The World After COVID-19: An Opportunity for a New Beginning

As the COVID-19 pandemic propagates throughout the world, speculations have begun of the post-pandemic world. In this article, I argue that the world after COVID-19 will be a different and difficult one, with unprecedented economic hardships and rampant social anxieties becoming the new normal.

However, the pandemic also offers a chance to reflect and to revise our course, and to come up with an alternative that will be just and fair for the many. I begin the article by offering an assessment of COVID-19’s impact on global power structures and move on to elaborate its possible implications on political processes, particularly on the instruments of democracy and the rule of law.

Drawing from various experiences reported during the pandemic, I argue that the post-pandemic world will be characterized by populism, nationalism, intensified citizen surveillance, and curtailed and compromised individual liberties. The pandemic will also inflict severe damage to globalization, free trade, multilateralism, and development cooperation.

I conclude the article by arguing that most of the problems witnessed during this crisis, however, are systemic, and caused by dysfunctional neoliberal corporate capitalism. In that sense, if there is a political mandate of this crisis – that is to find an alternative to the obsolete and oppressive neoliberal corporate capitalism which has served a few and failed the many.