The Duck of Minerva

This is a guest post from Annick T.R. Wibben is Anna Lindh Professor of Gender, Peace & Security at the Swedish Defence University. Her research straddles critical security and military studies, peace studies, international theory, and feminist international relations. Her books include Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (Routledge, 2011), Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics & Politics (Routledge, 2016), and Teaching Peace and War: Pedagogy and Curricula with Amanda Donahoe (Routledge, 2019). The effects of COVID-19 are invariably exacerbated by existing...

This is a guest post from Jiun Bang, PhD (University of Southern California, political science and international relations), currently a visiting scholar at the Korean Studies Institute at USC. In the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, cities have been making the news, from the harrowing daily struggles of New York City with COVID-19 to President Trump’s erroneous estimate of Seoul’s population of ‘38 million’ [more like just shy of 10 million].  I happened to listen to Dr. Robert T. Yanagisawa, MD and Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Co-Director...

This is a guest post from Eric Van Rythoven (PhD) who teaches International Relations and Foreign Policy at Carleton University, Canada.  His work has been published in Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, and Journal of Global Security Studies, among others.  He is the editor (with Mira Sucharov) of Methodology and Emotion in International Politics: Parsing the Passions (Routledge, 2019).    As governments around the world grapple with the Covid-19 crisis several are reaching for the metaphor of war to convey the urgency and gravity surrounding the pandemic. ...

This is a guest post from Ben Bellows, PhD (UC Berkeley, epidemiology), currently a researcher at the Population Council in Washington DC and a co-founder and the Chief Business Officer at Nivi Inc., a digital health company empowering consumers in emerging markets. Nivi is supporting the COVID-19 response here.   Background: the problem Disease outbreaks are as much a social phenomenon as a biological one. Rumor, innuendo, and public sentiment drive disease transmission dynamics. Covid-19 is no different; the fact checking website, Snopes.com, has a dedicated “covid-19” tag to run the...

This is a guest post from Peter Verovšek, a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics/International Relations at the University of Sheffield The Coronavirus has turned us all into amateur epidemiologists. This desire for greater understanding makes sense in the face of a threat as novel and as dangerous as COVID-19. The shutdown of massive sections of the economy and state-mandated orders to engage in social – or, more accurately, physical – distancing has left the majority of us stuck at home, wondering when things will go back to normal and worrying that they never will. As a result of...

This is a guest post from Karen A. Grépin, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong As cases of COVID-19 soar globally, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have garnered accolades from the international community for having kept their epidemics relatively under control through mid-March - despite the incredible threat they all faced earlier in the year of imported cases from China. With all of the praise flowing to Hong Kong, one might expect citizens to also have good things to say about their government’s handling of the outbreak - but you would be wrong. In fact,...

This is a guest post from Yongjin Choi, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Public Administration at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany. His research focusses on evidence-based policy, Medicaid, and citizen participation. Before entering the doctoral program, he worked as a researcher at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST) for several years. He is currently working as a research assistant at the Center for Technology in Government (CTG). Follow him at @TheYongjinChoi While the COVID-19 outbreak in Korea, which as of March 16th...