Learning global solidarity in the Covid-19 pandemic? (original) (raw)
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COVID-19: Another Look at Solidarity
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
Is there such a thing as corona solidarity? Does voluntary mutual aid solve the problems caused by COVID-19? I argue that the answer to the first question is “yes” and to the second “no.” Not that the answer to the second question could not, in an ideal world, be “yes,” too. It is just that in this world of global capitalism and everybody looking out for themselves, the kind of communal warmth celebrated by the media either does not actually exist or is too weak to rule out the uglier manifestations of group togetherness, driven partly by the pandemic. I make my point by offering two approaches to understanding what solidarity is. According to the first, it is essentially partiality: “us” against “them.” According to the second, it can be many things, including the impartial promotion of the good of others. I show that the second reading would make it possible for mutual aid to solve the problems caused by COVID-19 and other crises. This would happen at the expense of conceptual cla...
From security to solidarity: The normative foundation of a global pandemic treaty
Journal of Global Health, 2022
In response to the ongoing discussion about creating a new pandemic treaty, we first identify that the security discourse has dominated global health governance. Yet, we argue that the solidarity discourse is necessary for promoting global health and compliance with relevant legal instruments in the post-COVID era. At the critical moment where transformation of the global pandemic response regime is about to happen, we consider that the sense of feeling prepared prior to a disease outbreak and the sense of urgency when it happens require an ethical reason – that is, global solidarity. Without it, the institutional redesign might not work. The belief in and realisation of global solidarity, shared between global citizens and the nation-states they constituted domestically, include both dimensions of self-interest and global public good. The former comes from the expectation for the boomerang effect of sharing, and the latter accumulates all the primary and side benefits from the process of sharing burden and effort. Thus, the discourse of global solidarity is not only ethically necessary, in order to ensure commitment to carry costs to assist others of equal membership, but also practically necessary, in order to promote the incentives of seeking international support and cooperation.
Solidarity in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic
Chatham House , 2021
This paper assesses how the global community has responded to calls for greater solidarity in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, and presents the insights of key stakeholders and experts in global health governance, health security, and pandemic preparedness and response.
Solidarity and Global Health Cooperation During Covid-19 and Beyond
Development and Peace Foundation, 2021
In this Spotlight, we explain what we mean by solidarity, argue that we are far from achieving it in our current global pandemic response, and outline ways forward that would allow for a more effective pandemic response based on practices of genuine solidarity.
Solidarity in Times of Pandemics
Democratic Theory, 2020
This short article discusses how the COVID-19 crisis has affected solidarity. It starts by defining solidarity in such a way that it can be distinguished from other types of support and pro-social practice, and by arguing that solidarity can manifest itself at three different levels: at the inter-personal level, the group level, or at the level of legal and contractual norms. Drawing upon findings from two ongoing studies on personal and societal effects of the COVID-19 crisis, I then go on to argue that, while forms of inter-personal solidarity have been shifting even during the first weeks and months of the crisis, the importance of institutionalized solidarity is becoming increasingly apparent. The most resilient societies in times of COVID-19 have not been those with the best medical technology or the strictest pandemic containment measures, but those with good public infrastructures and other solidaristic institutions.
Solidarity at a Time of Risk: Vulnerability and the Turn to Mutual Aid
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid was rapidly taken up as an ideal model for solidarity. This paper examines why mutual aid may have found such popularity in this moment by examining the affective underpinnings of risk, vulnerability and the imperative to care. Rather than celebrate the turn to mutual aid as the best path towards justice, however, the paper suggests that we think strategically about the models we use for survival, by considering mutual aid as one strategy among many for generating our responses to the harms that predate, and are intensified through, the pandemic.
Cammino Diritto, 2021
The arrival of COVID-19 on a global scale has upset the entire international community. The latter had to face an unprecedented health crisis, focusing the international cooperation efforts in the health field and in the development of new vaccines capable of coping with the continuing spread of the virus. Before the pandemic event, the community of states seemed to embark on a multilateralism that was taking more and more account of environmental protection. The work intends to analyse the recent changes of the international cooperation in the field of international environmental law and the possible prominence of the principle of solidarity as a constitutive value of this normative system through the definition of new development policies after the pandemic.
Solidarity and COVID-19: An Introduction
Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy, 2021
Since the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, ethicists and legal philosophers have grappled with societal, political and medical issues raised by the new predicament. One of the first to do so was the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. 1 His public interventions in this domain have been controversial, but his Foucauldian alertness to the significance of the contemporary moment 2 could not have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his work. Already in 2015, five years before the start of the pandemic, Agamben addressed the connection between epidemics, health and sovereignty in the context of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. Discussing the presence of two plague doctors on the famous frontispiece of Leviathan, Agamben remarks: 'Like the mass of plague victims, the unrepresentable multitude can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise the sovereignty.' 3 Agamben's worry that the continuing presence of the virus will legitimize a permanent state of exception in which the lives of citizens are subjected to unmediated power in the form of biopolitics, is well-known. 4 Somewhat lesser known, however, is Agamben's awareness of the fact that the connection between sovereignty, health and epidemics is at least as old as social contract theory itself. 5 We agree with Agamben that it is important to reflect on the fact that Hobbes developed his theory of sovereignty in a context not only of civil war, but also of epidemics. In this latter context, the maxim salus populi suprema lex esto-borrowed by Hobbes from
"All in this together": the global duty to contribute towards combating the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper explores the unique realities and effects of Covid19 as experienced in the global North and global South with special reference to Canada and subSaharan Africa; it also examines the moral responsibilities countries have towards their own people and the duty they have to work together to minimise and mitigate the devastating effects of the pandemic worldwide. We illuminate the importance of countries sharing their own world views, strengths, and expertise, and learning from one another in order to better situate all in tackling the pandemic. We argue that it is only insofar as all countries work collaboratively commensurate to each party's capacity to contribute towards the tackling of the Covid19 pandemic that we may truly be said to be "all in this together".