By Lee Chor Pharn

What comes after Westphalia?

The nation-state rose from the unique path Western Europe took after the Thirty Years War ended in 1648. This defined a particular notion of national sovereignty that then geographically spread from the peninsula of Europe through colonialism to reshape the world. The alternative to nation-states are theocracies, empires, tribes bound by blood, race, ideology, religion wrapped up in the peculiarities of geography. …

By Gurubaran Subramaniam and Calissa Man

2021 begins on a hopeful note as COVID-19 vaccine development, distribution and administration are well underway. However, equitable distribution and quick access on a global scale is unlikely, and the issues surrounding vaccine production and logistics resilience echo similar concerns with global supply chain disruptions during the pandemic.

Early on at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, global supply chains came under significant strain. Governments rapidly sought to mitigate this by facilitating the reshoring of production of essential goods or ramping up local production of those goods. States also began stockpiling critical supplies and…

By Angel Chew

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a third of the world’s population was under some form of lockdown. As 2020 draws to a close, much of Europe has locked down for a second time, and many other countries are imposing some form of lockdown or additional safety measures in anticipation of higher rates of infection from year-end festivities.

Despite curfews and the closure of bars and restaurants, people have still found creative ways to connect with each other while being cooped up at home. In countries where infection numbers are falling and there is an urgency…

By Lucas Loh

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a generational shock, which has increased the salience of preparing for global, long-term threats–including the existential issues of climate change and resource resilience. Governments, businesses and communities have all made public commitments to a more sustainable and resilient post-pandemic world. However, some contend that this newfound burst of interest will be short-lived. Prioritising sustainability and long-term resilience can conflict with more immediate concerns such as supply constraints and limited resources. It is unclear whether commitments and aspirations to sustainability will endure as their costs become clearer and dearer, and as the world…

By Tse Hao Guang

Governments and other organisations are using technological solutions to safely resume economic and social activity amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Some solutions, such as track-and-trace technologies to complement manual contact tracing, have been criticised for having limited utility in controlling COVID-19 transmission. Nonetheless, there are signs that bio-surveillance regimes — including immunity certification and the use of contactless biometric authentication like facial and iris recognition — are increasingly being considered as additional pandemic management measures. Beyond the usual trade-offs between safety and privacy, bio-surveillance may have surprising implications both for organisations using them, as well as people…

By Calissa Man and Louise Cheng

As the COVID-19 crisis continues, we have looked to past security, health and environmental shocks for ideas about how societies, economies, and governance may change as a result. While the past does not wholly determine our present, the study of other major shocks offers key insights on how human behaviour may change (or not) over time. Here, we offer four lessons from the past.

Lesson 1: Old Divides, New Vulnerables

Past crises deepened or accentuated existing divides around race, age, and class. For instance, the nomenclature for new infectious diseases (for instance the Spanish…

By Jeanette Kwek

While governments are working hard to manage the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, these efforts may inadvertently exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, or create new ones. For instance, as jurisdictions put social isolation measures in place, domestic violence is on the rise. The UN has described this as the “shadow pandemic”, and asked governments to include the prevention and redress of violence against women in their national response plans. In Singapore, family violence rose after the “circuit breaker” (local parlance for Singapore’s social isolation measures) started in early April. …

By Seema Gail Parkash and Liana Tang

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a public health emergency of international concern almost six months ago. At the time, few could have imagined the immense toll of the disease, with more than 10 million confirmed cases and close to 500,000 fatalities globally to-date.[i] Even fewer could have imagined that the disease would up-end our ways of life so comprehensively or raise the spectre of a global depression. However, the driving forces reshaping our lives did not all emerge overnight — COVID-19 has accelerated many pre-existing trends. It has also…