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  • The Health of Nations in an Age of Global Risks:COVID-19's Implications for New Paradigms of Human Rights and International Security and Cooperation
  • Carol Dumaine (bio)

This article was contributed to Forum-the edition's portfolio of thematic content-by GJIA's Science & Technology section.

Disasters can demolish orthodoxies and prompt new thinking needed for sustained recovery and transformative change. The story of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 serves as an analogy for tectonic shifts unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. These shifts stem from the pandemic's unequal impacts across societies—including disproportionate harm to the world's poor as well as growing global food insecurity—and recognition that each nation's recovery depends on every other nation's crisis response.1 Sometimes, new ideas evolve and transform human society amid disaster. This progression of thought and action was the case in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake; such progression is similarly required today for devising effective responses to global inequalities and lack of preparedness exposed and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a radically different international security and human rights paradigm modeled on today's global public health reality that "no one is safe until everyone is safe."

The COVID-19 pandemic's toll attests to the failure of governments, institutions, and societies to act on available knowledge about a transformed global security environment and its climate change-amplified risks, including pandemics.2 In many ways, most actors failed to protect human rights and security and mobilize necessary international cooperation. Many governments and citizens were slow to perceive the coronavirus as a global threat requiring a global response. This misconception was partly due to leaders who underestimated or denied the threat and its ability to cross borders and oceans. While existing institutions were created to recognize collective security interdependence in the aftermath of World War II, the current difference is in the global systemic nature of the twin challenges of pandemics and human-induced climate change, which stem from environmental and biodiversity degradation caused by human economic activity. The scale and cross-boundary nature of these dangers means that effective risk mitigation and crisis preparedness are beyond the reach of nations acting on their own. The COVID-19 pandemic itself has created new geopolitical and economic realities that require new global responses.

Coping effectively with today's challenges will require overturning status quo thinking just as recovery after the Lisbon earthquake did. On the surface, both disasters may appear to have little in common: one was a geological event and the other is widely believed to stem from [End Page 153] zoonotic disease transmission generally attributed to human destruction of natural habitats.3 However, each disaster occurred at a moment when orthodoxies of how the world works were mismatched with reality. Nonetheless, new concepts for creating a better society, promoting collective responsibility, and instituting disaster preparedness emerged from the Lisbon disaster in ways that can provoke thinking today about the need for modern equivalents.

In terms of setting a stage for new thinking, the Lisbon disaster occurred when Enlightenment philosophy emerged in Europe and England involving an awakening of secular humanism—a life stance that embraces human reason and secular ethics while rejecting religious dogma and supernaturalism as the basis of decision-making.4 This thinking was partly rooted in impatience among a rising class of legal professionals with existing monarchical institutions believed to be limiting development.5 By the second half of the eighteenth century, natural philosophers, or "philosophes," discussed concepts of autonomy and collective responsibility, highlighting the "rights of man" and the "natural liberty of mankind." Historian Lynn Hunt has examined how around this time the popularity of "epistolary" novels in which readers would be immersed in an exchange of letters between fictional characters also increased readers' self-awareness, empathy, and independence in matters like marriage and childrearing.6 By emphasizing secular questions, the period ushered in an "explosion of innovative thinking about society, government, and the economy," according to historian Margaret C. Jacob.7

The 1762 trial of a sixty-four-year-old French Protestant named Jean Calas illustrated the...

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