by Ankhmaa Ankhbayar

Written by David Blunt on June 17th, 2021.

Our Student Spotlight highlights the excellent work done by students in
the Department of International Politics.

Introduction

COVID-19 has brought many challenges in the lives of many nations in the world. The virus was first identified in China, the City of Wuhan in December 2019, however, it took months for some states to react. It is one of the most serious events of the 21st century (Caparrós, 2020). Globalisation is one of the biggest facilitators in the spreading of the virus (Drezner, 2020). And today, we can barely count the number of countries that have not been affected by this virus. States responded in different ways; some introduced very strict measures from the earliest periods of the pandemic, whereas others took relatively lighter measures. From one point of view, the world today can be explained by the liberal institutionalist approach as many nations are cooperating. However, there are shreds of evidence of nationalistic behaviour of certain countries which corresponds to realist ideas.

The global response to coronavirus pandemic suggests that global governance is failing when it comes to international cooperation because of the nationalist leaders, however, certain international organisations are succeeding in integrating many countries and assisting them. The goal of this research is to answer the following questions: Are countries collaborating and fighting together against the problem or independently?

How effective are international responses when it comes to COVID governance? To answer these questions, firstly, the essay will look at background information about coronavirus and early period of the
pandemic. Secondly, the essay will introduce approaches to global governance that are influential in this paper. Thirdly, the research will go through findings and analysis relating to the theories from previous
sections. And finally, the conclusion will be made based on the research. The observations will be useful to anticipate the world in the future and, also, to predict behaviours of political actors when it comes to any other unexpected events. The pandemic is threatening the health of people as well as reshaping all four aspects of human life such as spiritual (religion but, art, moral, culture, education and science), social, economic and political spheres, thus it is worth to acknowledge consequences of COVID-19.

This topic is very intriguing as there is an uncommon situation for international society and it does not only concern health but also politics, economics, international relations of millions of people (Davies et al,
2020). COVID-19 is a new issue area, which means the literature on this topic is limited, so the research will use materials from primary sources of particular intergovernmental organisations besides academic sources.