and the transparency Beijing showed in sharing this information with the world, will be questioned after the outbreak is eradicated. China faces accusations from several countries, including the U.S., that it was late in alerting the world to the virus situation.

According to official statements, the absence of new cases in China as of the end of March 2020 was regarded as a success that garnered the appreciation of the whole world. Undoubtedly, bringing a population of over one billion to a standstill during the Chinese New Year celebrations, is a remarkable story for any modern state, even if this procedure was carried out in limited areas.

On the other hand, the spread of the virus worldwide, and the fact that no known remedy has been developed, has globalized the problem and pushed the whole world into a panic. After the coronavirus spread to the U.S., Latin America, EU countries, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and many others at the same rapid speed that it spread in China, countries are having an extremely difficult time in dealing with the fallout.

Overwhelmed in the face of hundreds of deaths, many countries are forcing their citizens to isolate themselves as the first line of defense and trying to prevent the epidemic from flooding hospitals by restricting travel. Total deaths in many countries have now surpassed China, and cases are rapidly increasing worldwide exceeding 6.4 million on June 3, 2020. The current situation shows that the U.S. has received the biggest blow from the pandemic so far.

While countries are developing their methods to deal with the pandemic, they are also trying to act according to their health policies, the capacity of their health systems, hospitals, and economies, and the medical resources they have. However, the virus infection rate is very high, and it is not clear when the outbreak will end. This has led to an environment full of uncertainty.

The question of global leadership

The global geopolitics, balance of powers and the hierarchy of states undoubtedly do not alter by themselves, nor do they change in peaceful ways. Looking at times of major crises in history shows us this. The U.S. independence from the British Empire, the French Revolution, World War I and II are all examples that prevent us from voicing hope about change through peaceful means. However, we should not underestimate those who advocate for peaceful change.

Although it is imperative to carry out such broad cooperation to compensate for the damage caused by the coronavirus, it is just as important to remember that it is political leadership that will carry us forward. The U.S. is traditionally expected to play an immersive and constructive role from this point on. The order that has been damaged and needs to be compensated is the West-centered liberal economic system led by the U.S. Thus, naturally, the pioneering steps to be taken to compensate for the losses this system has incurred are expected, to come from the West.

The biggest factor missing at this point is leadership. If U.S. President Donald Trump is not willing to take on such a leadership role, for which he has not shown any positive signs so far, an incredible geopolitical opportunity has been opened for the European Union – the likes of which it has not seen since its foundation. Will the EU be able to take on that role?

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is preparing to bid farewell to politics very soon, is trying to keep the EU project alive, it is difficult to predict whether she will take economic geopolitical steps around the EU or even on a global scale. Even if Merkel is willing to take these steps, will rising German nationalism interfere? Or will EU member states be willing to let such a patronage role take place outside of the Union while they failed to coordinate aid among each other when it was needed the most? Looking at the latest developments, especially the plight of Italy and Spain and the battle over medical equipment, it is not possible to give positive answers to these questions.

The fact that neither the U.S. nor the EU has taken steps to find a global solution to the financial dilemma within the Western system does not mean that they are going to wait forever.

The fact that neither the U.S. nor the EU has taken steps to find a global solution to the financial dilemma within the Western system does not mean that they are going to wait forever. As most countries are currently busy dealing with their difficulties caused by the pandemic, they may have chosen to postpone this step. Failure to take such a step toward the middle of this year will certainly deepen the financial and economic problems experienced globally. This may push new actors with the potential to play the leadership role, such as China, to take on the initiative.

Those who argue that the U.S. should leave global leadership to China, claim that the coronavirus epidemic has prepared the base for such a power shift. They discuss that it is more reasonable to gradually change the global system, rather than a change through a comprehensive and destructive nuclear war. The main problem with this approach is it assumes that the U.S. is ready to leave its leadership role without a fight. Whether China’s global leadership capacity is being tested or not, it is still unclear if China and the strong economies on its side will be willing to undertake or consent to such a power shift.

The coronavirus outbreak will continue to have an impact on many governments’ human and financial resources as well as their administrative capabilities. Less damage from COVID-19 will amount to more power and quick recovery for the victim countries in the aftermath of the crisis.

Trying hard to overcome the crisis that has already disrupted their production and consumption mechanisms, many countries have announced that they will ease their markets by printing large sums of money. While such steps may temporarily produce solutions, there could be a risk of inflation in the medium term and even hyperinflation in some cases.

The U.S. injected $2.2 trillion into their market to rescue the coronavirus-battered economy. If Washington fails to manage the crisis and isolates itself by casting aside its global leadership role, this may invite China – an economy based on production and with plenty of cash reserves – to take necessary steps to be the leading global power. After China announced the supposed end of the coronavirus outbreak, it has taken some striking steps on public diplomacy, like sending aid packages and health teams to virus-stricken Italy. China may be taking these steps to prevent or preempt charges against how it handled the COVID-19 outbreak. It may also be doing these to prove its willingness to protect its partners in the One Belt and One Road project. In whichever case, the U.S. lack of self-sufficiency and disappearance in such a global crisis creates a big power vacuum and thus provides ample opportunity for China.

If China can live through the current mistrust it has incurred for being the source of the pandemic and creates an image of a credible workable partner, the shift of power towards Asia will accelerate. However, it is not going to be easy for China to overcome this crisis of trust. If it fails to turn the tide, it may lose its image of being the world’s primary production center, and most China-based production activities will be distributed to different regions in Asia and Europe.

After the pandemic ends, the EU will also face a stringent test. Having failed to provide support to its member countries such as Italy and Spain, which have been struck hard by the pandemic, the EU may face the question of survival. As for Germany, it might face national objections and some bigger economic storms in the future if it extends help to its corona-hit EU neighbors during and after the crisis.