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D e s i g n e d b y A N Z E L I K A P U S N A K O VA

Researchers - Anisha Chandrasekar, Lucas van den Heuvel, Lea Hoopman, Ami Kinoshita,
Karolina Kneller, Marnix Middelburg, Remya Radhakrishnan, Judith Rybol and Caoimhe Ní
Shúilleabháin. Editors - Emma Armand, Taylor Brown, Jindra Hartog, Josephine Henze, Pieter
“Guus” Huurman, Veerle Korsten, Romée Lind, Emma Lindner, Marleen Onnekes and Gemke
Wijgergangs. Creative Content – Laetitia Lizotte. Board – Pauline van Andel, Nur Ayça Demir,
Lior Hamovitz, Bas Jacobs, Hanisha Kanani, Clara Lindemann, Anzelika Pusnakova, Robert
Riopelle, Theodor Stabile.

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Dear readers,

During the late summer of 2020, a group of us Leiden University College students
came together to create the first intellectual magazine in our school, compiled of
articles exclusively written by students from all six majors offered under the scope of
the Global Challenges curriculum. The intention of this magazine, and the Roosevelt
Network in general, is to create erudite work that sheds light on the ways in which
students interpret the world’s current affairs. We started by asking ourselves: which
theme could possibly cover everything that had happened during 2020?
The answer was almost too easy: Crisis Management.
Over the past year, countries, societies and individuals alike have had to
confront some of the most formidable crises of the 21st century. From widespread
disinformation, to outrageous abuses of power, to enduring wars, to ceaselessly raging
racism, and above all, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
When assembling our teams of researchers and editors we were determined to
find a group of students with varying interests that would highlight the abundance
and variety of challenges 2020 brought with it. In a way, this decision resulted in a
magazine covering such a large array of topics that it is sometimes difficult to see the
strings which bind them together. But we recognize their interconnectedness, and we
would like to take you on a similar journey.
This magazine is the product of months’ labor where the world was constantly
changing, forcing us to continually revise our work in some cases, and leave it
unchanged in others, as living proof of the dynamism of this period in human
history. Where you might see disconnect, we see a group of students who never
worked together before, from a diverse background of nationalities and educational
environments, coming together to write academic pieces that hopefully inspire you
to take a deeper dive into the topics we covered.
You will notice a range of papers, from opinion pieces to literature reviews to
more research-oriented works. Our authors aimed to provide you with an
introduction of the managing (or mismanaging) of 2020’s crises, and we hope you
enjoy our joint efforts of letting you into the minds of our generation. If there is one
thought we wish for you to depart this reading journey with, it is this: young minds
have unique insights and ambitious perspectives to offer. They deserve to be heard
and valued.

Thank you for joining us and enjoy your read!

Your Heads of Research

Lior Hamovitz Nur Ayca Demir

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 Photo by Jorik Kleen • unsplash.com

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Table of Contents Page 6
Stranger than Fiction: A US Elections Retrospective
Written by Lior Hamovitz and Robert J. Riopelle

Climate Refugees, the Missing Piece of the Refugee

Page 20 Convention
Written by Ana Nico Clement and Bram Burger

The Emergence of the COVID Vaccine: Silver Bullet?

Page 26 Written by Lucas van den Heuvel
Edited by Taylor Brown

Diverging Covid-19 Responses Within the European

Page 30 Union
Written by Karolina Kneller, Lea Hoopman and
Anisha Chandrasekar

Food Security in Light of the Environmental Crisis –

Page 48 Controversies and Misconceptions
Written by Judith Rybol and Karolina Kneller

2020 Visions: An Exploration of Modern Civilization

Page 58 Written by Caoimhe Ní Shúilleabháin

The Politics of Public Health – A Literature Review

Page 64 Written by Nur Ayça Demir, Lior Hamovitz and Remya
Radhakrishnan

A Matter of Life-or-Death: The Efficacy of Female

Page 70 Leadership During COVID-19
Written by Audrey Wientjes

Assessing the Influence of the ‘Two-Level Game’ on the

Page 78 United States’ War in Afghanistan
Written by Lea Hoopman and Marnix Middelburg
Edited by Lior Hamovitz

The Serbia-Kosovo Normalization Deal: Everything We

Page 96 Should Know
Written by Lior Hamovitz

Invisible Emissions from the Internet: Should We

Page 102 Care?
Written by Ami Kinoshita and Judith Rybol

Power, Structure and Responsibility: Police Reform in

Page 110 the United States of America
Written by Lucas van den Heuvel and Caoimhe Ní
Shúilleabháin

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Photo by Andy Felicotti • unsplash.com
Stranger than Fiction:
A 2020 US Elections Retrospective
Written by Lior Hamovitz and Robert J. Riopelle
T
he 2020 elections in the United States
were arguably the most consequential
ones in modern American history.
Following a presidency defined by impeachment
and a staggering over 400,000 deaths resulting
from the coronavirus (New York Times 2021),
Donald J. Trump was denied a second term, and
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. was elected the 46th
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!"
President of the United States. Despite claims to
the contrary, Biden won by a margin of 7 million
popular votes, while Trump secured the second
most votes of any presidential candidate in US
history with 74 million ballots cast to his name
(DeSilver 2020). While Biden’s victory came as
a relief to many, the record-high turnout did not
produce the much-anticipated landslide victory
Democrats were hoping for, yielding ‘only’ the
same electoral count that elected Trump in
2016, 306 versus 232, 270 being needed for
victory (DeSilver 2020).
In the broader scope of this election
cycle, Democrats have lost ten seats in the House
of Representatives, while they clinched a
majority in the Senate after two extremely close
run-off elections in Georgia (Levinson et al.
2020). With control over both chambers of
Congress, Democrats have concurrent
command over the executive and legislative
branches of government for the first time in a
decade (Leonhardt 2021). However, the election
outcome indicates that four years of Trump’s
divisive rhetoric and controversial policies
resonated with nearly half the nation, and even
helped Republicans construct “a broader
electoral coalition that includes more Hispanics
and Black Americans” than in 2016 (Bremmer
and Kupchan 2021). In light of these results, it
is safe to say that Americans did not decisively
reject Trump.
This retrospective will engage with some
of the questions that remain debated over
following these turbulent elections and will try
to position the 2020 cycle in its rightful historic
place. More than anything, we aim to
demonstrate that the Republican Party remains
hostage to Trumpian fanaticism, showcasing the
former President as a symptom of a much larger
challenge to the divided American politics and
society. We argue these divisions will accompany
the Democratic Party as it seeks to solidify
Biden’s administration through a resolution of
the national crisis amplified by the pandemic
and, more crucially, in its aftermath.
Post-Election Mayhem
The elections' aftermath was unprecedented.
Breaking a political and democratic tradition,
the incumbent President refused to concede
power and instead campaigned to undermine
his opponent, Biden’s, victory – falsely claiming
that widespread election fraud was that which
rendered him a one-term president. The
consequences of Trump’s lies are dire: a recent
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Quinnipiac poll shows that “77 percent of
Republicans believe that there was major fraud
in the 2020 election” (Fukuyama 2021). This
simmering misbelief reached its climax on
January 6th, 2020, on the day Congress certified
Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ victory. Amid the
congressional debate, a violent mob of Trump-
supporters, rallied by the President and his
allies, stormed Capitol Hill in an alleged final
attempt to overturn the election results
(Rojanasakul and McCartney 2021). On this
dying day of Trump’s presidency, his supporters
threatened the lives of politicians under the
pretense that they were patriotically defending
their democracy, not attacking it. The ensued
chaos left behind a sea of vandalism and five
people dead (McEvoy 2021).
While the insurrection failed, it shook
American democracy to its core and reminded
the world about the fragility of this institution.
World leaders were quick to condemn the
violence; German Chancellor Angela Merkel
said she felt “angry and sad” while UK Prime
Minister Boris Johnson reprimanded the
“disgraceful scenes” (BBC News 2021). Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani also denounced the
Capitol rioters and said that “unfortunately the
ground [of democracy] is fertile for populism,
despite the advances in science and industry.”
He added that the events demonstrated “how
fragile and vulnerable Western democracy is”
(Agence France-Presse 2021).
Consequently, the House of
Representatives promptly impeached Trump,
with 10 Republicans even crossing party lines.
Trump’s second impeachment stains his legacy
as he will go down in history as the only
President to be charged twice with higher crimes
and misdemeanors (Cowan and Morgan 2021).
At the time of writing, we await the Senate’s
trial, which will determine whether Trump will
be found guilty and indicted. But Senate
Republicans will likely acquit Trump, again
(Mascaro 2021). The US must therefore
reconcile with the troubling reality that their
President is indeed, at times, above the law,
while an acquittal also risks normalizing the
violent insurgency and sets a dangerous
precedent for the future.
The events of January 6th were not an
isolated incident, caused by one individual, and
limited to one election – they symbolized the
potent nature of America’s flawed democracy.
The lasting legacy of racism, a fragmenting
media landscape, party polarization and the
resistance to political reform have culminated in
a perfect storm which had been brewing for
decades (Bremmer 2021). Despite being largely
culpable for the ruin we witnessed, Trump
merely channeled these forces for political gain
and resultantly exposed the dark underbelly of
American society. For this reason, we consider
Trump to be one of the most consequential
presidents in recent US history, whose rise to
power signals America’s societal and political
decline.
“
The institutional divisions
between Republicans and
Democrats have come to
reflect, at least in the public
eye, a fundamental cultural
disagreement on the basic
value systems.
The close election outcome signifies the
polarization that has come to define modern US
politics and established ‘Trumpism’ as a political
force for the foreseeable future. As we believe,
Trump’s legacy has paved the path for more
Republicans to benefit from the ideology he
loudly spouted in order to push their
conservative agendas forward. Francis
Fukuyama writes, “What were once policy
differences between ‘blue’ and ‘red’ factions
have hardened into divisions over cultural
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identity” (Fukuyama 2021). He means that
Americans’ political affiliations have
transformed significantly to become part of their
identities, setting them apart from one another
through a strangely partisan line that seems to
stretch into their perception of ‘us versus them’,
even under one national flag. The institutional
divisions between Republicans and Democrats
have come to reflect, at least in the public eye, a
fundamental cultural disagreement on basic
value systems. The new President will be facing
not only a split government but a deeply divided
nation, almost half of which does not even
acknowledge the legitimacy of his seat in the
Oval Office (Bremmer and Kupchan 2021).
A Victory for the Democrats?
After a few days’ delay due to the constraints of
the COVID-19 pandemic, the major networks
projected Joe Biden to become the next US
President. However, his victory remains
shadowed by the fact it was not nearly as
conclusive as Democrats across America had
hoped. While voter turnout had hit a historic
number of nearly 160 million voters, these
record-breaking outcomes were still
accompanied by narrow gaps state by state
(Lindsay 2020). Importantly, in terms of the
Electoral College, only a few tens of thousands
of votes in the right places could have wholly
altered the voter map, granting Trump a second
term. Moreover, these vast numbers of voters
should not be taken out of context. Population
growth is on the rise in the US, and voter
turnout has increased significantly for both
candidates. When contextualized in this manner
and controlled for electorate size, it becomes
apparent that the mandate received by Biden is
not nearly as overwhelming as he or the party
had wished (Al-Gharbi and Lazarsfeld 2020).
The thin margins between Trump and
Biden are significant then not numerically, but
ideologically. They are a testament to several key
characteristics of modern-day America. The
United States, today, is a country encumbered
by almost too many issues to count. Across the
board, it seems that voters are more divided than
they ever have been. The coronavirus pandemic
which had cost the lives of hundreds of
thousands of Americans altered the face of the
nation. Arguably demonstrating the Trump
administration’s glaring inadequacy, it
prominently revealed the everlasting conflict
between classes in the country. Healthcare
became the topic on everyone’s lips, and it
appeared that almost every person had a
different view of how the country ought to
operate. The COVID-19 pandemic showcased
the discrepancies between Americans, deriving
from the differences in their socio-economic,
ethnic, gender, religious, racial and cultural
backgrounds. The unexpected economic burden
of the crisis put the livelihoods of innumerable
Americans at risk and showed the prevalent
problems of the system in place. Indeed,
systemic issues seemed to be the theme of the
months leading up to the elections, as the Black
Lives Matter movement took to the streets in the
face of unyielding police brutality against black
Americans, and later against protesters. The
sheer size and conviction of these protests,
whose impact reached the entire globe, is
inarguably a testimony of people of color’s harsh
reality in the United States.
These issues of class, race, gender,
systemic oppression and violence all, in theory,
could have pointed towards an easy win for the
Democratic Party, whose general platform
consistently attempts to address them. However,
it was the coronavirus crisis that seems to truly
have tilted the scales towards a win for Biden in
the final stages of the run-up to the elections
(Zurcher 2021). Nevertheless, like any crisis, it is
temporary and an unstable source of lasting
legitimacy for the Biden-Harris administration
as the years progress. We must remember that as
protests raged on in America and the
coronavirus pandemic affected practically all
elements of daily life, many Republicans were
still rallying forcefully behind Trump. They
supported his administration’s decision-making
processes, positioned themselves against the
causes that Democrats were fighting for and
demonstrated that their political presence in the
country could not be overlooked nor
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diminished. In large part, President Biden’s
victory was a meagre one. It could be attributed
to grassroots movements, circumstantial
increased political participation due to the
pandemic, among plenty of other factors, before
being attributed to the success of Biden’s
campaign or sweeping ideological support of his
democratic agenda. The impressive numbers at
the voting booths are more a concerning
manifestation of the deep divisions between
Americans than any celebration of the
democratic system. Hence, while Trump has left
the Oval Office on January 20th, his voters and
their ideological support for his four years in
office are likely to stay, and loudly so.
The Electoral College and
Grievances in Rural America
Divergent results in the popular and electoral
votes renewed an age-old debate about
abolishing the Electoral College, as the US is
currently the only country in the world using
this system to elect its head of state. It is claimed
that the Electoral College is an old-fashioned
institution, one that the Founding Fathers
implemented as an insurance policy to prevent a
populist from seizing power, among other
reasons (Beinart 2016). Ironically, the Electoral
College helped elect a populist in 2016. While
Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton
by 3 million, the electoral votes carried him to
victory (Smith 2016). Indeed, Democrats have
won the popular vote the last seven out of eight
presidential races, mostly because their
constituencies are concentrated in populous
states and urban areas (Riccardi 2020). It is
therefore unsurprising that several Democratic
leaders are demanding the Electoral College to
be abolished. As outlined earlier, this institution
has long been deemed to perpetuate
inequalities, through affording some citizens
significantly more voting power than others,
thereby producing asymmetries along
geographic and racial lines (Codrington III
2020).
 For example, Wyoming, with a
population of 563,626, which awards it three
Electoral College votes, has the fewest people of
any state. By contrast, California has 66 times as
many people—but only 18 times as many
Electoral College votes. A voter in Wyoming,
therefore, has a much more powerful vote than
a voter in California. Wyoming has about
188,000 voters per electoral vote, while
California has 677,345 voters per electoral
vote—about 3.6 times more voters per Electoral
College delegate than Wyoming. The second
smallest state, Vermont, which has 62,000 more
residents than Wyoming, still receives only three
electoral votes, meaning a vote in Vermont
counts only as 90% of a vote in Wyoming
(Dorger 2020).
Nonetheless, pushing to abolish the
Electoral College is arguably pointless since
challenging well-established institutions, and
political traditions, is often perceived as radical.
The Electoral College is also deeply rooted in
the US Constitution and federalist system, so it
is unlikely that it will be upended anytime soon.
As any political scientist would readily explain,
the issue with achieving meaningful reform is
that the politicians who need to promote it are
those who were elected through the very same
system in the first place. For this reason, we
argue that Democrats are somewhat misled in
their thinking. If Democrats seek to secure more
electoral votes, their efforts should not focus on
changing the rules of the ‘game.’ Instead, they
should employ more effective campaigning
strategies to better play the existing game by
targeting constituencies that can earn them
more electoral votes, like in the Midwest and
other rural areas (Hogseth 2020).
However, Democrats have repeatedly
neglected these constituencies. In 2016, Trump
flipped several Blue states, such as Michigan,
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, in part due to
Hillary Clinton’s negligence to actively
campaign in the states above (Smith 2017).
Instead, she focused her campaign efforts
elsewhere based on the assumption that she had
those states secured. The progressive
organization was better this election cycle, and
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Democratic primary candidates certainly tried to
appeal to Midwestern voters: Biden played on
his long-standing reputation as ‘middle-class
Joe,’ while Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg
emphasized their midwestern origin (Schor
2020). Nevertheless, the stark rural-urban divide
in the presidential election demonstrates how
Democrats did not succeed in penetrating
Republican heartlands once again (Siegler
2020).
This phenomenon speaks to a broader
issue, namely the Republican base’s grievances,
particularly non-college-educated white voters.
Decades earlier, many of these constituents
turned their backs on Democrats after the party
seemingly shifted its priorities and embraced a
more liberal and globalist agenda. This shift
generated concerns that a changing America was
moving too fast and left behind the Midwest and
rural America (Hendrickson et al. 2019). More
recently, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis have
exacerbated anger which returned in the forms
of Islamophobia, xenophobia and anti-
establishmentarianism, among other such
manifestations of this anti-globalist sentiment
(Balz 2016). Trump’s rise reflects only a
fragment of the growing demand for anti-
establishmentarianism in the US, which has
evolved into populism on both sides of the
political spectrum. Whether it concerns Trump
or Bernie Sanders, an increasing number of
Americans are losing faith in their political
institutions and are demanding change. Hence,
Trump managed to capitalize on the tone-
deafness of Democrats by giving a voice to those
who felt left behind (Montanaro 2017). He
surgically targeted these grievances to rival his
political opponents from both parties and set
himself apart from the pack.
Democrats must understand these
grievances better – and act on them accordingly
– if they want to improve their electoral
prospects. Firstly, Democrats must drop the
detached and often patronizing tone and find
ways to relate to rural voters, co-opting them to
the Democratic cause. Secondly, they must
speak more directly towards midwestern and
rural voters, framing national problems
specifically as rural ones too. Some observers say
that they should propose actionable policy
“Trump’s rise reflects only
a fragment of the
growing demand for
anti-
establishmentarianism in
the US, which has
evolved into populism on
both sides of the political
spectrum.
alternatives for rural America that addresses
structural shifts in employment, decaying
infrastructure and mental health concerns
(Hendrickson et al. 2019). As things currently
stand, the Democratic agenda does not
definitively incorporate rural America and
instead doubles down on its urban strongholds.
However, switching gears may still not
yield the desired results for two reasons. First,
the rural-urban divide is deeply ingrained in US
political culture and personifies the geographic
distribution of party polarization. Even though
Democrats propose alternatives to address the
policy issues concerning rural America, the
perpetual fear of ‘big government’ remains a
strand of America’s DNA, and ever-present in
Republican circles. Therefore, the Democrat’s
core agenda contradicts the demand for anti-
establishmentarianism by Republicans—at least,
according to their definition of the term, with
Trump and Sanders representing two starkly
different conceptualizations. Second, “new
communications technologies have contributed
to the disappearance of a common factual basis
for democratic deliberation.” Even once the
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COVID-19 pandemic is defeated, the delusion
and disinformation epidemics will remain,
making it even harder to find common ground
(Fukuyama 2021).
Intervention by Media
A pertinent point to understand before delving
into the role the media has played during the
Trump presidency and around the 2020 election
cycle is that the US's media landscape has
changed dramatically over the past few decades.
Historian Nicole Hemmer explains that during
the 1960s and 70s, American people were all
reading, watching, and listening to essentially
the same news. There existed a far smaller variety
of news outlets than what we know today—a state
derived from lower demand for variability in
information at the time. Put more simplistically,
American people used to trust the media far
more than they do today. For this reason, they
were not looking for alternative outlets but
relied on the few which existed, and mostly took
the news at face value (Hemmer 2018). The most
striking difference can be seen when comparing
the trust in the media around the time of the
Nixon impeachment hearings, versus that in
America today. Despite causing quite the
partisan dispute, the Watergate scandal's media
coverage was relatively uniform among all
existing news platforms, and public trust in the
media stood at 69% (Gallup 2019).
However, by 2019 and following
Trump’s first impeachment hearings regarding
the Ukraine scandal, public trust in the media
has dropped to a mere 41%. This figure becomes
even more significant when viewed down the
partisan lines, as we see that of all Americans
who expressed trust in the media, only 15% of
those were Republican voters (Gallup 2019).
These numbers help explain how we have seen a
vast proliferation of news platforms over the
decades, which provide a variety of journalists,
but more importantly, what appears to be a
variety of truths. Possibly the most surprising
aspect of the 2020 general elections, then, was
none other than the media’s almost unanimous
battle to rebuke former President Trump’s

claims regarding voter fraud. After four years in
office, where Trump and his administration
have repeatedly spread misinformation, it was
November 3rd, 2020, that marked the media's
overwhelming involvement in combating
Trump's typical dismissal of reality.
Twitter, Trump’s go-to outlet and main
platform of communication with the public
began marking his tweets regarding voter-fraud
as 'refuted' and provided people with more
trustworthy sources of information. Needless to
say, these words are being written with the
solemn understanding that the president of the
United States should be a reliable source of
information for the public. Perhaps that is why
news channels and social media platforms have
not been as forthcoming about rebutting Trump
as they are now. The line between direct political
involvement and provision of facts is often too
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Photo by Charles Deluvio • unsplash.com
blurry for such prominent platforms to be
willing to tread it. However, following the
elections and in light of Trump’s anti-
democratic claims, there appeared to be a
consensus among American media that it is high
time they use their vast power to control for the
outgoing President’s misinformation.
From the Washington Post to the
National Public Radio to Trump’s beloved Fox
News, one cohesive statement rang loud: we
have a democratic duty to protect American
citizens’ votes (Gerhart 2020). It all seems too
little too late, but much can be concluded from
this media intervention. Primarily, despite
recent developments, vital stakeholders in the
US are still committed to the country's
democratic nature and, for once, are willing to
sacrifice a portion of their viewership or support
for the sake of the country’s continued political
integrity. Moreover, we can understand that
Trump’s attempt to override the election results
by unsubstantiated legal claims was perceived
almost unanimously as a severe problem, rather
than as another of his many falsehoods. This
media involvement revealed more than ever the
sheer power it has as a political actor both in the
United States and in the world as a whole. It was
striking to see article after article, news segment
after news segment, boasting the title of “fact-
checking” the president, consistently debunking
Trump’s claims. The abundance and
overwhelming presence of these shed a worrying
light not only on Trump and his political allies
but also on the state of American democracy.
The pinnacle of the country’s arguably
years-long process of democratic backsliding
arrived on January 6th, 2020, on the ground of
Capitol Hill. While an entire dissertation could
be written solely on the events that took place in
Washington DC that day, one key element
proved crucial in encouraging the violence that
took place and answering it: the media.
Immediately following the riots, blaming fingers
were pointed practically everywhere. However,
one in particular was directed at the role social
media has played over the years of Trump’s
presidency as a medium to spread
misinformation and even outright lies. As
investigations proceed and a fuller picture of the
lead-up to the riots is being drawn, it becomes
clearer that the violent mob organized itself
through social media platforms. It fomented and
fed into conspiracy theories, white supremacist
tendencies, and their feelings of injustice
following what they were made to believe were
fraudulent elections (Purtill 2021).
On the other side of things, both media
channels and social media platforms operated
swiftly after the insurrection in the Capitol,
suspending first temporarily then permanently
Trump’s accounts on Twitter and Facebook,
banning him from further inciting violent
actions against the government (Paul 2021).
Apple, Amazon and Google later also banned
from their services the social media platform
Parler, which Forbes defined as “a far-right
Twitter alternative that has become noteworthy
13
for its calls to violence against elected officials”
(Dellinger 2021). In essence, social media giveth,
and social media taketh away. While many
rightfully highlight that this is all too little too
late on these platforms’ side—which for years
have allowed politicians and private individuals
like former President Trump and his allies to
spread misleading propaganda—there is an even
bigger lesson to be learned here. Perhaps the
most important conclusion to take from this
tumultuous election cycle, when addressing the
role of media in it, is that more than ever, public
perception is inextricable from how politics
operate, and the democratic process needs to be
guarded tightly. In today’s America, it seems the
media is as much a part of the nation’s checks
and balances as any other federal institution.
“
In today’s America, it
seems the media is as much
a part of the nation’s
checks and balances as
any other federal
institution.
Trump and Trumpism
From a historical standpoint, Donald Trump is
not solely responsible for dividing America – he
is the symptom of a divided nation. Leading up
to the 2016 election, Trump correctly read the
national mood and leveraged the Republican
party (GOP) to facilitate his rise to power. To
put it in Jared Kushner’s words, Trump’s closest
advisor, Trump was successful in his “hostile
takeover” of the GOP (Solender 2020). The
platform allowed him to boost his political
agenda, which aimed at policy issues such as
elitism (“drain the swamp”), neoliberalism
(“America First”) and progressive politics (“the
radical left”).
 Understanding Trump’s rise can be
traced back to the period between 1948-1968
when the Republican Party took over the
Democratic strongholds in the American South
(Heersink 2018); (Balz 2016). At the time, both
parties were realigning their ideologies during
the New Deal era. Demographic changes
notwithstanding, party leaders implemented
novel political strategies “to either maintain or
create an electoral coalition that
constituency, but that subsequently enabled the
likes of Trump to hijack their ideology. Trump
was not afraid to embrace the racially charged
attitudes the GOP was flirting with over the last
decades, and he was successful in doing so. His
unapologetic remarks resonated far better with
the Republican base than the suggestive rhetoric
of his Republican counterparts in 2016.
Trump’s unconventional style also signaled to
voters that Washington politics

“
would win them the White would not weigh him down. As a
House and majorities in the political outsider, he pledged to
House and Senate” (Heersink follow through on the anti-
2018). Democrats shifted their
This Catch-22 establishment and socially
focus away from the American subsequently conservative promises that
South and, at times, even Republicans were making for
opposed them to position triggered the long- decades. This growing
themselves strategically for long- connection between the GOP
term political gain. In contrast, term shift in the and white supremacy is reported
the New Deal coalition party’s message by a Washington Post poll,
constrained Republicans, which which found that among
made them target the South as a towards Republicans who rated white
new source for forming a nationalists very unfavorably,
majority coalition (Heersink nationalist- less than half of respondents
2018).
However, the GOP was
populism on that endorsed the conspiracy theory
that millions of fraudulent mail-
operating under a degree of risk: has accelerated in ballots had been
“A full embrace of white counted. However, 67 percent
segregationists in the South over the last four of Republicans who rated white
could hurt the party elsewhere
in the nation. Thus, Republican
years, in parallel to nationalists very favorably think
that millions of fraudulent mail-
leaders faced the problem of the country’s in ballots were cast (Nagler and
having to simultaneously appeal Zilinsky 2021).
to Southern Whites, while not political decay. The GOP’s ideological
alienating its existing voting base evolution explains why many
in the Northeast, Midwest, and Republicans are afraid to oppose
West” (Heersink 2018). Republicans defined Trump. When all the major networks projected
their core ideology as anti-establishmentarian Biden’s victory, Republicans held off on
and socially conservative and resorted to acknowledging the outcome as Trump spouted
discriminatory undertones to carefully balance election fraud. Some Republicans remained
their messaging. This Catch-22 subsequently silent, while others even condoned his lies. It is
triggered the long-term shift in the party’s clear that Trump’s grip over the party has
message towards nationalist-populism, one that enabled him to take it hostage; his influence
has accelerated over the last four years, in over the GOP’s constituents granted him the
parallel to the country’s political decay power to end his Republican colleagues’
(Fukuyama 2021). political careers if any of them decided to cross
The GOP made a ‘pact with the devil’— him. Furthermore, Republicans were likely
they were initially afforded a reliable attempting to undermine the voting system as

14
 15
Photo by Todd Trapani • unsplash.com
part of a strategy to energize their voters ahead
of the Senate run-off elections in Georgia
(Tanfani and Lewis 2020)— as the balance of
power in the upper congressional chamber
depended on those two seats. This behavior on
their part also lays the foundation for voter
suppression in future elections. As Republican
Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News, “if we
don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re
going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in
this country” (Lewis and Tanfani 2020).
Hence, Republicans are now facing the
uncomfortable possibility of adopting
Trumpism as their new ideology to preserve
their voter base. But this entirely depends on
whether Republicans decide to oppose Trump
or not – a conviction in the upcoming Senate
trial (at time of writing) most certainly presents
an opportunity for the GOP to break away from
him. It remains unlikely that Trump will be
convicted; although, up until recently, it did not
seem impossible considering the damning
evidence against him (such as the testimonies of
rioters), the bipartisan impeachment in the
House and the possibility that Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell may seek a conviction.
Some Republican senators were reportedly
discretely lobbying for a conviction, albeit
depending on their individual assessments
about how their vote may harm their re-election
chances (Kamarck 2021). However, the Senate
recently tabled a motion by Senator Rand Paul
(R-Ky.) that would have dismissed the second
impeachment trial of Trump, and 45 Senate
Republicans sided with Paul on the
motion, including Mitch McConnell—a pretty
sure sign that Democrats do not have the votes
to convict Trump, and that Mitch McConnell
does not seem to be interested anymore in a
conviction, or even a trial.
Either way, the GOP’s future is at stake
because a clean break from Trump will be
difficult. Trump had previously discussed
affiliating himself with a new political party
called the ‘Patriot Party’ to threaten Republicans
before his campaign team distanced themselves
from the idea a few days later (Brewster 2021).
Alternatively, some observers predict that
16
Trump may build his own media empire—the
demand for it is most certainly there. Even if
Republicans move forward to convict, Trump
reserves the ability to break the party’s coalition
if he can maintain his current influence over
their constituency. This existential threat
potentially looms over Republicans, with or
without a conviction, and arguably represents
the latter end of the devil's pact Republicans
made decades earlier, and again in 2016.
That being said, Trump’s influence
could dwindle over time, too, for several
reasons. First, Trump is a charismatic showman
whose energy and style that fabricated his
personality cult cannot be replicated easily. His
social media ban also cuts off the direct
communication link with his supporters,
making it more difficult for him to energize his
base. Second, a possible conviction in the Senate
would disbar him from ever holding public
office again, and a 2024 presidential run would
be out of the question (Kamarck 2021). Third,
Trump is subject to multiple ongoing criminal
investigations into his finances and business
dealings. These growing pressures, as well as
mounting financial debt, would possibly disable
him from financing many of his future political
ambitions. Several banks, including Deutsche
Bank, have already terminated partnerships with
the Trump Organization (Scuffham et al. 2020).
All things considered, if Republicans can
overcome Trump’s White House exit,
Trumpism will remain a potent force for the
foreseeable future, mostly for offering more
skilled conservative politicians an ideological
platform to run on (Luce 2021). We can already
observe how some of Trump’s Republican
opponents from 2016 behave differently,
especially when leveraging his election fraud
claims for political gain. For example, Ted Cruz
objected to the Arizonian electoral votes’ validity
on the day of the Capitol riot. He “may well
inherit the Trump base” (Kamarck 2021), even
though he was once an adamant critic of Trump
and even subject to his multiple famous insults.
As for the GOP, the 2020 election proved that
it is at a crossroads. Trump has disrupted the
GOP’s decades-long core messaging which has
been balanced delicately between the American
South and other constituencies. It may
consequently split the party.
The Incoming Administration
Unifying a deeply divided nation is quite
possibly the greatest challenge for the incoming
Biden-Harris administration. ‘Normalcy’ may
reinstate some stability, but the underlying
conditions that led to Trump's presidency and
in its final days to the Capitol siege remain.
Biden’s diverse cabinet appointees and his
hopeful inaugural message have undoubtedly
demonstrated a change in tides. However, the
new administration must be held accountable
for its promises, particularly towards minority
groups that essentially granted Biden the
presidency. It should be noted then that Biden’s
vow to unify the country arguably sets him up
for failure. It is unlikely that Biden can stitch
back together America’s torn social fabric. If
Biden can reign in ‘normalcy’ and reinforce the
safeguards of democracy, that is indeed
something one can build a presidency around;
bringing civility back into the political debate,
along with some of the core principles of
democracy that have been neglected in the US
for years now. Nevertheless, the COVID-19
pandemic poses another unprecedented
challenge which requires the incoming
administration’s wholehearted attention.
On the bright side, the 2020 election
brought progress to America. Kamala Harris was
elected Vice President (VP)—the first woman
and woman of color from a multi-ethnic
background to hold this office (Kambhampaty et
al. 2020). She represents a changing America, in
terms of representation, inclusion and equal
opportunity. VPs are traditionally selected based
on geography from swing states that may aid the
presidential candidate in the general election
(Burns et al. 2020). However, Biden selected his
running mate based on demographic, suggesting
a possible shift in priorities among America’s
renewed national leadership. Harris brings her
strong character and prosecutorial background
into the White House, albeit criticisms for her
17
controversial voting record on criminal justice
during her tenure as Attorney General in
California (Aster and Ember 2020). The VP
reserves a crucial role in representing the US
abroad, and Harris' capacities in that realm will
certainly be put to the test in coming years. The
fact is that American foreign policy has become
tainted by ‘exceptionalism,’ and Harris as VP
may present an opportunity to indicate a change
in posture towards non-Western countries. The
Biden-Harris administration will have to
confront the Capitol riots' gruesome images
every time they would want to reassert the US as
the world’s moral and democratic leader for the
foreseeable future. As Secretary of State
Anthony Blinken put it: "There's no doubt that
our ability to speak with that strong voice for
democracy and human rights took a hit with
what happened on January 6th and happened at
the Capitol" (Haltiwanger 2021). America’s soft
power took a hard hit, and it remains to be seen
how the international community will embrace
Biden’s administration. There is a narrow
window of opportunity to re-establish the US’
credibility, but this will depend on whether
Biden can follow through on his campaign
promises early on in his presidency. Biden was
already off to a solid start before he even
assumed office—Harris’ appointment is only the
tip of the iceberg as Biden rolls out a diverse set
of cabinet nominees. If approved by the Senate,
the Biden administration will look more like
America than any other administration in the
country’s history.
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19
 Photo by Charlie Red • unsplash.com
Climate Refugees, the Missing Piece of
the Refugee Convention
Written by Ana Nico Clement and Bram Burger
W
hat are the human rights of climate
refugees in relation to the 1951
Refugee Convention?
To what extent can climate refugees be protected
by the international legal regime despite its
exclusion from the 1951 Refugee Convention
and 1967 Protocol?
20
!"
The warming of the climate is beginning to
reveal increasing human insecurities in high-risk
areas (Ecological Threat Register, 2020). New
levels of ecological threats, food and water
scarcity, and natural disasters are sparking
concerns that many may be forced to migrate or
seek refuge abroad. The 2020 Ecological Threat
Register suggests that as many as 1.2 billion
people are at risk of displacement by 2050 as a
result of climate change (Ecological Threat
Register, 2020). These climate-induced migrants
fall outside of the legal definition of the 1951
United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees
and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of
Refugees. This has serious implications for a
rights-based approach to tackling the looming
challenge. While state actors have moved slowly
to offer any remedy to this issue, the
international agenda is reluctantly beginning to
turn to the question of climate migration.
This paper will investigate the existing
legal human rights understanding of migration
in relation to climate change, providing insight
from the case of the Republic of Kiribati before
establishing some pathways for a rights-based
approach to a protection regime for climate
migrants and refugees. First, the existing
international refugee legal framework will be
analyzed in light of climate-induced migration.
Second, the case of Kiribati will be brought
forward as one of the states most susceptible to
have climate change play a push factor for mass
emigration. Finally, we will provide future
outlooks on the inclusion of climate refugees in
international law.
International Refugee Law &
Climate-Induced Migration
The question of climate change-induced
displacement can best be understood through
the lenses of refugee law or environmental law.
As of now, no legal instruments address the
issue and there is no international mandate for
climate change refugee protection and
assistance. The principle doctrine addressing
refugee rights is the 1951 Convention Relating
to the Status of Refugees.1 Article 1 (2) of the
convention defines a refugee as:
1 5
UNHRC, “Convention and protocol relating to the
status of refugees”, 1951
2
UNHRC, “Convention and protocol relating to the
status of refugees”, 1951
3 8
Ibid.
4 9
Ibid.
21
“Someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their
country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group, or political
opinion.”2
This narrow and selective definition does not
encompass climate refugees within its scope. As
a status and rights-based doctrine, the
convention offers its beneficiaries basic
standards of treatment amongst which non-
discrimination, non-penalization, and non-
refoulement are the most widely recognized.3 It
also focuses on various forms of assistance
ranging from access to the courts, to work and
travel documentation.4 Hence, the 1951
Convention is an important building block to
human rights and the international protection
of refugees.5 The 1967 Protocol relating to the
Status of Refugees is another important legal
instrument that expanded the Convention’s
applicability to refugees who fled after January 1,
1951.6 It provides no further information on the
matter of climate-related displacement.7
Defining Environmental and
Climate Change refugees
In 1985, Essam El-Hinnawi, member of the
United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) produced the most widely employed
definition of environmental refugees.8 He
describes environmental refugees as:
“Those people who have been forced to leave their
traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently,
because of a marked environmental disruption
(natural and/or triggered by people that jeopardized
their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of
their life.”9
Ibid.
6
UNHCR, “Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees”,
1967.
7
Ibid.
Hinnawi, “Environmental Refugees”, 1985.
Ibid.
Meanwhile, definitions have been presented as
working papers in various United Nations
bodies defining climate refugees. Biermann and
Boas offered the following definition for the
United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change:
Climate refugees are “those who have to leave their
habitats, immediately or in the near future, because of
sudden or gradual alterations in their natural
environment related to at least one of three impacts of
climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events,
and drought and water scarcity.”10
Despite increased attention towards working
definitions, both of the terms remain
unrecognized by the UNHCR11. Recent
developments in legal literature have expanded
the definition encompassing the type of
relocation, what constitutes “being forced to
flee,” the nature of environmental change and
the timeline of the changes (Docherty & al,
2009).
Protection Gap
The issue relating to the definition of refugees is
that they exclude the increasing number of
individuals fleeing environmental catastrophes,
who may receive fewer protections than other
displaced individuals. Some attempts have been
made by the UNHCR to remedy the gap
through various working papers. In 2017, the
body issued “Legal considerations on refugee
protection for people fleeing conflict and famine
affected countries.”12 This code for instance
applies the 1951 Convention to individuals
fleeing armed conflicts in situations of drought
famine.13 Where an interaction exists between
climate change and conflict, protection has been
10
Biermann, “Preparing for a Warmer World”, 2010.
11
UNHCR, “Climate Change and Disaster
Displacement”, 2020.
12
UNHCR, “Legal considerations on refugee
protection”, 2017.
13
Ibid.
14
Weerasinghe, “In Harm’s Way: International
protection in the context of nexus dynamics”, 2018.
22
expanded.14 What the UNHCR refers to as a
nexus dynamics has been the closest solution to
the protection gap in international law to date.15
Case Study Kiribati
To look at how international human rights law
could protect climate migrants and refugees in
practice despite the protection gap, it is
important to consider the monumental case of a
Kiribati citizen suing New Zealand in 2019. The
Republic of Kiribati, a small pacific island state
with a population of around 100,000 people is
a collection of 32 Coral Atolls. When climate
change is often depicted to be impacting the
earth, most people think of these small pacific
island states as we speak sinking into the sea.16
The case of Kiribati demonstrates clearly that
this fear is warranted, with the World Health
Organization (WHO) indicating that since
1993, sea levels have risen 1-4mm annually, with
an average elevation of around 2 meters, the
expected rise will exponentially increase the
threat of submergence of the island, which is
without a doubt exacerbated by climate
change.17 These threats stem from issues such as,
Ocean acidification and increasing
temperatures, as they are expected to rise by
around 3,8 degrees in 2100. These are all
exacerbated by an extremely poor per capita
GDP of only around a thousand USD, spelling
the perfect climate change disaster.18
The case at hand has two parts to it,
namely the New Zealand national courts and the
United Nations Human Rights Council. For the
first part, according to New Zealand's national
court's case description, the defendant, Mr.
Ioane Teitiota and his wife who moved to New
Zealand from Kiribati in 2007, overstayed their
15
Ibid.
16
WHO, “Climate and Healthy Country Profile 2017
Kitibati”, 2017.
17
WHO, “Climate and Healthy Country Profile 2017
Kitibati”, 2017.
18
Ibid.
visa after it had expired in October 2010. In
order to remain in the country legally, they
applied for refugee status under the
Immigration Act of 2009 which incorporated
the 1951 Convention into national law.19 He
argued that he should be entitled to the status of

“…new violent land

a refugee “based on changes to his environment
in Kiribati caused by sea-level-rise associated
with climate change.”20 This appeal was rejected
by a New Zealand domestic court, the High
Court, and finally, the Supreme Court, which
upheld the decisions made by the courts of lower disputes had occurred
instances in 2015. The courts essentially argued
that even though the native island Mr. Teitiota on the island due to
was from (South Tarawa) had been
compromised and did not have the carrying environmental
capacity for the current population due to
“population growth, urbanization, limited degradation ruining all
infrastructure, sudden onset of environment
effects (such as storms) and slow-onset processes
land, rendering
(such as salinization and sea-level rise),” his
migration had been “voluntary adaptive
subsistence farming
migration” and was not forced under the refugee
convention.21 For this reason, they rejected his
nearly impossible and
claims and attempted to deport him as the leading to the
demonstrated environmental conditions faced
are not so parlous that his life will be placed in contamination of
jeopardy […] or that he could not live a substant
life with dignity.”22 freshwater by
In 2015, after the Supreme Court ruling,
Mr. Teitiota turned to the UNDRC, claiming saltwater.
that by deporting him, New Zealand had
violated his right to life under the International
Convention on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR) as sea-level rise and other climate
change effects had rendered his return
impossible.23 Furthermore, new evidence came
to light that new violent land disputes had
occurred on the island due to environmental
degradation ruining all land, rendering
subsistence farming nearly impossible and
leading to the contamination of freshwater by
saltwater.24 All these factors would also violate

19 23
Buchanan, “New Zealand: Climate Change Refugee, OHCHR, “Historic UN Human Rights Case Opens Door
Case Overview”, 2015. to Climate Change Asylum Claims”, 2020.
20 24
Ibid. OHCHR, “Historic UN Human Rights Case Opens Door
21
Ibid. to Climate Change Asylum Claims”, 2020.
22
Ibid.

23
his right to adequate shelter, water, and food.
His appeal at the HRC was denied because the
council claimed there was insufficient evidence
to convince New Zealand as the state of Kiribati
was using all available resources to combat the
issues, therefore, under the legal conditions, the
court decided that he was not being persecuted.
However, not all Council members agreed. In
January of 2020, when the
ruling was issued, Duncan Laki
international efforts, climate change may force
more violations of states' human rights
obligations. “Given that the risk of an entire
country being submerged underwater is an
extreme risk, the conditions of life in such a
country may become incompatible with the
right to life.”27
Conclusion

“
Muhumuza of Uganda, stated In conclusion, as this paper has
the following; “conditions of demonstrated, the 1951 refugee
life laid out by the author – convention is currently not
resulting from climate change appropriately designed and used
in the Republic of Kiribati, are Without true regarding environmental migrants
significantly grave, and pose a and refugees. Their situations, as
real, personal and reasonably
national and seen in the Kiribati case,
foreseeable risk of a threat to international demonstrate they are outside of
his life under Article 6(1).” 25
the scope, however, the case also
This became part of a efforts, climate demonstrated very clear
landmark movement as the connections between
committee clarified that change may force fundamental human rights. The
individuals seeking asylum more violations of consistent violation of these
fundamental human rights due to
status are not required to prove
they would face immense states’ human climate change-induced events
harm, as climate-induced harm and situations should become
through both sudden-onset rights obligations. states' priorities when designing
events and slow-onset, could policy and future environmental
through valid reasoning trigger human rights. Finally, as
an individual need to cross the indicated, the concepts of
border to seek protection from “climate refugee” and
climate change. 26
This “environmental” refugees have
UNHRC ruling became the not yet been recognized by the
first instance in which a UN human rights body UNHCR or international courts, either
saw a complaint from an asylum seeker fleeing establishing a broadened refugee status under
from a location affected by climate change and the current convention or the adoption of these
even though the case did not go through in Mr. new statuses and future conditions under future
Teitiota’s favor, it continues to be of importance international legal frameworks. It is paramount
for climate migrants and asylum seekers. The that those who have been displaced and
UNHRC further made a plea to the damaged by environmental impacts must be
international community to stand up for their protected more than they currently are, as their
legal human rights obligation, in the face of lives are affected more rapidly than ever, the
climate change renewing their efforts to mitigate human rights frameworks are stalling.
the negative impacts. Without true national and

25 27
HRC, “Views adopted by the Committee under article 5 (4) HRC, “Views adopted by the Committee under article
of the Optional Protocol”, 2019. 5 (4) of the Optional Protocol”, 2019.
26
Kobal, “UN Landmark Case for People Displaced by
Climate Change”, 2020.

24

References
Biermann, Frank, and Boas, Ingrid. "Preparing for a Warmer
World: Towards a Global Governance System to
Protect Climate Refugees." Global Environmental Politics
10, no. 1 (2010): 60-88.
Buchanan, Kelly. “New Zealand: ‘Climate Change Refugee’
Case Overview.” The Law Library of Congress, July
2015. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/climate-change-
refugee/new-zealand-climate-change-refugee-case.pdf.
Docherty, Bonnie, and Giannini, Tyler. "Confronting a Rising
Tide: A Proposal for a Convention on Climate Change
Refugees." The Harvard Environmental Law Review :
HELR 33, no. 2 (2009): 349.
Hinnawi, Essam E. Environmental Refugees. Nairobi : UNEP,
1985.
Kobal, Mitja. “UN Landmark Case for People Displaced by
Climate Change.” Amnesty International, January 20,
2020.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/01/u
n-landmark-case-for-people-displaced-by-climate-change.
OHCHR. “Historic UN Human Rights Case Opens Door to
Climate Change Asylum Claims.” United Nations
Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner,
2020.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Displa
yNews.aspx?NewsID=25482.
25
UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), Views adopted by the
Committee under article 5 (4) of the Optional
Protocol, concerning communication No. 2728/2016,
24 October 2019, CCPR/C/127/D/2728/2016
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "Climate
Change and Disaster Displacement." UNHCR. Last
modified 2020. https://www.unhcr.org/climate-
change-and-disasters.html.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Convention
and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva:
UNHCR, 1951. https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Legal
Considerations on Refugee Protection for People Fleeing
Conflict and Famine Affected Countries. UNHCR,
2017.https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/5906e0824.pdf.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Protocol
relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva: UNHCR,
1967.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages
/ProtocolStatusOfRefugees.aspx
Weerasinghe, Sanjula. In Harm’s Way: International Protection in
the Context of Nexus Dynamics Between Conflict or Violence
and Disaster or Climate Change. Geneva, Switzerland:
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
2018. https://www.unhcr.org/5c1ba88d4.pdf.
WHO. “Climate and Healthy Country Profile 2017 Kitibati.”
World Health Organization, 2017.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/health-and-
climate-change-country-profile-2017-kiribati.
 !"

Photo by Mat Napo • unsplash.com

The Emergence of the COVID

Vaccine: Silver Bullet?
Written by Lucas van den Heuvel
Edited by Taylor Brown

T
he intermingling of the social and the
science is a delicate process which creates
multifaceted healthcare interventions
aimed at the targeting of disease spread and
following eradication. The recent COVID-19
pandemic and subsequent curfews and
lockdowns have created a sense of restlessness
towards addressing the virus. The global face of
COVID-19 alleviation is the vaccine. Vaccines,
when widely and equally distributed, provide
relatively rapid treatment to combat the spread
of infectious diseases. This narrative, combined
with those fueled through prematurely
published news articles, may encourage the idea
that vaccines will be the silver bullet response in
tackling COVID-19. However, a long-term

26
pandemic such as COVID-19 has equally
lengthy socioeconomic repercussions following
from the supposed ‘end’, such as increased
unemployment rates and lack of accessibility to
adequate medical care. The vaccine could prove
impactful, yet these stipulations suggest that the
overreliance on a miracle cure is ill-advised and
should be cushioned by thorough policy-making
addressing all sectors affected by the virus.
As elaborated by Lantz et al. (2007), the
hyper-focus on the notion of a miracle cure
diverts attention from the wider public health
grievances. The socioeconomic burdens brought
upon by COVID-19 are pressured when these
issues are left to manifest, rather than be
incorporated into a comprehensive plan to
tackle the pandemic (Benjamin et al., 2020).
Firstly, the distribution of the vaccine depends
largely on international relations, and the ability
to procure sufficient funding to secure the
vaccine (Benjamin et al., 2020). The “rat race”
towards the vaccine has influenced the patterns
of equal distribution, as countries producing
vaccines are able to dictate the distributive
efforts (Mullard, 2020). A projected $4.3 billion
was needed to secure distribution of the vaccine
in developing nations, due to insufficient
infrastructure and funding (UN, 2020).
Developing nations pre-COVID-19 withstood
gaps in access to healthcare, as well as education
and infrastructure to combat this. The addition
of the pandemic has resulted in excess strain;
without financial aid from third parties, certain
nations do not possess the ability to acquire the
vaccine at a pace to outweigh demand (UN,
2020). This data suggests that the distribution of
the vaccine cannot reach communities that have
been largely affected on a global scale to the
extent that it could be classified as a silver bullet
solution.
Following this, the distribution of
healthcare funding and pre-existing policies in
countries is a further obstacle faced when
projecting the idea that the vaccine is a silver
bullet. The EU member states along with five
other high-income countries had pre-ordered
half of the available vaccines in 2020, however
27
this accounted for only 13% of the global
population (Mullard, 2020). Buying power of
high-income countries is therefore evidenced to
influence the equal distribution of the vaccine,
leaving the remainder of the global population
amidst the pandemic. In relation to adequate
funding, the details of policies within certain
nations further influence the ability for the
vaccine to provide resolve. For example, the
United States of America (USA) is framed as a
high-income country, with the largest percentage
of their gross domestic product (GDP) being
funneled into healthcare, relative to similar
cases (Lantz, 2019). Despite this, the USA ranks
poorly on many population health indicators,
suggesting that there are avenues being
underfunded and rarely researched (Lantz,
2019). A vaccine for COVID-19 cannot
adequately eradicate the record-high
unemployment rates in the USA, peaking at
14.8% in April of 2020, specifically affecting
ethnic minorities and those with lower
educational attainment (CRS, 2021). Even if
accessibility to the vaccine remained open to
these groups, it does not address the systematic
impact that the virus has had on economic and
social stability. Short-term reliefs such as the
stimulus cheques distributed in the USA fail to
compensate for the extent of the damages caused
by COVID-19 and should be paired with social
outreach programs aimed at tackling the
underlying issues (Lantz et al., 2007). Taking
these factors into account, the efficiency of the
vaccines in reducing COVID-19 spread can be
analyzed and altered when deemed necessary.
On the other hand, following the steady
distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines has
shown that the vaccine has been successful in
reducing the transmission of the virus (Kershner
and Zimmer, 2021). After a Pfizer-BioNTech
vaccination campaign amongst the ages of 60+,
the results had shown a 41% drop in new
COVID-19 cases within the age group in
comparison to the statistics three weeks before
(Kershner and Zimmer, 2021). Positive ripple
effects caused by the impact of the vaccine
“…the hyper-focus on
the notion of a miracle
cure diverts attention
from the wider public
health grievances.

28
Photo by Mat Napo • unsplash.com
included a 31% drop in 60+ years
hospitalizations, as well as a 24% drop in those
existing cases that became critically ill (Kershner
and Zimmer, 2021). Whilst the vaccine appears
to be efficient, the rise of new variants that
weaken the effects of the vaccine make reliance
on the vaccine risky. Furthermore, new case
numbers after the initial vaccination campaign
have risen in Israel, contributed to by relaxed
mindsets towards the social implementations
such as lockdown (Kershner and Zimmer, 2021).
This example, whilst addressing the immense
success of the vaccine, further urges attention to
be drawn to the social sectors that are not being
addressed. This would annul the ability to
categorize the COVID-19 vaccine as a silver
bullet.
Straightforward medical care is often
posited as being an all-encompassing solution,
with the vaccine propelling this narrative to the
forefront in most cases. The distribution of the
COVID-19 in Israel highlights the impact that
vaccines have when combating disease
transmission, yet also reiterates the essential role
that public health plays in the fight against the
pandemic. A vaccination, and more particularly
the COVID-19 vaccination, should not be
posited as a silver bullet solution. The integral
role that vaccines play can only be enhanced
when paired with public health strategies
29
targeting broader underlying factors that
contribute to the burden of COVID-19.
References
Benjamin, D., and Komlos, D.. "Why This Epidemiologist Says
The Vaccine Is Not A Silver Bullet For The U.S.
Forbes." Forbes. December 14, 2020.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminkomlos/2020/
12/14/why-this-epidemiologist-says-the-vaccine-is-not-a-
silver-bullet-for-the-us/?sh=3dd2a825429b.
CRS Report, “Unemployment Rates During the COVID-19
Pandemic: In Brief.” Congressional Research Service.
January 12, 2021.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46554.pdf
Kreshner, I., and Zimmer, C., “Israel’s Vaccination Results
Point a Way Out of Virus Pandemic.” The New York
Times. February 5, 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/middle
east/israel-virus-vaccination.html
Lantz, P., "Who Will Stay Upstream?" Milbank Memorial
Fund. March 18, 2019.
https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/the-
medicalization-of-population-health-who-will-stay-
upstream/.
Lantz, P., Lichtenstein, R., and Pollack, H.A., "Health Policy
Approaches To Population Health: The Limits Of
Medicalization." 1253-1257, Health Affairs 26: 5, 2007
Mullard, A., "How COVID vaccines are being divvied up
around the world." Nature. November 30, 2020.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03370-6.
UN News, “COVID-19 vaccines: Donors urged to step up
funding for needy countries.” UN News. December 11,
2020.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1079842.
 Photo by Marissa Lewis• unsplash.com

!"

Diverging Covid-19 Responses Within

the European Union
Written by Karolina Kneller, Lea Hoopman and
Anisha Chandrasekar

I
t has been one year since the virus SARS-
CoV-2 (Covid-19) began to spread from
Wuhan, China to almost every country
around the globe. Around this sad anniversary,
many European countries are looking back at
the moments that defined 2020. The first wave
of the Covid-19 pandemic swept the continent
during the first half of the year, and, at the
moment of writing, the second (or third) wave is
still in full force. At this point in time, we look
back and try to understand the decisions that
were made during the first wave. Since the start
of the pandemic, the EU has stressed the
importance of a coordinated response, but the

30
member states’ approaches differed greatly.
While some countries went into strict and long
lockdowns, others chose not to restrict people’s
movement at all in an effort to protect the
economy. This article will explore why their
approaches differed so greatly and provide some
tentative explanatory factors.
Although the 1993 Treaty of Maastricht
established public health as a central tenet of the
European community, harmonization has been
explicitly avoided and countries enjoy almost
full sovereignty in the organization of their
national health systems (Hantrais 2020). At the
outset of the pandemic, Ursula von der Leyen
(2020) established a “coronavirus response
team” to facilitate “coordination at all the levels
and all the different sectors'' within the EU.
However, since the EU ought to explicitly
“respect the responsibilities of the Member
States for the definition of their health services
… and organization … of medical care”, each
country was able to enact their own policies
despite established avenues for coordination
(Hantrais, 2020). This strange duality
exemplifies the many debates taking place
within the EU about further integration and
national sovereignty.
This article is an exploratory paper into
the causes of the diverging national approaches
within the European Union. We have chosen to
do this using three different case studies:
Germany, France, and Sweden. These will first
be analyzed individually, and later compared in
the conclusion. While all three EU member
states had the same goal, namely protecting their
citizens from the virus, the trajectories they
chose to do so were vastly different. Between the
countries, we see a gradation in the severity of
lockdowns. France had the strictest measures
with an enforced curfew and explicit restriction
of movement. Sweden, on the other hand,
stands out for its “soft” measures with minimal
legislative controls. And Germany falls
somewhere in between with its focus on
voluntary compliance to a lockdown and few
restrictions on the movement of people but the
closure of many public spaces, shops, schools,
and most of the borders.
31
Since the second wave of the pandemic
is still raging across the continent at full force,
we have chosen to limit our research to the
period defined as ‘the first wave’. This concerns
the period from the second half of January,
when the first cases of the novel coronavirus
were reported within the EU, to the early
summer months, when infections had subsided
to manageable levels and many restrictions were
slowly lifted. Plümper and Neumayer (2020), in
an article which categorizes the varying
lockdown policies of European countries, define
this as a period with “a two-week incidence rate
of below 10 new infections per 100,000 people.”
The times at which these dates were reached are
displayed in Table 1. Since the virus arrived in
the countries at different times, it is impossible
to set concrete dates for the beginning and the
end of the research period. That being said,
tentative comparisons are still possible.
The EU’s divergent approaches come as
no surprise considering the scope of EU
jurisdictions and the power for national leaders
to formulate their own strategies. However,
there are two main aspects which can be used to
characterize the varying EU approaches to the
Covid-19 pandemic. Namely the constraints and
opportunities generated through divergent
political institutions, and the narrative used by
“… the framing and
rhetoric of policies hold
direct consequences for
the manner, in which
public support is
mobilized.
leaders to encourage compliance and morale.
Though not all-encompassing, these are
identified to be the most prominent and
contrasting features that have heavily influenced
and characterized the types of response to the
pandemic- especially during its earlier stages.
The characteristics and capacities of national
health systems and the speed with which
regulations can be implemented all boil down to
features inherent to political institutions.
Likewise, the framing and rhetoric of policies
hold direct consequences for the manner, in
which public support is mobilized. As such, the
difficulty in creating a unified, cross-cultural
approach to the pandemic poses interesting
questions with regards to the further integration
of the Union, and the perceived tension
32
between national and European strategies for
crisis management.
Before exploring the case studies, it is
important to note that case numbers and deaths
per capita are not reliable sources to make
judgements about who did ‘best’ or ‘worst’ in
their approach. There was no uniform method
of data collection across the EU, which meant
that the definition of Covid-19 related deaths
varies per country. Furthermore, differences in
testing capacity and strategy, as well as
bureaucratic efficiency also meant that during
the first wave registered cases did not necessarily
reflect the number of infections. Thus, we have
added other measures to Table 1., such as public
trust and citizen satisfaction, to create a more
accurate picture of the measures.
Photo by Anastasiia Chepinska• unsplash.com
Table 1. A schematic overview of Covid-19 trajectories in our case study.

France Sweden Germany

Population 10.3 (SCB,
67.1 (Insee, 2020) 83.1 (StBA, 2020)
(million, January 01, 2020) 2020)
People with confidence in
national government 34.3% 51.3% 58.7%
(OECD, 2018)
Case numbers
(by August 31, 2020) 261955 84139 242381
(WHO, 2020)
Death rate
(total, per 100,000 population,
30467 5817 9295
August 31)
(WHO, 2020)
Date of first case
17 January 28 January 23 January
(Spiteri et al., 2020)
Days until end of first wave
142 n/a 1 148
(Plümper and Neumayer, 2020)
Medium late
Epidemiological timeliness of lockdown Late lockdown (>10
No
lockdown (>5 and <10 cum. cum. infections per
lockdown
(Plümper and Neumayer, 2020) infections per 100,000)
100,000)
Severity of lockdown Higher degree of No
Moderate lockdown
(Plümper and Neumayer, 2020) restrictions lockdown
Percentage “very & fairly” satisfied
with national Covid-19 response
42% 67% 66%
(April 2020)
(European Parliament, 2020)

1
The two-week incidence rate did not fall below 10 per 100,000 people.

33
Germany
On May 27th, 2020, at the end of the first wave
of the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany, the
country counted almost 180,000 reported
infections and more than 8,300 deaths
associated with the virus (Kluth, 2020; Plümper
and Neumayer, 2020). Germany’s initial
response was praised internationally for being
directed with “sobriety, incrementalism and
nuance” and some referred to the low fatality
rate in the first weeks of the outbreak as the
“German anomaly” (Bennhold, 2020; Kluth,
2020). Not all decisions taken by federal and
state level governments proved to be appropriate
and successful, as was forcefully demonstrated
by a surge in cases in October and high
incidence rates throughout the following
months (Robert Koch Institute [RKI], 2021).
However, there is little doubt that the German
response to the Covid-19 pandemic was highly
successful in the beginning. There are numerous
factors that shaped and characterized these
initial measures.
Germany is a federal state and decisions
related to the health and well-being of the
population generally fall under the authority of
the sixteen states and their respective
governments. Under the Infektionsschutzgesetz
[Infection Protection Act], the federal Ministry
of Health is granted far-reaching powers in case
of an epidemic situation of national concern
(Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2001).
Nevertheless, most regulations and decisions
need to be translated into state level law first.
This has necessitated a close cooperation
between the states and the federal government.
Regular Bund-Länder-Konferenzen [Federal
Government and the States Conferences] were
held, where common measures were discussed
and agreed on (tagesschau.de, 2021). The
German federalism proved to be a strength and
a major factor for a successful management of
the Covid-19 outbreak in the first months
(Kluth, 2020). Only later on, when discussions
around relaxing measures and restrictions
started, the political unity dissolved. The prime
ministers of various states (especially North
34
Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria) started to
criticize the decisions of the federal government
as too strict or too lax. States and the federal
government still agreed on a common plan, but
there was “a lot of creativity in the
interpretation” and implementation of this plan
(Spinney, 2020).
After a first case of Covid-19 was reported
on January 27th, it took some time until the
threat of a large, uncontrolled outbreak was
taken seriously (Spiteri et al., 2020). First
recommendations to practice social distancing
and cancel large events were not complemented
by the closure of schools, shops, and borders
until mid-March (tagesschau.de, 2021). Despite
the dramatic reports and images from China
and Italy, the German authorities, like so many
other European governments, underestimated
the potential for a large-scale outbreak and
spread of the virus. In late February and early
March, Germany continued to send protective
medical gear abroad to support China and Iran
in their fight against Covid-19, equipment that
was later missed by health care workers in
Germany itself (Plümper and Neumayer,
2020). A sign of misjudgment and disregard of
the early scientific evidence. However, once the
gravity of the situation was acknowledged, the
German government clearly followed an
evidence-based approach. During press
conferences and in official statements, it was
emphasized that there would be close
cooperation with the Robert Koch Institute
(RKI) and leading experts (Bundesregierung,
2020). Based on research from the University of
Bonn, chancellor Merkel warned the public of
the likely scenario of 60% to 70% of the
population to become infected without drastic
measures being taken immediately (Glucroft,
2020).
A remarkable feature of the first German
shutdown was its strong reliance on voluntary
compliance, public acceptance, and solidarity
(Stafford, 2020). There were no curfews, people
were allowed to leave their homes for any
reason, as long as they did not gather in groups
and stayed away from busy places (tagesschau.de,
2021). This approach of opting for the “least
35
Photo by Sergi Brylev• unsplash.com
 possible intervention” based on clearly
communicated scientific evidence was rewarded
with strong public support (Lauterbach,
2020). At the end of March, 89% of the
population thought the government was making
the right decisions and 75% viewed the
measures as adequate (Forschungsgruppe
Wahlen e.V., 2020). Protests against the
measures only gained momentum in the later
phase of the first lockdown and over the course
of the summer with large demonstrations,
especially in Berlin (BBC, 2020).
These high levels of acceptance were
achieved by effective and clear communication
as well as a high level of transparency regarding
their justification. Karl Lauterbach, member of
the national parliament and professor of health
economics and clinical epidemiology, believes
that “the communication of the measures […]
has been even more exceptional than the
measures themselves” (Lauterbach, 2020). Great
emphasis was placed on why ‘stay at home’ was
so important. Measures were based on facts and
a strong cooperation with experts and scientists
(Farr, 2020). Throughout the first wave, it was
the federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn and
the RKI president Lothar Wieler who mainly
communicated measures and decisions to the
public. Scientists took on an important advisory
role. Soon, the government and public alike
listened to the expert opinion of virologist
Christian Drosten (Siebert, 2020). Assessments
and recommendations by the national academy
of sciences Leopoldina shaped the political
response (Leopoldina, 2020).
In a rare address of the public on
television, chancellor Merkel referred to the
pandemic as the biggest challenge for German
society since the Second World War and called
for “action in a spirit of solidarity” as a
“community in which each life and each person
counts” (Merkel, 2020). This solidarity was
exemplified by a high degree of political unity
and cooperation across parties which resulted in
a commonly agreed on and consistently
communicated position (Lauterbach, 2020).
The call for solidarity and the clear
communication of science-based measures was
36
supplemented by a third dominant narrative:
the strength of the German health care system.
Within Europe, Germany has one of the highest
numbers of hospital and ICU beds per
population. Due to the federal structure, the
health system is highly decentralized with high
levels of accessibility of health services on a
regional level (Winkelmann and Reichebner,
2020). The same applies to the public health
system. For example, there is not only one
central testing laboratory, but many certified
and quality-controlled laboratories throughout
the country who could start large-scale testing
right when the first cases of Covid-19 appeared
(Stafford, 2020). Hospitals halted all planned
and routine treatments and thereby freed up
enough capacities to even take in patients from
overwhelmed neighboring countries (McCarthy,
2020). High test rates and plenty of free beds on
ICUs likely helped to keep up the spirit of
determination and hope that was present in
large parts of the German population
throughout the first wave.
A high level of public acceptance and
support of the measures paired with the
rigorously implemented strategy to “test, isolate,
[and] trace” contributed to the successful
mitigation of the first wave (Glucroft, 2020).
The strong health system and emphasis on
science and evidence-based policy helped to
maintain some feeling of control and
confidence in a technological fix
(Bundesregierung, 2020; Lauterbach, 2020).
Good communication seems to have been the
solid basis for the high degree of unity and
cooperation across political camps, between
economic sectors, physicians, hospitals, and
within society.
France
When the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed
in France on the 17th of January, the country
seemed well prepared for the coming epidemic
(Spiteri, 2020). After the 9/11 terror attacks
France changed its national security structure. A
notable addition was the explicit mention of
pandemics in its national security doctrine,
 37
Photo by Fran Boloni • unsplash.com
which became even more important after the
first SARS epidemic in 2003 and the fears of
zoonotic diseases affecting the population (IISS,
2020). Nevertheless, the country struggled
significantly during this first wave of the Covid-
19 pandemic. On the 11th of June 2020, France
officially left its state of “health emergency” and
although some restrictions were still in place, the
worst seemed to be over. At that time, France
had recorded 29,257 Covid-19 related deaths
and a total of 151,165 confirmed cases in a
population of around 67 million people
(Statista, 2020; Insee, 2020). The following
section will explore France’s strategy in the
management of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like other European countries, France
was hesitant to openly declare the risk that the
virus posed for the country. When Italy’s cases
started soaring at the beginning of March, this
raised alarms, but no decisive action was taken.
The latter rule is specifically related to the
Mulhouse cluster - a gathering at the end of
February which has been linked to about 2,500
confirmed cases - that significantly accelerated
the spread of Covid-19 in France and abroad
(Salaün, 2020).
Instances like these were the early warning
signs that resulted in the imposition of a
lockdown on the 17th of March. In this respect,
the country reacted similarly to the virus as other
European countries. Although the first cases of
Covid-19 had already been confirmed in France
at the end of January, only after the country had
reached between 5 and 10 cumulative
confirmed coronavirus cases per 100 thousand
people that the country went into lockdown.
This has been classified as a “medium late
lockdown” by Plümper and Neumayer (2020).
From the beginning, France’s government
structure has shaped its approach. The country
has a tradition of being highly centralized, and
almost every major decision is taken in Paris.
Decisions related to the pandemic are made by
the “defense council” and publicized by its head,
president Macron himself, in long televised
speeches. Furthermore, the scientific basis for
these decisions have been made by two new
advisory bodies of scientific experts, instead of
38
the already existing agencies (Hassenteufel,
2020). To understand France’s approach,
understanding the consequences of this
centralization are key, and it provided
advantages as well as several disadvantages.
These will now be discussed in turn.
A clear positive aspect of this
centralization was France’s ability to quickly
impose a strict lockdown. All decisions were
made at the same level, which made them swift
and consistent (The Economist, 2020). As soon
as the nonessential shops were shut down and
travel/movement restrictions instated, these
were complemented by the necessary
bureaucratic tools for enforcement. These
included exemption certificates that were used
by police all over the country (The Economist,
2020). The centralized nature of the government
also enabled the effective relocation of affected
patients from oversaturated hospitals. They were
transported via France’s high-speed train
network and even the military assisted in these
efforts (IISS, 2020; The Economist, 2020).
Another advantage of France’s centralized
political system was its ability to provide
economic assistance to those in need. In a bid to
uphold social welfare for its citizens, the French
government continued to pay the income of
furloughed employees. The government was
criticized heavily for this plan, since some
thought it was easy to abuse (IISS, 2020).
However, this plan already partially covered the
wages of about 3,6 million employees in early
April (The Economist, 2020). In doing so, it
successfully avoided the unemployment of its
population, at least partially, which reduced the
drop in consumer demand in comparison to
other countries and previous economic crises
(IISS, 2020).
Lastly, Macron’s centralization created a
unitary message that ensured stability. The
military was not solely used for logistical
purposes, but also a part of the rhetoric the
French president Emmanuel Macron used to
mobilize his population. Unlike his colleagues
in Germany and Belgium, he specifically called
the pandemic a “war” of the “nation” against a
“common enemy” (Opillard, Palle, and
Michelis, 2020). His speeches likened those of
his predecessor Georges Clemenceau, who was
France’s prime-minister during the First World
War (IISS, 2020). This strong message increased
Macron’s personal approval ratings significantly
(Momtaz, 2020). Although Macron’s unitary
rhetoric of “war” created stability, it also
received a lot of critical backlash. It has been
argued that this rhetoric is one of the strategies
used to deflect from the state’s responsibility in
the mishandling of some aspects of the
pandemic (Opillard, Palle, and Michelis, 2020).
These issues will be discussed in the following
section.
France’s centralized form of government
made it difficult to create an effective testing
structure. In mid-April, the OECD
approximated that France was testing 5.1 in
1000 inhabitants. This is significantly lower
than the OECD average of 15 (Hassenteufel,
2020). Only officially approved laboratories
were allowed to carry out testing. And thus,
although France has a strong healthcare system,
it was unable to use it to its full potential. Many
laboratories that could have carried out effective
testing were ignored, such as private laboratories
and even veterinary labs (IISS, 2020).
Furthermore, other regional decrees that were
drafted by local actors such as curfews or the
wearing of masks were opposed by the
government and its territorial representatives
(Hassenteufel, 2020). Thus, France’s centralized
structure meant that it was unable to adapt to a
situation as unpredictable as this pandemic.
Although a centralized message can be enforced
effectively, it halts innovation if the initial
choice was incorrect. A lesson that the French
government learned the hard way.
These decision-making structures
furthermore affect public opinion. When
decisions are made centrally this also results in a
clear target for criticism. This is a problem for
the French government since political
dissatisfaction already predates the pandemic.
And thus, the political distrust has only been
exacerbated by policies that the public perceives
to be contradicting or inefficient.
39
A particular point of contention in this
process were the municipal elections that were
supposed to be held on the 15th of March. Bars
and restaurants had to close on that same day
and the rhetoric surrounding the risk of the
virus had become increasingly alarmist. As a
result, the refusal to cancel the elections caused
a lot of confusion and distrust in the population
(IISS, 2020). This point of criticism so close to
the start of the measures set the tone for the
criticism the government received throughout.
This perception of contradictory advice
is also exemplified by the dialogue about
facemasks. Although France had a large stock of
face masks around the middle of the decade,
almost none of these stocks had been replaced
and there was a shortage of masks and other PPE
for the country’s medical practitioners. As a
result, like other European governments, the
French government did not initially encourage
its citizens to wear masks. This is notable since it
not only defies evidence from Asian countries’
experiences with Covid-19, but it also differs
from the country’s established pandemic plans
(Hassenteufel, 2020). Once more masks became
available at the end of May, the government
started to encourage their usage, however parts
of the public then started to question the
sincerity of this advice (Hassenteufel, 2020).
Thus, France's highly centralized strategy
against Covid-19 held some great advantages.
The government was able to impose lockdown
measures quickly and effectively, as well as to
help its population in need. On the other hand,
it discouraged regional activities that could have
helped in curbing the virus. Furthermore, the
perceived contradictions and ineffectiveness of
the measures increased the dissatisfaction and
confusion of the population. Although there are
many factors that influence a country’s ability to
deal with a pandemic, France’s decision-making
structure impacted the country’s material and
political abilities to handle the virus.
Sweden
The Swedish approach during the first wave of
the pandemic has been a strikingly controversial
and unorthodox strategy that has been both
admired and criticized across the world. While
most states were quick to enact a lockdown in
March and April, Sweden instead implemented
‘soft’ measures that acted as recommendations
with minimal formal legislative controls
(Kavaliunas et al., 2020). Without ever going
into a lockdown, Sweden’s relaxed approach
kept bars, restaurants, schools, and shops open,
with predominantly relying on voluntary social
distancing to keep infection rates down.
By June 3rd, 2020, nearing the end of the
first wave, Sweden tallied 41,253 total infections
and 4,731 total Covid-19 related deaths
(Worldometer, 2020). At the same time, its
neighboring states of Norway and Finland both
only counted 237 and 321 deaths, respectively.
Although Sweden’s 10.23 million population is
nearly double that of Norway or Finland, its
deaths per 100,000 population still stood much
higher at 43.88 in Sweden compared to 4.46 in
Norway and 5.80 in Finland (Eurostat, 2020;
Wise, 2020). Yet despite the higher fatality rate,
WHO representative Dr. David Nabarro praised
Sweden’s strategy in late August and
commended the way Sweden was able to
sustainably keep its economy running. Likening
a national lockdown to a “blunt instrument,”
Nabarro described its harmful consequences as
one that “really bites into the livelihoods of
everybody, particularly poorer people and small
businesses” (Daly, 2020). As such, Sweden’s no-
lockdown approach remains highly disputed,
both among national and foreign analysts and
experts (Habib, 2020). Though its presumed
success will vary according to time scale,
stakeholder, and indicator, this will delve into
the particularities of how the Swedish approach
was formed and executed in its early months.
The first imported case of Covid-19 in
Sweden was detected on the 31st of January
2020, exactly a day after the WHO declared the
virus as a threat to human health (Ludvigsson,
2020). The second case came nearly a month
later on the 26th of February, which then
prompted the National Board of Health and
Welfare (NBHW) to place the virus under high
alert. The risk for imported cases were deemed
40
high and general transmissions were considered
moderate but the only message voiced by the
government discouraged the public from
unnecessary visits to healthcare and elderly care
facilities. The only formal legislation was
imposed on the 11th of March where gatherings
of more than 500 people were forbidden. Two
weeks later, this was further tightened to
gatherings above 50 people alongside a ban on
visiting elderly care facilities- a high-risk group
which were beginning to experience a growing
wave of infections. Apart from this, the majority
of communications were framed as voluntary
recommendations and advice- including
working from home, staying at home if sick,
avoiding travel, practicing good hand hygiene
and physical distancing (Ludvigsson, 2020).
Though Sweden has a generously
financed health system, with 10.8% of GDP
allocated towards healthcare in 2018, its
fragmented nature leaves room for discrepancy
between policy formulation and enforcement
(Kavaliunas et al., 2020). The three key actors
that make up Sweden’s healthcare system,
include (1) the central government and its
national agencies, (2) the 21 administrative
regions responsible for regional healthcare and
(3) the 290 municipalities responsible for
disabled and elderly care. As stipulated in the
Constitution, there is a high level of
decentralization and power sharing between
municipalities and national agencies that
prevent ministers from authoritatively
intervening in day-to-day activities. Ministers are
able to voice their opinions but do not have the
power to override decisions made by
independent agencies. As such, Sweden’s ‘soft’
approach stems from its institutional landscape
where coordination is complex and politicians
do not have the authority to make ‘strong and
fast’ decisions, as they have been able to in other
countries (Ludvigsson, 2020). Instead, the
primary means of directing the region is through
nudges and informal instruments such as
bargaining and providing information to local
authorities (Pierre, 2020). On the one hand, the
high levels of interpersonal and institutional
trust have facilitated a culture of compliance
Photo by Linus Mimietz• unsplash.com

41
through past experiences that have enabled
Sweden to rely on these informal mechanisms to
yield efficient coordination. However, that said,
the volatile and uncertain landscape of the
Covid-19 pandemic have revealed the pitfalls of
high fragmentation, such as the slow-moving
nature in moments of crisis and the weak power
of the central government (Pierre, 2020).
Another major obstacle to rapid and
coordinated intervention by the central
government is Sweden’s legal framework and the
incompatibility of enacting a lockdown under
the existing Constitution. Since 1974, one
condition reads that “Swedish citizens have the
right to move freely within Sweden and leave the
country” (Ludvigsson, 2020). While there is also
an Infectious Diseases Act that imposes
conditions on the restriction of individual
movements, it does not allow for a region-wide
national lockdown. As such, most measures
have to be framed as voluntary
recommendations. That said, surveys have
shown that 89% of the Swedish public place a
high level of confidence in expert knowledge
and between 60% to 80% have trust in the
Public Health Agency of Sweden (PHA) and the
state of national healthcare (Kavaliunas et al.,
2020).
This narrative of individual
responsibility is also highly present within the
social contract of Swedish society. Sweden has a
long-standing history of placing a high value on
secular-rational and self-expression values that
have characterized the nation as “individualism
within a social contract” (Kavaliunas et al.,
2020). Accordingly, the dominant political
rhetoric has stressed individual responsibility
and that each citizen has a duty to limit
transmission and protect fellow citizens
(Ludvigsson, 2020). So as to avoid conflict or
disrupt social order, the Swedish etiquette of
public trust has meant that recommendations
will be followed without needing coercive
control (Kavaliunas et al., 2020). This culture of
mutual trust and collective action is pertinent
and has been preserved through other aspects of
Swedish society, such as its universalistic welfare
system. In part due to established solidarity, high
42
state support and strong public trust, citizens
were successful in adhering to the government’s
clear and consistent advice.
One intriguing feature of the
government’s advice is the omission of
encouraging face masks outside of healthcare
and elderly care settings. Though supplies were
reported to be low in Mid-February, the
Government acted on this finding one month
later on the 16th of March to commission
NBHW to distribute more protective
equipment to regional health authorities. Staff
and personnel working with the elderly began
wearing facemasks in April and May, however,
this was retrospectively an overdue action since
75% of complaints in the early months were
related to shortages in elderly care homes and
outbreaks and fatalities had already occurred
(Habib, 2020). In Mid-April, 89.1% of Covid-19
deaths were found in those 70 years or older
while only 2.3% of deaths were found in
patients younger than 60 (Kavaliunas et al.,
2020). Especially considering a cornerstone of
the Swedish strategy being to isolate and protect
the most vulnerable, the number of deaths in
elderly homes has been admitted as a glaring
“failure”- even by chief epidemiologist Anders
Tegnell (Habib, 2020). Another key limitation
in Sweden’s containment strategy was its poor
understanding and underestimation of
asymptomatic transmissions. Even after initial
PPE shortages and once the WHO began
recommending more widespread usage of
facemasks in June, Swedish authorities were still
reluctant to enact new advice (Ludvigsson,
2020).
Although not posited as a formal goal,
reaching herd immunity was inherent and
integral to the Swedish strategy and has been far
from achieved (Habib, 2020). With infections
soaring in the second wave of late 2020, it is
increasingly clear that the “Swedish
Experiment” is now over, and policymakers have
since abandoned their hands-off approach
(Pancevski, 2020). In late November, a press
conference featured Prime Minister Stefan
Löfven announcing a new ban on gatherings
with more than eight people and the closure of
several leisure sector businesses. The strategy
that had once been admired for its compatibility
with keeping up the economy has failed to
produce its desired effects. In the first two
quarters of 2020, GDP fell by 8.5% with
unemployment predicted to rise to 10% by
2021. Instead of providing support and stimulus
to businesses, the reduced demand has
inevitably prompted a wave of closures. Not only
has the economy performed poorly but public
trust – which has been so key throughout the
first wave – is now dwindling and confidence is
falling. The cultural values of solidarity and
individual responsibility have indeed meant that
Sweden was able to pull off a strategy that would
likely not work in a different part of the world.
However, ultimately, the approach suffered
from an oversight of key scientific information
and slow implementation of national policies.
Discussion and Conclusion
Comparing the crisis management of Germany,
France, and Sweden during the first wave of the
corona pandemic has revealed great differences
in how things were handled within the
European Union. Although there are many
different and complex factors that impacted the
way in which governments handled and
populations received the protective measures
and restrictions, the three case studies point
towards two important aspects in particular: the
institutional structure and the dominant
narrative and frames that were used by the
governments when communicating with the
public.
The institutional organization and
structure of the three countries ranges from the
highly centralized system in France, where
virtually all decisions were taken by the
government in Paris, to the decentralized
systems of Germany and Sweden. Whereas in
Germany much of the decision-making power in
health-related matters rests with the
governments of the 16 states, in Sweden
decisions are taken on an even more basic level.
Here, municipalities and national agencies enjoy
a high degree of autonomy.
43
As pointed out above, these structures
result both in advantages and disadvantages in
the face of a national public health crisis. In
Germany, the decentralized nature of the health
system has resulted in a relatively high
availability of testing material and hospital beds.
Especially in the first weeks after cases began to
emerge within the country, this also allowed the
states to impose measures quickly and
efficiently, without having to wait for a
coordinated response by the federal
government. This may be one of the reasons why
the German handling of the pandemic seemed
highly successful at first. However, the initial
high degree of political unity started to falter
once a relaxation of the measures was debated.
In the following, the downsides of federalism
were increasingly prominent and appeared in
the form of long debates, an uneven
implementation of regulations, and a lot of
confusion among citizens.
In Sweden, the constitutional barriers to
the imposition of a strict, nation-wide lockdown
were a major ground for the alternative, ‘soft’
and ‘nudging’ approach. The emphasis of
voluntary measures affirms the self-conception
of solidarity among the Swedish people and were
thus met with a high level of public support and
acceptance, at least at first. However, this
approach became more difficult to sustain, as
case numbers continue to surge, and the rate of
new infections increases uncontrollably. The
poor performance of the economy and the
inadequate scientific foundations of the ‘no
lockdown’ strategy has created tension among
experts and led to a falling level of public trust.
Moving forward, the high fatalities from the first
wave and the failed efforts to reach herd
immunity make it highly unlikely that Sweden
will persist with their approach after all.
 In contrast, the highly centralized system
of France allowed for stricter measures that
could be implemented very quickly by the
national authorities in Paris. There being only
one dominant voice that announced and
communicated to the public meant that there
was little confusion as to nature and extent of
the measures. However, there is also hardly
room for checks-and-balances. Mistakes made at
this high level of governance have therefore
considerably more far-reaching effects than in
Germany or Sweden, where decisions are mainly
taken on lower levels. Also, there was less chance
for political debate and discourse about the
appropriateness and effectiveness of measures.
When looking at the French public health
system, its organizational structure meant that it
was slow to react to the highly dynamic nature
of the pandemic.
These differences in institutional
structures, combined with the culture and self-
perception of the three peoples, also resulted in
different narratives and images that were evoked
by government authorities in their
communication with the public. All three
narratives are based on the implicit duty towards
one’s fellow citizens to protect each other from
the adverse effects of a Covid-19 infection.
There is, however, considerable variation in the
relation of this dutiful solidarity and the
obligation to the state, as well as in the language
that was used to convey these messages. In
Germany, solidarity was paired with the need for
a major national effort to contain the spread of
the virus. References to the country’s history
tapped the German awareness of civic duty to
work together and avert a national catastrophe.
A high level of public support was ensured
mainly by grounding decisions in science and
evidence, as well as the optimistic accounts
about the strong German health system. French
authorities referred to the civic duty of the
French people as well, albeit in a way that would
have been impossible in Germany, considering
the country’s past. When Macron deployed a
militaristic rhetoric and framed the public
health efforts in terms of a state of war, he
attempted to rally the masses by evoking a
44
feeling of obligation and duty to defend the
French nation. This language also justified the
drastic measures that were taken by the
government, suggesting that the laws of war
differ from those in peace time. Quite in
contrast, the narrative in Sweden was much
more focused on the personal responsibility of
every person to ensure their own well-being and
that of all fellow citizens. The emphasis on self-
reliance and responsibility within the Swedish
social contract allows for the reference to the
obligations that come with the extensive
personal rights and freedoms. The Swedish
concept of governance and the state is only
possible if citizens feel responsible to act on their
own and comply with their implicit obligations.
“
In our case studies we
found no explicit reference
to a European solidarity.
Interestingly, none of these narratives
pointed towards a solidarity beyond the national
boundaries and fellow German, French, or
Swedish citizens. In our case studies we found
no explicit reference to a European solidarity.
While Covid-19 has uncloaked the underlying
nationalism which guides individual states, it
may also act as a steppingstone for carving out a
new ideal. The responses to the first wave in
Europe have been plagued by individualism,
mismanagement, and a resounding lack of
consensus. The second wave may now catalyze a
new approach. In November 2020, Ursula von
der Leyen introduced the newly established
European Health Union. In her speech, she
explains how the pandemic has “highlighted the
need for more coordination in the EU, more
resilient health systems, and better preparation
for future crises.” Especially considering the
interdependent nature of EU economies, the
need for stronger and more comprehensive
European integration is growing day by day. The
pandemic may just be the ultimate push for
reform towards a new era of a more unified
Europe.
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47
 !"

Photo by Rod Long • unsplash.com

Food Security in Light of the

Environmental Crisis – Controversies
and Misconceptions
Written by Judith Rybol and Karolina Kneller

2
020: You get up in the morning, treat
yourself with a fresh cup of Fairtrade
coffee with oat milk. You go to the supermarket,
buy pasta, tomatoes, cheese, maybe some ham
for today’s dinner.
2030: You go to the supermarket, because you
need new coffee. You are surprised, they have
increased the prices again! You consider maybe
skipping your coffee every other day to save
some money to regularly afford your weak spot,
that nice buffalo mozzarella.

48
2050: You have lost your job, as the company
you were working for had to radically restructure
in consequence of the multiple economic crises.
Political unrest, rising food prices, immigration
problems and exhausted health systems is
keeping everyone on their toes. With the little
unemployment benefit you get, you might be
able to afford to have a coffee on Sundays as a
very special treat, while you had to give up on
luxuries, like your favorite mozzarella,
altogether.
Sounds like a fatalistic fantasy? Sadly,
numbers about food insecurity today and
models predicting the consequences of climate
change on global food production over the next
decades say otherwise. This is not just about
your morning coffee, but about actual hunger
and malnutrition. It is about our current and
future ability to provide healthy, nutritious and
sufficient food for a growing world population.
“This is not just about
your morning coffee,
but about actual hunger
and malnutrition.
Current Facts and Predictions
about the Food System
Today, about 26% of humanity suffer from food
insecurity, of which almost 10% experience
severe insecurity or hunger. That is 1.25 billion
and 750 million people, respectively (FAO
2020). Ironically, the entire food system itself is
one of the single biggest contributors to climate
change, being responsible for 21-37% of global
GHG emissions, while it is one of the first to
49
painfully feel its impact: wheat, rice, maize and
soybean make up for two thirds of global caloric
intake, and their yields will decline by 3-6% for
each additional degree of warming we reach
(FAO 2020; Zhao et al. 2017). Without even
considering other climate change related
impacts such as extreme weather events,
salinization, desertification, or soil degradation.
Yes, it is true that climate change impacts on
crop yields vary largely between regions, and
general variability is not always easy to explain or
predict (Ceglar et al. 2020). Yet, there are some
detectable general trends, and the rule is, the
more extreme the climate change, the more
certain are the crop losses (Ray et al. 2019). The
degradation of fertile soils, an underappreciated,
finite resource which provides essential
ecosystem services, is already on its way, with
33% of agricultural soils already being highly
degraded and more than half of the soils
showing signs of degradation (Kopittke et al.
2019). So next to heat stress, soil degradation
may account for another 12% of yield losses
until 2040, leading to as much as 30% increase
in food prices (Kopittke et al. 2019).
Another worrying observation is that
vulnerable, already food insecure and hunger
prone regions suffer disproportionately from
climate change induced crop yield declines (Ray
et al. 2019). Should current agricultural
techniques remain in place, population growth
alone will put 31% of the world population (2.5
billion people) into food insecurity by 2050. If
you calculate climate change in, it will be an
additional 21% (1.7 billion people), meaning
that in total, more than half of the world will be
affected (Dawson et al. 2014). To prevent this,
we would need to scale up our agricultural
production by 70% within the next 30 years
(Dawson et al. 2014).
Sounds scary? The even worse news is,
some of these effects are accelerated by
destructive agricultural practices and
management (Kopittke et al. 2019). The good
news is, a lot of them could be mitigated by
alternative, holistic, regenerative agricultural

“… vulnerable, already
food insecure and
hunger prone regions
suffer
disproportionately from
climate change induced
crop yield declines.
practices and management (Lal 2020). ...Or can
they? Can sustainable agriculture be scaled up
sufficiently to feed the predicted 11 billion
people over the course of this century (UN
DESA 2017)?
Forms of Sustainable Agriculture
– and their potential to feed the
world
What exactly does sustainable agriculture entail?
First of all, there is the classic notion of organic
agriculture. This simply means avoiding synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides (Säle et al . 2017). The
idea is to close nutrient cycles, meaning to
prevent nutrient losses as much as possible, to
use natural means like cow manure and slurry or
nitrogen fixing legumes to enrich soils with the
necessary nutrients to grow crops (Möller 2018).
This also means that all these organic fertilizers
should be acquired as locally as possible, ideally
from the farm itself (Möller 2018). The benefits
and aims of this kind of practice are 1) limited
environmental harm, 2) energy savings, 3)
maintained biodiversity, 4) ecosystem and soil
health, 5) reduced chemical uptake with the
food, and importantly, 6) more resilience in the
face of climate change (Neugschwandtner 2020).
Organic products have enjoyed enormous
50
popularity over the last few decades, it has
become a well-established and understood
market (Katt and Meixner 2020). Also, from a
political point of view, organic food is a popular
asset which has been decorating many
sustainability agendas, praised as an important
stepping stone towards a more sustainable food
system (Vittersø and Tangeland 2015).
Nevertheless, organically farmed land makes up
7.5% of all agriculturally used areas in the EU
and less than 2% worldwide (Eurostat 2020).
Another phenomenon that has raised
the hope of many that a solution to the food
challenge is possible is urban agriculture. Around
the world, metropolitan areas are growing. By
2050, 68% of the global population will live in
cities (Armanda, Guinée, and Tukker 2019).
The past decades have shown that within an
urban environment it can be difficult to access
the food that is needed for a healthy and
balanced diet (Mead 2008). Especially those
with an economic or social disadvantage suffer
from the resulting malnutrition and associated
adverse health outcomes (Hamidi 2019). Many
cities rely on supply chains from rural areas or
imports to meet their residents’ demand for
vegetables, fruit, and other essential agricultural
produce. Urban agriculture can reduce these
dependencies.
Broadly speaking, urban agriculture
refers to all food products that are raised or
produced inside or around a city to meet the
needs of the local population (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019). It can be practiced
either in open space, for example in community
or rooftop gardens, or in controlled
environments, such as greenhouses and indoor
farming. Thanks to technical innovation and
clever use of available space within cities, urban
agriculture might actually be able to cover most
of a city’s demand in vegetables (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019; Orsini et al. 2014).
Rooftops, abandoned parking lots, and
industrial sites are turned into little thriving
oases within the concrete jungle that dominates
the cityscape. Green facades, vertical farms, and
plants grown in aeroponic systems (the roots are
without contact to soil or water but sprayed with
a nutrient-rich mist) may sound like science
fiction but they are already practiced in many
places (Miller 2018; Armanda, Guinée, and
Tukker 2019). In some cities, this kind of
agriculture can already meet up to 90% of the
local demand in vegetables already (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019). Large farms using
aeroponics in the United States produce as
much as 140 kg/m² of leafy greens per year
(Armanda, Guinée, and Tukker 2019). This is
390 times the yield per m² than what is achieved
on average with conventional farming
(Armanda, Guinée, and Tukker 2019). A case
study on rooftop gardens in Bologna suggests
that they could produce up to 12,000 tons of
vegetables a year and thereby meet 77% of the
city’s demand (Orsini et al. 2014).
Currently, most crops in urban
agriculture are vegetables, greens, or small fruits
like strawberries and cherry tomatoes (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019). Of course, the world
will not be fed on lettuce and tomatoes, but
these crops add to the diversity of the food
available in cities. For people without access to
affordable fresh products, urban agriculture can
be an option to get the vitamins, minerals, and
fibers that are part of a balanced and healthy
diet. This would align with changing the public’s
prioritization “from feeding people to
nourishing them.” (Haddad et al. 2016)
Our last technique of sustainable
agriculture strikes a similar tone. Permaculture is
holistic, it wants to change our relationship to
nature, food and nourishment, which makes it
praised as brilliant by some, and contested and
dismissed by many others (Morel, Léger, and
Ferguson 2018). It is a global agro-ecological
movement, which, despite its great potential in
both socially and environmentally sustainable
system design, has been very much understudied
and scientifically isolated and is thus often
misunderstood, marginalized and accused of
pseudo-science (Ferguson and Lovell 2014;
Morel, Léger, and Ferguson 2018). Next to
idiosyncrasy, this is partially due to its
complexity and the difficulty to define this
51
concept concisely, together with advocates
oversimplifying and overreaching its potential
(Morel, Léger, and Ferguson 2018; Ferguson
and Lovell 2014). A simple definition of
permaculture is that of “consciously designed
landscapes which mimic the patterns and
relationships found in nature, while yielding an
abundance of food, fibre and energy for
provision of local needs.” (Ferguson and Lovell
2014, 252) The aim is to create agriculturally
productive ecosystems which are as resilient,
diverse and stable as natural ecosystems, by
integrating people and landscape with their
respective needs in a harmonious and
sustainable way (Ferguson and Lovell 2014).
This means that the role of permaculture is not
only to produce food, but also to further an
agroecological transition by promoting
ecological literacy among the people, taking all
the complexity of socio-ecological systems into
account and thus solving several big social
problems at once (Ferguson and Lovell 2014;
Morel, Léger, and Ferguson 2018; Brawner
2015). The roots of permaculture go back to the
1970s and worries about reducing the energy
intensity of agricultural production, but in the
end, the movement draws on numerous
influences and ideas from other fields (Ferguson
and Lovell 2014). Key ‘postmodern’
philosophical and design principles of
permaculture are diversity, interaction, creative
innovation, adaptive management and self-
sufficiency (Ferguson and Lovell 2014; Morel,
Léger, and Ferguson 2018).
So, how could this possibly work? One
of the key techniques in permaculture is to use
perennials, meaning plants such as trees and
bushes which do not need to be planted anew
every year and which have low maintenance, as
a strengthened food source. Fruit trees, or better
agroforestry (‘edible forests’), also provide
important ecosystem benefits such as soil
stabilization or fodder production (Ferguson
and Lovell 2014). Another important design
principle is that of system optimization in terms
of energy flows - if you look closely how heat and
nutrients are naturally exchanged between
different species and then optimize these flows,
you can save labor and chemical input in the end
(Ferguson and Lovell 2014). This requires
landscape analysis and includes sophisticated
but ‘soft’ water, soil and microclimate
management. This leads to the general concept
of biomimicry: understanding and enhancing
natural synergy processes to increase
productivity (Stojanovic 2019; Morel, Léger, and
Ferguson 2018). Concretely, permaculture
comprises techniques like perennial
polycultures, intercropping, no till, wilderness
zone systems, heat trapping or shading patterns
for more labor efficiency, automatic pest
control, soil fertility maintenance, biodiversity
and smart resource distribution (Morel, Léger,
and Ferguson 2018; Ferguson and Lovell 2014).
Every part of the system has multiple functions
and is productive in some way (Morel, Léger,
and Ferguson 2018). In terms of climate change
vulnerability and arguably, economic
sustainability, these highly diverse and resilient
systems also convince more or less effortlessly
(Morel, Léger, and Ferguson 2018).
But how does permaculture score in
terms of yield numbers? Well, no one really
knows. The problem is, there simply are no
numbers. At least none that could be
extrapolated beyond the very specific case
studies they stem from (Ferguson and Lovell
2014). As already said, there is limited sound
scientific research on this – also because of
ideological barriers on both sides (Morel, Léger,
and Ferguson 2018). According to
permaculturists themselves, yield intensity (yield
in kg per area in ha) is astonishing, even
revolutionary - which would be great, as we have
seen that land is precious. But often there are
misunderstandings about productivity and yield
numbers, such as net primary production (NPP)
versus edible tissue (i.e. food crops), a different
value system of ‘productivity’ makes
comparisons hard. The complex forms, field
shapes and intercroppings might produce
52
significantly more yield, but this benefit could
easily be offset by the plus in manual labor this
requires – yet the energy savings and other
benefits from the smart productive design could
compensate for that again and make it
economically viable after all, and so on (Morel,
Léger, and Ferguson 2018). As you can see, there
is much left to clarify. There is much more to say
about permaculture, its specific philosophy,
moral, ethical, political, social, spiritual and
even colonial implications, but for now let’s
leave it at that.
Limits and perspectives to feeding
the world sustainably
When thinking about global food security, it is
important to notice that the scale-up of many
approaches - no matter how sustainable or
unsustainable – is either physically or financially
not realizable. Organic agriculture yields on
average 20% less than conventional agriculture
(de Ponti, Rijk, and van Ittersum 2012). This
means that more land is required to feed the
same number of people, in a time where arable
land is quickly becoming one of the scarcest and
most valuable resources we have (Behrens,
Bosker, and Erhardt 2020). Yet with climate
change, this yield gap between organic and
conventional agriculture may become smaller
(Lori et al. 2017). Still, organic agriculture
depends on consumer demand and willingness
to pay more, which makes it economically
questionable and reliant on subsidies. Policies
that incentivize consumption of organic
products and nudge consumer behavior often
do not turn out to be effective (Katt and Meixner
2020). But wait, didn’t the EU just wave through
another agricultural budget for the next seven
years that heavily subsidizes conventional
farming which would struggle a lot otherwise
(Abnett 2020)? This will not help to make
organic food more competitive at all. But EU
policy is a whole different debate.
Looking at urban agriculture, even if all
cities in the world would use all the vacant space
there is, the available area is “incomparable to
the global agricultural area today.” (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019, 19) Try comparing
the 300-700 thousand km² covered by cities to
“Usually, innovation
the 48 million km² of agricultural land
(Armanda, Guinée, and Tukker 2019). For
urban agriculture to make a meaningful
comes at a price.
contribution to the local food supply, innovative
technology like vertical or underground
farming, and soilless systems need to be used significantly between developing and developed
(Armanda, Guinée, and Tukker 2019). Usually, countries. Especially in cities of the Global
innovation comes at a price. Therefore, there is North, the focus tends to be on the social
the real threat of sustainable agricultural mission of sustainability instead of meeting the
practices ending up as a luxury that is only local food demand (Armanda, Guinée, and
available in high income settings. Already today, Tukker 2019). The focus is on crops that need
the primary aims of urban agriculture differ little space, are relatively easy in maintenance,

53
and can be sold at a high price (again, think
strawberries and cherry tomatoes!) (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019). Whereas in
developing countries, there are many small-scale,
informal production sites within cities that
supply food mostly for personal use (Armanda,
Guinée, and Tukker 2019). This means that
scaling up production in these settings is already
more difficult.
What spatial constraints are for urban
agriculture, are time constraints for
permaculture. We saw that permaculture
arguably needs an armada of farm workers doing
manual labor if you scaled it up (Ferguson and
Lovell 2014). Now think this through: Imagine
everyone had to work two of their five working
days per week on a farm and would get free food
in return. Physical or mental health and
community benefits aside, this would mean that
you spend an equivalent of two fifths (40%) of
your income on food only. For Westernized,
service-based economy spoiled ears, this sounds
frankly crazy. But then think back to what we
said before, with climate change, food prices are
on the rise. Does it sound a little less crazy now?
However, there are further, more tangible
barriers to scaling up permaculture. The
movement is essentially badly organized,
confusingly interconnected and not
institutionalized, which flattens hopes on
scaling it up through gaining effective political
support or necessary research (Morel, Léger, and
Ferguson 2018). Also, permaculture succeeds
through participatory action and mobilization,
but this is a ‘double-edged sword’: the depiction
of permaculture as something simple that
everyone can contribute to depoliticizes
something that urgently needs political
discussion. Consequently, this decreases the
chance that some of its great techniques and
ideas get the political support and large-scale
integration into farming they need (Morel,
Léger, and Ferguson 2018; Ferguson and Lovell
2014).
So, what could be a solution then? We
all know that ‘business as usual’ is not an option.
Maybe changing our dietary habits and
54
consumption patterns? But what about the
cultural aspect of food then, and nutritional
value? And good luck scaling that up...
This leads us to the problem that lies at
the heart of all sustainable practices. What do
we mean when talking about sustainability?
When thinking about global and local food
systems, there are several ways of interpreting
sustainability in this context. The ecological
dimension is concerned with the environmental
impacts of agriculture, the depletion of
resources and its contribution to environmental
degradation (Béné et al. 2019). Health scientists
would think about the capacity of a food system
to provide sufficient accessible, affordable, and
nutritious food in the long-term (Béné et al.
2019). An economist might compare the
sustainability of approaches based on financial
aspects like costs, profitability, and the chances
for employment (Reganold and Wachter 2016).
Clearly, this has conflict potential. It is already
incredibly difficult to agree on a shared
understanding of sustainability within academic
discourse, professional reports and also public
debate. How can the various dimensions of
sustainability be reconciled on a global level
then? Policy makers, farmers, the public – there
is an increasing awareness among all that the
global food system needs to become more
sustainable if it is to survive the rapid
development and changes in population,
environment, and climate (Behrens, Bosker,
Erhardt 2020). Any effort undertaken to
mitigate the adverse effects of past and present
practices cannot focus on a single dimension of
sustainability only. Better, faster, more – striving
for extremes is what has brought the world to
where it is now. A truly sustainable agriculture
needs to balance costs and benefits,
environmental and nutrient concerns, the
ecological, social, economic and cultural
dimension of sustainability (Béné et al. 2019).
Comparisons of different approaches need to
consider this as well. There will be no one-size
fits all solution, after all, “no one farming system
alone will safely feed the planet.” (Reganold and
Wachter 2016, 6)
 A multitude of narratives does not only
exist for the concept of sustainability. Although
there is a general agreement on the fact that
“food systems are failing us,” opinions on the
key problem usually differ across disciplines
(Béné et al. 2019, 118). Depending on the
perspective, this failure is placed with the
system’s capacity to yield sufficient food for a
growing population, its ability to produce food
at a high (enough) quality, a lack of equitable
distribution, or the food system’s contribution
to environmental degradation and climate
change (Béné et al. 2019). This ambiguity means
that there is a lot of tension and disagreement
on the setting of priorities and the preferred
direction of change.
Symptomatic of these different
narratives and conflicting understandings of
sustainability is the prevailing misconception of
organic food as inherently healthier and having
less environmental impacts than food that this
produced conventionally (Béné et al. 2019;
Meemken and Qaim 2018). There seems to be a
persistent confusion between a healthy diet and
an environmentally sustainable diet (Meemken and
Qaim 2018). Many consumers, especially in the
Global North, make the subconscious equation
of ‘what is good for my body must be good for
the environment’ and vice versa, but there is no
clear evidence that suggests such a connection
(Meemken and Qaim 2018). Thus, we are left
with the seeming paradox of vegan junk food
and the huge ecological footprint of organic
strawberries we eat in winter. But, as we have
pointed out above, assessing the environmental
sustainability of any farming practice is a
complex task and one that includes many factors
of uncertainty. A comprehensive review of
organic agriculture that considers all dimensions
of sustainability, arrives at the same conclusion:
“organic farming is not the global blueprint for
sustainable agriculture.” (Meemken and Qaim
2018) Solutions must consider regional and
local differences, for example in climate,
available resources and land, knowledge and
experience among farmers, whether there are
governmental subsidies or financial incentives
55
available, and also the socio-cultural structures
that lead to the sad reality of more than 20% of
all food being wasted.
So, what is the bottom line? In the end
it all boils down to one question, will it pay off
eventually? Will we reach a point where yield
losses through climate change in current
farming systems weigh out the drawbacks of
more climate change resilient farming options,
both economically and physically? It is up to us
if we want to test where this point lies, if we
really want to take that risk, or rather reform our
food systems precautionarily.
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Photo by Peggy Anke • unsplash.com
2020 Visions: An Exploration of
Modern Civilization
Written by Caoimhe Ní Shúilleabháin
I
t has been said that fundamental change
occurs when parameters become variables
(Holsti, 1998). When the very rules that
contain the experiment or the debate change. It
happens when the perpetual and non-changing
structures of human life suddenly become
structures that can exist, sometimes. This means
we can no longer rely on the structures of
58
!"
human life that we previously considered
perpetual and constant. In this article, I consider
whether or not some key parameters of global
society have experienced such a fundamental
change in 2020.
Theories of civilizational collapse are
used to explore these parameters and their
fortitude. Rather than offering a blanketed yes
or no answer to imminent collapse, which would
be impossible and futile, this article aims to give
entry points to the conversation and show that
civilizational sustainability is certainly a question
worth bearing in mind as 2021 unfolds. Overall,
I argue that there is work to be done in the
realms of research, politics and activism to
design and communicate the kind of resilience
strategies that our global civilization needs going
forward. Fundamental changes to the
conditions of our civilization are happening in a
manner beyond an individual’s control.
However, a collective reaction and construction
of new conditions has the potential to safe-guard
survival.
I will begin with an introduction to the
growing academic literature surrounding
civilizational collapse. The following segment
will use this literature two examine two crucial
parameters of modern civilization and outline
how they can be perceived as moving to the
domain of ‘variables’ - namely the agricultural
industry and close cohabitation. Finally, I will
turn to the way in which we discuss societal
collapse – including its securitization as a threat
and potential affirmative responses, such as
social resilience strategies.
“
… fundamental change
cannot be characterized as
innately ‘good’ or ‘bad’
because it epitomizes the
untainted notion of
‘potential’.
Civilizational collapse is a broad and
relatively abstract topic, so I will begin with some
disclaimers worth noting. Firstly, fundamental
change cannot be characterized as innately
‘good’ or ‘bad’ because it epitomizes the
untainted notion of ‘potential’. A space is
59
cracked open, the political and social veneer falls
away, and realities in all shapes and sizes are
lined up for inspection. When the right
conclusions are drawn, much can be gained
from such inspection. Secondly, a plethora of
generations have considered themselves at
humanity’s critical juncture in history - and have
had very convincing reasons to do so. The
Plague, the World Wars, and the creation of the
nuclear bomb barely scratch the surface of
reasons to think that humankind is on the brink
(North, 2017). This is not the first nor last time
the question has been asked and is it not more
justified in 2020 than ever before. Nonetheless,
2020 has created defining challenges for the
human race that are worth discussing in this
context with equal vigor as the aforementioned
examples.
Understanding Modern
Civilization
At one point in time, the Roman Empire
covered 4.4 million square km. Just over eighty
years later, the empire had effectively
disappeared (Kemp, 2019). The nigh-on
mythical rise and fall of such vast power has
fascinated scholars from varying studies for
decades. However, similar to its big brother in
academia, history, the study of civilizational
collapse is difficult to pinpoint. Analyses of past
collapses risk being tainted by the benefit of
hindsight, and therefore bias, whilst forecasting
future collapses is almost impossible to prove as
true rather than plausible. Nonetheless, tracing
common narratives in the field has the power of
justifying actions that might improve current
problems and steer us, as a collective species,
away from the precipice of disaster.
The exact definition of civilization is
fraught with debate and disagreement. Despite
the need for a practical term with standard
interpretation, many scholars and writers
include and exclude various elements depending
on the nature of their question (Weiner, 2018,
Nuwer 2017). That said, we can trace
 by existing research and the unforeseen events

“
of last year.

2020 Visions
…forecasting future
Infamous for a relentless sequence of
collapses is almost tumultuous catastrophes, the year 2020 has
impossible to prove as true come to feel synonymous with the start of a fairly
weak joke. Beyond the satire, it has also become
rather than plausible. a common precursor to a myriad of important
conversations from race relations to the rise of
the far-right. However, in this string of chaotic
incidents there are two elements most prevalent
reoccurring themes in the various meanings of
for this article: climate change and COVID-19.
civilization to form a broad picture of a society
This catastrophic pair is a force to be reckoned
with agriculture, multiple cities and continuous
with - inspiring controversial and polarized
political structures. Modern civilization has also
reactions the world over. Adopting a lens that
been described as planetary rather than ethnic,
focuses on the conditions of civilization and
national or bound to a particular geographic
their viability, the two take on a remarkably
region (Collins, 2020).
different significance.
In terms of potential collapse of
The term climate change encompasses a
civilization, there are two central divergences in
host of problems ranging from global warming
the literature. Some describe it as a ‘decline’,
to the astronomical loss of biodiversity. One
taking place over a large amount of time, whilst
driver of climate change helps to link these
others claim that the term ‘collapse’ accurately
problems by virtue of the fact that it is involved
captures the inevitably abrupt nature of a
in the aggravation of almost all of them:
civilization’s grand finale (Kemp, 2019). A
agriculture. Emissions from agricultural
second key division follows which separates
activities are responsible for up to 31% of all
scholars who believe that collapse forms part of
greenhouse gases which are the leading cause of
an unavoidable cycle from those who see it as the
global warming (OECD, meeting of Agriculture
endpoint of civilization’s existence (Kemp,
Ministers 2018). Furthermore, agriculture is the
2019, Weiner, 2018, Dixon 2009).
single largest contributor to biodiversity loss
Overall, the most commonly cited
with expanding impacts as a result of changing
factors of civilizational collapse are as follows;
consumption patterns and growing populations
climate change, environmental degradation,
(Dudley and Alexander, 2017). Scientists agree
inequality and oligarchy, complexity, external
that the fallouts of climate change such as crop
shocks and well, misfortune (Nuwer, 2017,
failure, desertification and starvation have the
Kemp 2019, Weiner, 2018, Collins, 2020). The
potential to wipe out societies all around the
field of civilizational collapse is extremely far-
world (Kemp, 2019). Others have recorded the
reaching, though divided in theory and
potential impact of environmental degradation
consequently lacking in copious empirical
like deforestation and water pollution as life-
evidence. However, as the study grows and its
threatening for large swathes of global society
main themes begin to enter mainstream politics
too (Kemp, 2019).
and news, this might change in the future. In the
Yet agriculture is also one of the most
years and decades to come this kind of research
easily identifiable markers of our modern
will form an invaluable part of the informational
civilization. Since the agricultural revolution, we
wealth we need to collectively tackle these
have organized our societies around the
factors of collapse. The following section’s
production of food in farming and cultivation
explorations of two particular factors is inspired

60
designed to facilitate economies of scale. The
central role of agriculture has often been
accepted as one of the most essential conditions
of modern civilisation (Dixon, 2009, Weiner,
2018, Kemp, 2019). However, the pandemic
temporarily made the production of agricultural
goods extremely difficult and posed a serious
threat to the industry as a whole (CIHEAM,
2020). COVID-19 regulations restricted the
movement of workers, shut down certain food
processing and production units and incurred
new restraints on food trade policies (Serpil et
al., 2020). Suddenly, the question of
agriculture's long-term viability loomed in
immediate terms and this parameter of
civilization shifted. As one Spanish business
expert says, “The global pandemic has
repositioned our priorities to value the essentials
of life, including food” (Moragues-Faus, 2020).
There have been numerous
international conventions, acts of protest and
public debates, but for the first time, agriculture
was threatened in terms of immediate
functioning. Finally, it seems that the climate
debate moved from relegating the effects of
societal structures to questioning the structures
themselves (Moragues-Faus, 2020). The
enormous infrastructure and workforce behind
the production of food was looked at in holistic
terms when it came to drafting regulations for
the industry’s viability (Serpil et al., 2020).
Practical policymaking has come to echo the
language of activists and idealists. We should
have great hope in the emergence of this kind of
conversation. Changing the parameters of the
climate debate allows us to make choices which
other civilizations hardly considered and as a
consequence perished. On Easter Island, as they
chopped down the last tree and thus sealed their
own fate, those same choices vanished and the
civilization ate itself out of existence. Hopefully,
the rude awakening of food insecurity shifts our
paradigm to the sustainability and stability of
our agriculture.
As we have seen, the concept of a
pandemic is a familiar one in civilizational
studies or ‘collapsology.’ Its core relevance
concerns the following fact: avoiding infection
61
means changing the conditions of social
interaction on a global level. These social
conditions have a wide range but one of the
most pressing is the way that humans live
together. Our massive cities of incredible
population density became hotbeds of infection
overnight. Many government leaders declared
that population density could be blamed for
fueling the spread of the virus (Caron, 2020).
The crowded transportation systems, small
spaces and skyscraper apartment blocks fail to
allow people living in cities to maintain
appropriate distances from one another at all
times. And yet, since the first human settlers
almost 300,000 years ago people have gravitated
towards close cohabitation in the form of
villages, towns and cities. Prior to 2020, cities all
over the world had become more closely
connected than ever before in terms of trade and
socio-politics. Close cohabitation has been a
structure of human civilizations for thousands of
years, but the threat of COVID-19 has
challenged this structure unlike any other time
in living memory. Now that government
regulations urge us to avoid our neighbors, work
from the solitude of our homes and steer clear
of all kinds of gathering, the truth of close
habitation has become clear: it is not a God-
given inevitability, it is a choice. It is, in fact, a
variable.
Beyond these two pivotal features of
2020, the year was also marked by civil rights
protests by and for people of color and
indigenous people living on threatened land.
Authors who focus on inequality and oligarchy
as precedents for civilizational collapse may find
key changes in these events which will affect the
way that we tackle the aforementioned
challenges as a human collective (Kemp, 2019).
When imagining new parameters for global
civilizations, social inequality cannot be brushed
under the carpet but must also experience a
restructuring. Conditions, of a global
civilization with a future, must reflect the
increasing diversity of social relations in work,
education and leisure. Without the
commitment of collective action supported by
all members of civilization, attempts to
restructure areas like agriculture and
cohabitation will have little legitimacy or impact.
The conversation could be broadened to the
overall lack of collaboration between political
parties displayed by countries around the world,
exposing violence and terrorism as a serious
threat to peaceful democracies. As Donne once
wrote in his poem about the inevitable bond
between humans, “send not to know for whom
the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” (1970). In other
words, the widening trench between people on
the basis of left/right politics has a dark and
potent meaning for each and every one of us.
Where to go from here?
“Either we go on as a civilisation or we don’t”
(Thunberg 2020)
Though multiple choices lie before us, there are
few decisions we can make which will ensure the
continuation of modern civilization for the
decades to come. One central question before us
concerns communication of these meta-
challenges in domestic and international
politics. Should we adopt a framework of
securitization wherein the conditions of modern
civilization are presented as highest on every
security agenda in the world? Or is this a slippery
slope to alarmism and fearmongering? Do
alarmist methods even produce desired results
in changing people’ attitudes and perceptions?
Such questions must start taking more central
stage prominence in an era marked by the
extreme political divide epitomized by the likes
of the Charlottesville protests alongside the kind
of grave changes outlined in this article.
A useful way to differentiate between
solution-based approaches to the decline of
civilization is to distinguish between
collapsology, collapsosphy and collapsopraxis
(Severigne et al., 2020). Respectively, these terms
mean understanding how collapse comes about,
imagining solutions to collapse and practically
attacking the issues caused by collapse (Servigne
et al., 2020). Collapsopraxis is an ever-
broadening field of research policy practice
which focuses on social resilience strategies and
62
deep adaption. Deep adaption is a relatively new
addition to the mix, defined as “synthesising
scientific information on major risks and on the
possibilities of collapse, taking these risks
seriously, informing as many people as possible,
taking care of emotional, psychological and
spiritual aspects, and organising ourselves
politically accordingly” (Servigne et al., 2020).
There is space in our education, politics and
advocacy for the inclusion of collapsology,
collapsosphy and collapsopraxis. Integration of
this kind is a vital step in paving the path to
civilizational durability.
“
Climate change,
pandemics, nuclear
weapons, bread-basket
failures, and inequality
are all issues which bind
us as a species.
Therefore, articles that use meta-
language to consider global changes in historical
perspective can no longer be dismissed as
grandiose empty vessels; they must help to
introduce this kind of conversation in pragmatic
fashion on an international, political level.
Climate change, pandemics, nuclear weapons,
bread-basket failures, and inequality are all
issues which bind us as a species. They have
begun to bring about fundamental changes in
the way we see our lives and these changes are
the precursor to new conversations.
Conversations which, when brought to the
table, will demand the collective response of
humanity as a whole.

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https://collections.folger.edu/detail/Devotions-
vpon-emergent-occasions-and-severall-steps-in-my-
sicknesse./99b9c0e4-a3b1-4a84-a199-627cae53b398.
 !"

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The Politics of Public Health – A

Literature Review
Written by Nur Ayça Demir, Lior Hamovitz and Remya
Radhakrishnan

A
lbert Camus’ Nobel Prize winning novel,
The Plague, is said to be the most
successful novel he has ever written.
Although Camus’ objective with writing the
book was not to relate to our contemporary
crisis of the coronavirus pandemic or any
historical pandemics for that matter, it is a piece
of art that presents an excellent rundown of the
human and collective psyche when faced with
inescapable death, isolation, and quarantine.
While The Plague is an allegory of France and
French resistance under German occupation,

64
Camus alleges experiences felt by humankind as
a whole: the awareness of one’s own mortality,
the fight against suffering, the sense of duty,
freedom, confinement and truth. He shows the
reader how man has an uncanny capacity to
reject the unpleasant truth and to avoid taking
up individual responsibility in times of crisis,
even if the truth has grand implications for
defining a new normal where freedom is
stripped of its material reality:
The word ‘plague’ had just been
uttered for the first time. At this
stage of the narrative, with Dr.
Bernard Rieux standing at his
window, the narrator may, perhaps,
be allowed to justify the doctor’s
uncertainty and surprise – since,
with very slight differences, his
reaction was the same as that of the
majority of the townsfolk.
Everybody knows that pestilences
have a way of recurring in the world;
yet somehow we find it hard to
believe in ones that crash down on
our heads from a blue sky. There
have been as many plagues as wars in
history; yet always plagues and wars
take people equally by surprise
(Camus 1947, 30).
This observation Albert Camus makes here
seems almost alarmingly relevant to the past year
our world has been experiencing – a crisis that
has invaded all levels of ordinary life. The author
poignantly illustrates the contours of the
modern idea of freedom and how it is
challenged by a historically repetitive
phenomenon like a pandemic: “[Townsfolk]
considered themselves free and no one will ever
be free as long as there is plague, pestilence and
famine” (Camus 1947, 30). Freedom, therefore,
is more dependent on how one’s consciousness
relates to the reality than a physical condition of
confinement. The Plague is then not a
pessimistic work of literature, but a humanist’s
declaration to believe that good exists in people
65
despite a situation where mortality is more than
an afterthought or a mere truth:
[Dr. Rieux] knew that this chronicle
could not be a story of definitive
victory. It could be the record of
what had to be done and what, no
doubt, would have to be done again,
against this terror and its
indefatigable weapon, despite their
own personal hardships, by all men
who, while not being saints but
refusing to give way to the
pestilence, do their best to be
doctors (Camus 1947, 237).
“Freedom, therefore,
is more dependent
on how one’s
consciousness
relates to the reality
than a physical
condition of
confinement.
While The Plague is nevertheless a work of
fiction, it presents an interesting philosophical
exploration into the individual’s mind during a
pandemic. Perhaps the biggest lesson that could
be drawn from Camus’ writing is that the history
of pandemics is not necessarily independent
from the individual experiences of confinement,
mortality and duty. Today, the discussion on
personal responsibility, duty and freedom is
more relevant than ever given the state-
sanctioned rules and measures in place to tackle
the COVID-19 pandemic. The literature on the
history of epidemics and pandemics, however, is
not limited to fiction and philosophical
discussions. Taking a look into the history of
epidemics and health crises would reveal what
we can learn about how both individuals and
governments can tackle the current pandemic,
and may also reveal what is waiting for the world
on the other side of it.
In Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in
an Early Modern City, John Henderson explains
that policies and strategies in dealing with the
plague have ultimately formed the
contemporary understanding and policy-making
strategies with regards to tackling pandemics.
Public health management is, therefore, not a
recent phenomenon but a necessary reaction to
a crisis that has grave implications for the
economy, trade and commerce. The author
illustrates how in Renaissance Italy, public
gatherings were banned, schools were closed
down, and infected people were quarantined
while cities were protected by guards to prevent
anyone from entering. The reaction to the
plague has not been much different from our
contemporary response to COVID-19, and
neither are the public health policies at place.
On the other hand, Henderson shows the issue
does not have solely monolithic implications,
but affects all sectors of society and often
exacerbates divisions within societies. He
illustrates how marginalized communities were
blamed for spreading the disease while the
debate on human liberties became a part of the
public health policymaking. Deepening
cleavages and reinforcing stereotypes are not,
thus, independent phenomena from a
pandemic, but can be a direct result of such an
alienating crisis.
Presenting a complementary argument,
Samuel Cohn’s book Epidemics: Hate and
Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS,
focuses on the construction of dichotomies as a
human reaction to an epidemic. He illustrates
the association between the reactions of blame,
violence and suspicion towards marginalized
communities, especially the poor. These
constructions – ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and ‘inside’
66
versus ‘outside’ – emerge into public discourse.
Rage and violence against the state in times of a
pandemic have thus been correlated with state
elites’ impositions of harsh quarantine rules,
and their disregard for the economic insecurity
of marginalized groups in colonial contexts, like
India during the bubonic plague. In colonial
contexts where imperial elites exacerbate
segregation and exploitation as well as wealth
gaps, Cohn shows that the medical workers,
conversely, have been the ones to become the
principal victims of such violence. Patricia Fara
further argues that the reaction of attempting to
identify a source, or even a culprit, reveals the
fault-lines in a society. The case of the outbreak
of AIDS in the 1980s showcases how American
media blamed African people for the spread of
the virus, using a highly derogative narrative,
while there was no consensus and almost no
information on the source of the HIV/AIDS.
Later, a similar narrative was turned against the
LGBTQ+ community, resulting in the
reinforcement of negative stereotypes and
widespread homophobia, which is still largely
prevalent in the discourse on HIV/AIDS today.
That being said, Cohn also illustrates that the
human reaction to pandemics has not always
been of a negative and violent nature. In some
cases, epidemics were followed by mediation of
class differences and unprecedented
compassion, self-sacrifice and volunteerism such
as that Camus illustrates in The Plague.
COVID-19: How did governments
respond?
Moving to the current pandemic our world is
experiencing, many scholars have attempted to
analyze the policy-making patterns of countries
across the world, trying to understand why and
to what effect states took such varying measures
to one another. A study by researcher Barry
Colfer, titled Public Policy Responses to COVID-19
in Europe, analyses the policies of twenty
European nations in their attempt to tackle the
coronavirus pandemic. Using a timeline of the
pandemic, the author states that initial actions
from policymakers across Europe were quite
similar: largely relying on restrictions on
economic activity, social distancing measures
and closure of institutions and businesses. The
first wave of such legislative measures - modified
based on regional context - began roughly in
mid-March in 2020. This excludes Sweden and
the UK, which initially favored the herd-
immunity approach. Despite the different policy
approaches, the author found European
policymakers to be overall ill-prepared,
incapable, and unwilling to manage the national
crisis (Colfer 2020, 127). However, it’s
important to keep in mind that as this work
mainly focuses on Northern and Southwestern
European states, these generalizations may not
apply to other regions of the continent.
Colfer continues then to discuss the
different approaches governments chose in
tackling the spread of the pandemic. One such
approach is the ‘blame avoidance strategy,’
which refers to the depoliticizing of an issue and
either distributing or avoiding responsibility for
its handling altogether. An alternate approach is
the ‘credit claiming strategy,’ which prioritizes
validation and political survival (Colfer 2020,
129). It can be critiqued that this categorization
is reductionist, as it does not take into
consideration how the same approach could
have been implemented differently by states.
The author then discusses the controversial role
of experts in the formulation of COVID-19
public policy, emphasizing the notable tensions
“… notable tensions
between public health
experts and politicians
with economic agendas
67
between public health experts and politicians
with economic agendas (Colfer 2020, 129). The
extent to which governments incorporated
experts’ input hence varied across nations.
Despite the predicted resistance from
citizens, European policymakers found it
inevitable to compromise on civil liberties in
order to put public health first. Furthermore,
there were significant disagreements over the
economic recovery packages proposed in the
EU, particularly between the Frugal Four
(Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and
Denmark), and hard-hit southern European
states. Despite these hurdles, the EU was able to
provide rescue funds through the “Next
Generation EU” recovery instrument (Colfer
2020, 130). Overall, Colfer’s article is extremely
useful for identifying the patterns of
policymaking of certain European nations.
However, despite claiming to analyze twenty
nations’ policies, this text mostly discusses
certain Northern and Southwestern states of
Europe.
While Colfer’s study focused on
European policies directly tackling the
pandemic, a paper by Simon Evenett, titled
Initial Trade Policy Response to COVID-19,
analyzes trade policies regarding the import and
export of medical goods needed to combat the
pandemic. As opposed to the previous paper,
this study considers various nations across the
world and can thus analyze global patterns of
policymaking. The paper begins by discussing
how different governments either curbed or
fully banned the export of medical equipment
and medicines (Evenett 2020, 829). However,
the author does acknowledge that over time,
countries like Germany, Taiwan, Brazil,
Colombia, US, China, and Paraguay relaxed
these curbs to a certain extent. Other
governments chose to implement export
authorization rules, which made it virtually
impossible for local producers to export medical
goods (Evenett 2020, 830).
Evenett references past epidemics in
order to argue that export curbs will be
detrimental to developing countries (Evenett
2020, 831). These curbs/bans have
disincentivized local companies from increasing
production of medical goods in high demand.
Another consequence of these policies is
therefore distrust between trading partner states.
For example, EU nations’ authorization-cum-
bans invoked a furious reaction from Serbia,
which turned to China for medical supplies
(Evenett 2020, 832). The author thus believes
export curbs and bans to be the product of hasty,
flawed policymaking (Evenett 2020, 833).
Furthermore, many nations implemented non-
tariff barriers like high import duties, which
reduced the supply and affordability of medical
equipment. However, it is important to note
that the tariff data used in this paper is not fully
accurate, as many governments do not update
trade records with the WTO timely (Evenett
2020, 834). Since this paper mainly refers to
policies made in March 2020, it is not entirely
representative of policies during the entire
pandemic. Nevertheless, it provides a useful
overview of trade policy patterns and their
effects during the initial phase of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Is Public Health Political?
Reflecting on the literature brought above, the
most glaring of questions becomes: How is it
that public health is so often depoliticized? As
further theoretical scholarship on the topic
reveals, health, and public health, have always
been an inextricably political matter. In their
article Towards a Politics of Health, Bambra et al.
discuss the often-unaddressed relationship
between politics and ideology, and their
practical influence on people’s health. The
authors of the article argue that health is an
inherently and profoundly political topic, and
that its political nature stems from three main
sources: Firstly, in a modern age of neo-liberal
economic systems, health is as much a
commodity as any other such resource whose
distribution can be fiscally controlled.
Consequently, it is discrepantly distributed
between social groups, making it an incredibly
68
political matter. Second, health is political
because “its social determinants are amenable to
political interventions'' (Bambra et al. 2005,
187). Third, health is political because it has
been deemed to be a universal human right, and
thus must be upheld and treated as such. As
human rights have come to be interlinked with
citizenship, and the duties of the state, their
protection is inherently a matter of governance.
Overall, then, we ought to understand health as
a political concern because power can be
exercised over it – controlling its distribution,
and its position in the local and global agenda.
Bambra et al. explain that it has been
widely shown that the health of people is
determined by social, cultural and economic
determinants. The way we approach these
inequalities in the health of people is thus
political, in that we can either accept these
inequalities as being ‘natural,’ or explore their
roots and work for the diminishment of these
differences. It is crucial to understand in this
context that the approaches taken are
dependent not only on a view of what is possible
to achieve, but ideological perceptions on which
changes are desirable and which are not
(Bambra et al. 2005, 188).
This observation is one shared among
many scholars, such as Thomas Oliver. In his
article The Politics of Public Health Policy, Oliver
discusses the factors which influence
governmental response to public health
concerns. He writes that while public health
necessitates “governmental action to produce
outcomes,” some publics are more concerned
with whether or not their government controls
them than whether it provides them with
tangible benefits (Oliver 2006, 196). This is
inarguably a phenomenon we have seen during
the COVID-19 pandemic, where sections of
society in the US, Belgium, Israel and the
Netherlands, to name a few, were deeply
disturbed by the notion that the government can
so thoroughly ‘invade’ their personal lives and
routine. Health conditions, as the author
explains, become a political problem – a
condition which people find unacceptable –
when they are recognized by the public as a
problem which is shared among many (Oliver
2006, 197). The expected governmental
response to the problem, and the response in
practice, therefore depend not only on the
perceived level of risk, but also on who is held
responsible for it (Oliver 2006, 199). Health is
thus a political matter both for those political
actors wielding power over public health
policies, and for the public whose health
becomes an intensely political matter when
socio-economic and cultural factors affect their
practical health conditions.
During the coronavirus pandemic, these
arguments by scholars like Bambra and Oliver
became more substantial than ever. As countries
around the world responded in dramatically
different manners to the spread of the virus, it
was evident that governments and political
bodies play a determining role in the condition
of people’s health. This point is emphasized in a
piece titled The Cumming Effect: Politics, Trust,
and Behaviours During the COVID-19 Pandemic,
where Fancourt et al. write about the effects of
the senior aide to the British prime minister’s
breaking of lockdown rules. Cummings’
violation of the rules set by the government, and
“
… in times of public
health crisis, public trust
in the government and its
response is crucial for the
individual behavior of
citizens.
69
subsequently his not expressing immediate
remorse nor being condemned by the
government, can now be deemed as having had
lasting and quantifiable effects on the trust of
the British people in their government’s concern
for their health (Fancourt et al. 2020, 464). The
authors underscore that in times of public
health crisis, public trust in the government and
its response is crucial for the individual behavior
of citizens. This trust is tightly linked with the
willingness of people to follow the guidelines set
by the government, a decisive element in
controlling the spread of any pandemic
(Fancourt et al. 2020, 465). In the case of the
novel coronavirus, it is clear how political actors
have had, and still hold, an integral role in the
conditions of individual and public health.
References
Bambra, Clare, Debbie Fox, and Alex Scott-Samuel. "Towards a
Politics of Health." Health Promotion International 20,
no. 2 (2005): 187-193.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. London: Penguin Books, 1947;
2013 edition.
Cohn, Samuel Kline. Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the
Plague of Athens to AIDS. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018.
Colfer, Barry. “Public Policy Responses to COVID-19 in
Europe.” EurPolicyAnal 6 (2020): 126–137.
Evenett, Simon. “Sicken Thy Neighbour: The Initial Trade
Policy Response to COVID-19.” World Econ 43 (2020):
828–839.
Fancourt, Daisy, Andrew Steptoe, and Liam Wright. "The
Cummings Effect: Politics, Trust, and Behaviours
During the COVID-19 Pandemic." The Lancet 396, no.
10249 (2020): 464-465.
Henderson, John. Florence under Siege: Surviving Plague in an
Early Modern City. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2019.
Oliver, Thomas R. "The Politics of Public Health Policy."
Annual Revie Public Health 27 (2006): 195-233.
 !"

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A Matter of Life-or-Death: The

Efficacy of Female Leadership During
COVID-19
Written by Audrey Wientjes

B
etween estranged loved ones, flooded
hospitals, and dwindling economies, the
COVID-19 pandemic is a prime example
of the term “crisis.” Each and every country has
been uniquely and sometimes distinctly tasked
with handling the devastating effects of the
virus. Historically, nations with substantial
economic power and resource abundance have
been best prepared to deal with such calamities
(Coscieme et al. 2020, 14). Under this notion, it
would follow that countries such as the United
States of America (USA) and the United
Kingdom (UK) would combat the virus most
effectively. However, looking back over the past
11 months, a paradox has presented itself: it is
those ever-powerful nations who are now in

70
shambles, whereas some smaller economies have
managed to keep their relative stability intact
(Coscieme et al. 2020, 14). Namely, the USA has
had the highest cumulative case totals of any
nation, recently hitting a record case count of
308,000 cases on January 8th, 2021
(Worldometer 2021). Similarly, the UK ranks
fifth worldwide in total cases, with daily case
counts at a threatening level (Worldometer
2021). In an attempt to explain this paradox,
there is speculation as to state-specific predictors
of effective handling of the COVID-19
pandemic. One factor increasingly being
brought to light is that of female leadership in
governance.
With the global focus currently trained
on the health workforce, the gender gap between
front-line workers and upper-level decision
makers has warranted increasing public
attention. Although women compose 70% of
the global health workforce, they constitute a
mere 25% of health-related leadership positions
(Bali et al. 2020, 5). Yet, the few women with
decision-making power, such as female heads of
state, are receiving praise from the media for
their effective handling of the crisis (Van Daalen
et al. 2020, 5). From New Zealand, to Denmark,
to Taiwan, metrics including death rates and
case counts are substantiating such praise: a
study on 35 highly developed and relatively
wealthy democracies by Coscieme et al. (2020)
found that countries with female heads of state
recorded 1.6 times lower death counts per capita
than those with male heads of state (p. 8).
Although many of these are island countries, a
factor which undeniably contributed to their
success, the strong female leadership and
competent governance they have demonstrated
simply cannot be ignored. Looking only at the
countries with low rates of income inequality,
female-led nations recorded 26 fewer days on
which deaths occurred, and 33.5 times lower
rates of excess mortality (Coscieme et al. 2020,
10). Excess mortality attempts to estimate the
gap between projected deaths based on pre-
pandemic mortality rates, and observed deaths,
allowing for a more direct comparison between
71
countries and reducing the error induced by
differing methods of counting COVID-19
“
… the lower excess
mortality in female-led
states suggests that said
governments may have
been particularly
successful in handling the
crisis.
deaths. The measure is considered the best
indicator of a country’s handling of the virus by
The Health Foundation, as it reflects not only
on exposure to COVID-19 transmission but also
on a government’s approach and handling of
resources (Krelle et al. 2020). Although the
unique political, economic, social, and
geographical context of each country results in
unique outcomes, the lower excess mortality in
female-led states suggests that said governments
may have been particularly successful in
handling the crisis.
As for the reasoning behind these states’
more positive outcomes, one potential
explanation is the swift and durable approaches
taken by female political leaders. As global
health advisors urged the need for public safety
measures including the closing of businesses,
travel restrictions, and work-from-home orders,
governments were faced with the choice between
prioritizing economic considerations or favoring
health concerns (Coscieme et al. 2020, 10). The
threat of a suffering economy led many nations
to hesitate in fear of causing unnecessary strife.
One example is the USA, where former
President Donald Trump downplayed the virus’
severity long after the first cases were reported
within country borders (Cillizza 2020). On the
other hand, female-led countries were among
the first to take action in response to the virus’
outbreak (Coscieme et al. 2020, 13). In Taiwan,
“
… female-led countries
were among the first to
take action in response to
the virus outbreak.
which was initially anticipated to have the
second highest number of COVID-19 cases due
to its close interactions with China, Prime
Minister Tsai Ing-wen quickly took
precautionary measures at the virus’ onset,
increasing health care availability and contact
tracing (Wand et al. 2020, 1341). It should be
noted that the learned experience from the
SARS in 2003, in addition to Taiwan’s political
opposition to China, likely contributed to the
unhesitatingly instituted measures (Wand et al.
2020, 1341). To the far south, New Zealand
adopted strict lockdown measures in March
when the state still had negligible case counts
and a death count of zero (McGuire et al. 2020,
367). Denmark, led by female prime minister
Mette Frederiksen, acted upon the principle “act
fast and act with force,” shutting down the
country swiftly and closing all schools and
universities, one of the earliest responses in
Europe (Olganier and Mogensen 2020, 10).
This begs the question: could it be that
these swift decisions have significant effects on
the virus’ long-term severity? As of late-January
2021, Taiwan has limited total cases to 890, with
only 37 cases per one million people and 7 total
deaths (Worldometer 2021). In the same
timeframe, New Zealand has suffered around
2,300 cases, with a mere 25 deaths for their
population of 5 million (Worldometer 2021).
72
Denmark was able to relax its first wave
lockdown in early April, a month before many
other European nations, emerging with a small
case count of less than 10,000 in June. At the
time, this was about three times less than
Switzerland, a country of comparative size and
population (Olganier and Mogensen 2020, 10).
It still ought to be mentioned, however, that in
December a second wave hit Denmark severely,
spiking total cases to nearly 200,000, although a
lockdown was quickly reinstated, bringing daily
case counts down again (Worldometer 2021).
Even though such early measures were
considered bold or overdone at their onset, time
has indicated that these decisions allowed the
aforementioned states to keep cases relatively
under control, whilst helping the economy in
the long term (Coscieme et al. 2020, 10). In part,
this explains the general trend of lower death
tolls in female-led countries, considering that
acting early prevented intensive care wards from
being flooded at the virus’ peak, which enabled
medical staff to concentrate their resources on
the few critical cases. Thus, the initial
prioritization of health concerns over economic
safety has ensured citizens’ wellbeing.
Furthermore, severe containment measures as
seen in the examined countries have been
shown to damper the intensity of a pandemic
induced recession, leading to long-term
economic resilience while more lenient nations’
approaches cause harmful economic
repercussions (Coscieme et al. 2020, 18). While
“
… the initial
polarization of health
concerns over economic
safety has ensured
citizens’ wellbeing.
not being the sole contributor, the proactive
decisions seen in the cases of female-led
countries indicate a preventative and long-term
view of the situation, often leading to a
preferable outcome.
As for the reasoning behind female
leaders’ preference towards long-term thinking,
applied psychology’s findings concerning the
differences in women’s and men’s mental
models in times of crisis provides a potential
explanation. In a study on women’s
participation in peace agreement negotiations
conducted by the International Peace Institute,
the introduction of gender-equal participation
in the boardroom led to three main outcomes.
Firstly, the strong influence of women meant a
peace agreement was nearly always reached,
whereas the absence of women considerably
lowered those odds (O’Reilly et al. 2015, 11).
Secondly, the inclusion of women in
negotiations resulted in agreements being “20
percent more likely to last at least two years”
(O’Reilly et al. 2015, 12). Lastly, agreements
negotiated by women were found to make
noteworthy contributions to gender equality in
their respective country (O’Reilly et al. 2015,
32). The historical incongruence of war’s
impacts on men and women is likely responsible
for these deviations. Men, who dominate the
battlefield, are the most likely to die in conflict,
translating to viewing war in terms of “conflict”
and “post conflict” (O’Reilly et al. 2015, 5).
Women, on the contrary, have borne the brunt
of the aftermath of war including the
“‘breakdown in social order, human rights
“
… women have been hit
harder by the second-
hand effects of the crisis.
73
abuses, economic devastation, and the spread of
infectious diseases’” (O’Reilly et al. 2015, 5).
Hence, women are said to view peace by its
positive definition: not only the absence of war,
but the development of human rights and social
wellbeing. Accordingly, women take on a long-
term perspective when negotiating peace
agreements. This points to the potential of
women’s comparative advantage in crisis
management and peace negotiation.
Placing this in the context of COVID-
19, the virus parallels to situations of war or
conflict. Similar to men being the first to die on
the front line of the battlefield, sex-based
immunological vulnerabilities have resulted in
the death rate of COVID-19 being higher for
men than women, despite equal case numbers
between the sexes (Wenham et al. 2020, 846).
However, as in war, women have been hit harder
by the second-hand effects of the crisis. The
closures of schools and stay-at-home orders have
seen upticks in domestic violence, unwanted
pregnancy, and unpaid family care
responsibilities, all of which perpetuate gender
inequalities and economic barriers for women
(Van Daalen et al. 2020, 847). This scenario is
not unique to COVID-19, as both the Ebola and
Zika epidemics placed the social fallout burden
on women, according to Van Daalen et al.
(2020), through “demonstrated rises in maternal
morbidity and mortality, unwanted pregnancies
and unsafe abortions” (p. 12). Therefore, it
would follow that the residual mental models of
war and conflict may also apply to the case of the
coronavirus: men are likely to view the crisis as
conflict and post-conflict, while women may be
more adept at understanding the far-reaching
ramifications of a global health crisis, and thus
prepare accordingly. This aids in explaining the
longer-term thinking adopted by female leaders
in their swift responses. In addition, the mental
model theory supports the multifaceted
approach evidenced by these female-led
countries that were found to consider not only
economic and health impacts, but also “social
equality, sustainability, and innovation”
responses (Coscieme et al. 2020, 15). Such
considerations are exemplified by German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s COVID response.
Merkel has been noted to call upon Germans to
consider the social implications of breaches in
COVID restrictions, asking them to think about
how their behavior impacts every other German,
and therefore requested their willingness to
cooperate (Glucroft and Raish 2020). In
addition, she has been firm in her intent to ease
the burden of the pandemic on working
mothers and childcare, instituting a law that

“… female leaders have

allows parents to receive compensation if their
work performance was hindered due to the
closure of schools (Zimmermann and Kallhoff
2020). Considerations of non-economic factors
support the health and welfare of a state’s
population, contributing to the relative success been repeatedly noted to
of female-led countries.
However, regardless of how multifaceted
display leadership
they are in theory, the aforementioned measures qualities of empathy and
are useless if the public does not adhere to them.
Incidentally, female leaders have been confidence, which have
repeatedly noted to display leadership qualities
of empathy and confidence, which have been been found to be
found to be particularly effective at providing
stability and inducing public trust (Ryan et al.
particularly effective at
2016, 447). In a qualitative and quantitative providing stability and
analysis of the USA’s COVID-19 response,
federal states with female governors showed inducing public trust.
greater levels of confidence in their coronavirus
press conferences, as well as “greater awareness
of the feelings of others” (Sergent and Stajkovic
2020, 773). This communication style had
significant impacts on public trust, as female-led
states that issued rapid shelter-in-home orders
had a higher percentage of social distancing
adherence, and thus fewer deaths per capita,
than orders issued by their male counterparts
(Sergent and Stajkovic 2020, 776). Congruent
trends were found in New Zealand, where Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern presented an
exceptional level of compassion in
communications, announcing that all
“government ministers and public service
executives would take a 20% pay cut for six
months, in solidarity with New Zealanders who
had lost their jobs or taken significant pay cuts”

74
(McGuire et al. 2020, 370). Confidence and
decisiveness were also integral to Ardern’s
rhetoric, with slogans including “balanced
precautionary approach” and “go hard and go
early” (McGuire et al. 2020, 368).
Consequently, high levels of admiration and
public trust have been recorded for the New
Zealanders’ leader (McGuire et al. 2020, 371). In
Denmark, Mette Frederiksen joined in on a
national televised sing along in the weeks
following the onset of lockdown in March,
communicating that Danes were distanced yet
united (Phillips et al., 2020). The prime
minister’s approval rating increased by 40
percentage points following the first lockdown,
and public trust during COVID-19 is noted to
be a hallmark of Denmark’s resilience (Phillips
et al., 2020; Olagnier and Mogensen 2020, 11).
In Taiwan, the government has forthrightly
confronted stigmas around COVID-19,
promoting community solidarity, and pledging
“compassion for those affected by providing
food, frequent health checks, and
encouragement for those under quarantine”
(Wang et al. 2020, 1341). In return, the
Taiwanese have reported 70% approval ratings
on their government’s handling of the pandemic
as of April, 2020, in contrast to the American
president’s 37% COVID-19 approval rating in
October, 2020 (Wang et al. 2020, 1342;
Whitesides 2020).
Nevertheless, empathy and confidence
may not be the only reason for higher public
trust in female leaders. Across academic fields,
studies have found that women are perceived as
more trustworthy, by males and females alike
(O’Reilly et al. 2015, 9). In addition, women
have been recorded to be favored in precarious
or risky situations, deemed the “glass cliff
phenomenon” (Ryan et al. 2016, 446). To
explain this phenomenon, research into applied
psychology asserts that the qualities desired and
required for effective leadership in a time of
crisis, namely, “creativity, improvisation, and
intuition,” are exhibited more often by women
than men (Sergent and Stajkovic 2020, 773). As
for the origins of these observed variations, role
75
congruency theory postulates that human
beings’ neurocognitive functioning is highly
shaped by positive and negative reinforcements
from their environment (Paustian-Underdahl et
al. 2014, 10). For example, women who behave
as harsh negotiators will likely receive negative
reinforcements, while their male counterparts
receive positive ones, rewiring their behavior to
act within assigned gender roles. In this sense, it
is the “nurture” argument in nature-versus-
nurture that explains the differentiation in men
and women’s leadership qualities, with biases in
public trust following accordingly. Nonetheless,
this trust in female leaders further contributes to
how likely citizens are to adhere to restrictions,
resulting in a lower death toll as less
transmission occurs.
Despite this, it could be argued that the
deviation in coronavirus cases between male and
female-led countries is due to the requirement
of high social development that allowed for a
female leader to be elected or appointed in the
first place. This argument does hold some
traction, as countries that elect female leaders
tend to value “equity, solidarity, nurturing, and
collaboration,” all of which are qualities that
female leaders historically bring to the table
(Coscieme et al. 2020, 15). However, the trust in
government that female leaders inspire only
further instills these values. Additionally, it
requires the act of early and preventative
measures such as those taken by many countries
with strong female leadership to translate these
values into action in the first place. Thus, success
in such countries is likely due to both the
cultural context and the addition of female
guidance. Accounting for other factors, studies
comparing the efficacy of female to male
leadership in tackling the spread of COVID-19
cited in this piece purposefully exclude non-
democracies, countries with low resource
availability, and poorer nations in their analyses
in order to control for distortion possibly
encountered due to confounding variables
(Coscieme et al. 2020, 5). However, it should be
acknowledged that due to the pandemic being a
recent and novel event, available data and
published analyses are preliminary and limited.
A recurring issue in quantitative studies on the
topic is the small sample size of female-led
nations in comparison to male-led nations,
meaning results may not be significant.
Additionally, many success stories, such as
Taiwan or New Zealand, are island nations,
meaning cross border spread is much more
easily controlled. The small size of many female
led nations may also contribute to national
cohesiveness in pandemic response. Therefore,
it is important that the situation is monitored
henceforth to determine how female-led versus
male-led nations recover from the crisis in
coming years.
All in all, female leaders’ swift responses,
multifaceted approaches, and effective
communication styles may help explain the
successful curbing of the novel coronavirus seen
in a number of female-led countries. If female
leadership is indeed a causal factor, the
implications of these findings have
reverberations far beyond the present-day crisis.
Historically, the focus on women’s equal
participation in political processes have centered
around the argument that it is a human right, as
women make up half of the population (United
Nations 2015). Another angle to consider, and
one that merits greater urgency, is that female
political leadership and equal gender
representation introduces invaluable qualities
that have the potential lead to more productive
outcomes than those produced by male-
dominated decision rooms. Going forward, the
acknowledgement of the role women play in
crisis management and the incorporation of
their diversity of thought will be essential in
tackling looming challenges including climate
change and resource scarcity. In this sense,
female leadership in governance is may not only
a matter of rights, but quite literally a matter of
life or death.
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Photo by Andre Klimke • unsplash.com
!"

Assessing the Influence of the ‘Two-

Level Game’ on the United States’
War in Afghanistan
Written by Lea Hoopman and Marnix Middelburg
Edited by Lior Hamovitz

W
aging for nearly twenty years now, the
war in Afghanistan is the longest war
in the history of the United States.
This convoluted conflict has cost the lives of
more than 40,000 Afghan civilians, 65,000
Afghan military and police personnel, 2,500
American soldiers, as well as causing more than
2.5 million Afghan people to flee their homes
and the country. Moreover, it has left more than
20,000 American soldiers severely injured, a
staggering amount which does not even include
the number of veterans, soldiers, and civilians

78
who suffer from permanent emotional traumas
(McCarthy 2020). What was initially planned to
be a fairly quick intervention on the side of the
American military rapidly turned into a crisis for
all actors involved. Since first entering the
Afghan territory, each US administration has
tried to manage this difficult crisis in its own
way. From extensive intervention to minimal
military presence, aggressive counter-insurgency
operations to small counter-terrorist operations,
from nation-building to sole military support,
every such strategy has been tried and tested
during the US-Afghanistan war.
And to what end?
• Only about 33% of the country is under
the control of the Afghan government,
which is supported by the US and a
coalition of other states.
• Consequently, 47% of the country’s
territory remains contested and 19% is
under control of the Taliban (Hegseth
2017).
• The US has been forced back into
negotiations and concessions with the
Taliban, a policy that is opposed to the
political objectives that were set out
before the invasion of Afghanistan in
2001.
What then explains the radical
differences between the strategies taken by the
Bush, Obama and Trump administrations in
regards to Afghanistan? And has this
discontinuity contributed to the failure of the
US in trying to solve the ‘Afghanistan crisis’?
This paper will argue that the different
approaches of each US administration in trying
to manage and resolve the crisis in Afghanistan
was heavily influenced by the so-called ‘two-level
game’ between domestic and foreign politics.
The two-level game determines the number of
resources and time that a head of state can
commit to furthering national interests abroad,
without suffering a domestic political defeat.
Changes at the domestic and international level
have caused the Bush, Obama and Trump
administrations to vary in their level of
commitment towards resolving the ongoing
79
conflict in Afghanistan, resulting in a
discontinuity in the foreign policy of the US.
Additionally, it will be illustrated how this
discontinuity has contributed to the ongoing
and violent nature of the Afghanistan conflict.
The broader aim of this article is to understand
which factors influence crisis-management state
policies. It will become clear that theories that
aim to construct executable policies to manage
crises are in reality thwarted by influences from
both the domestic and international levels. This
should be taken into consideration while
constructing or analyzing crisis-management
strategies.
First, this paper will explain what the
two-level game is and how it is capable of
influencing the negotiation position of state
leaders at the international level. Secondly, a
summary of the state of Afghanistan before the
US-led intervention in 2001 will be provided.
The initial military campaign and strategy of the
Bush administration will be examined in this
part of the paper as well. Thirdly, the paper will
analyze the strategy of the Obama
administration in regards to Afghanistan. The
theoretical framework of the two-level game will
be applied to this period of 8 years in order to
understand why certain policy choices were
made. Following up on this, the piece will
examine the approach of the Trump
administration regarding the conflict in
Afghanistan. This will allow us to understand
why the US is currently in a process of
negotiations with the Taliban.
Overall, this paper will be engaging with
the broader theme of crisis-management by
constructing a broader understanding of the
nexus between international politics and
national politics. Many American presidential
administrations have developed theoretically
sound strategies that could have resolved the
US-Afghanistan war, but failed to do so in
practice due to material and political
constraints. By understanding the volatile
nature of politics, one can also understand how
extensive and time-consuming policies
sometimes fail to achieve their intended
purposes. Therefore, politicians often do not
resort to the ‘theoretically perfect’ solution to a
crisis, but to the policy that gives a desired
outcome in the short-term. This bias should be
taken into consideration by policymakers and
politicians alike.
It shall be noted that the number of
perspectives from which the US-Afghan war has
been analyzed are diverse in their scope,
theoretical groundings and focus, and each
study can shed more light on the conflict. The
chosen approach to this topic, through a broad
time frame while focusing on the interaction
between ‘critical junctures’ in American
domestic politics and international politics,
serves best to address the questions posed in the
introduction. The two-level game allows for a
theoretical framework to support this multilevel
analysis.
Theoretical framework: The two-
level game
The two-level game refers to a theoretical model
that describes how leaders of states are
constantly engaged in negotiations on the
domestic level, whilst simultaneously engaging
in international negotiations with other state
leaders and non-state actors. Wins and losses
can be experienced on both levels, which
provides for benefits or disadvantages for leaders
as individuals and the collectives that they
represent. Multiple actors are part of the two-
level game, but the national political leader is
the most important actor to analyze in this
framework. A national political leader is
susceptible to the influences of domestic groups,
such as government coalitions, specific groups
within the electorate, lobbyists and the political
opposition (Putnam 1988). This applies to
national leaders in democracies and in
autocracies, as both need a domestic base of
power to support their regime and policies. State
leaders need to satisfy their allies through
constant negotiations in order to prevent a loss
of power. In a globalized world, many promises
80
need to be fulfilled through international
negotiations. Think, for example, about
promises that leaders make to reduce the
number of refugees arriving in a country, or to
drastically decrease CO2 emissions, or to
intervene in conflict areas where human rights
are being violated (Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace 2018). When national
leaders come to power by promising their
domestic allies these kinds of policies, they will
need to deliver in the international arena to
make them feasible. On this level, they meet
other national leaders who have a seat at the
international negotiating table with their own
specific agenda, aimed at furthering their
national interests and delivering on the
promises they have made to their respective
domestic allies and voting base (Putnam 1988).
As a result, national leaders find
themselves constantly engaged in negotiations
on two levels. Due to the nature of the system,
changes at the international and domestic levels
are reflected in policies and negotiations in both
(Putnam 1988). This trade-off and balancing act
between negotiations on the domestic and
international level is present in many political
areas. It is also reflected in the policies of the US
regarding its activities in Afghanistan. Policies
derive from the decisions made by political
actors, and are meant to translate these decisions
“Due to the nature of the
system, changes at the
international and
domestic levels are
reflected in policies and
negotiations in both.
 Photo by Levi Meir Clancy • unsplash.com

81
into reality. Therefore, radical changes on the
domestic or international levels, which
influence the decisions of national leaders, will
change existing policies as well. Thus, the more
volatile the two-level game, the more likely it is
that a high-level of discontinuity will be found
in the policies of a state. It is therefore no
surprise that campaigns, presidential elections,
public opinion polls, domestic crises and
developing international crises have had a
significant impact on the decisions that different
US administrations have made regarding the
conflict in Afghanistan.
Historical Background
On the 11th of September 2001, the United
States witnessed a shocking terror attack on its
own soil. Close to 3,000 people lost their lives as
a result of Al-Qaeda operatives hijacking four
planes, two of which crashed into the World
Trade Center and one into the Pentagon in
Washington D.C. These attacks irrevocably
changed the face of the United States and the
world. In the months following 9/11, the
Taliban provided Osama Bin Laden - figurehead
of Al-Qaeda at the time of the attacks - shelter
and protection in Afghanistan. When the US
demanded the Taliban expel Al-Qaeda and hand
Bin Laden over, the organization refused to do
so, citing that there was insufficient evidence of
his involvement in the attacks. To ensure that
the Taliban would no longer enable the
operation of the terrorist organization within
Afghanistan, the United States launched
military operations in Afghanistan on October
7th of the same year (CFR 2020).
However, this was not the first major war
that took place on this land. Since the time of
Alexander the Great, empires had found their
way to and through the Afghan territory and
struggled with its mountainous terrain and the
local resistance. In the nineteenth century, for
example, the country became the site of many
international power struggles. The Russians and
the British fought to increase their control in the
area and engaged in multiple instances of
82
warfare (Bearden 2001). Moreover, during the
final quarter of the twentieth century, the
country had experienced a continuous period of
wars that were exacerbated by international
intervention. In 1978, the Soviet Union invaded
the country to help suppress unrest against a
communist government. As a response to this
Soviet invasion, different resistance groups
formed and became collectively known as the
Mujahideen. They operated within Afghanistan
and across the border in Pakistan. As this fight
took place in the background of the Cold War,
the Mujahideen received funding and assistance
from many countries, predominantly the US
and Pakistan (Bowman and Dale 2009).
Although the Soviet troops left in 1989,
a civil war continued between different factions.
In this unrest, the Taliban arose in 1993 in the
southern region of Kandahar. By 1995, the
group had gained control over most of the
country, excluding the north, and was able to
capture the capital city of Kabul only a year later.
The main military opposition to the Taliban was
the Northern Alliance, a loose network formed
by separate actors (Bowman and Dale
2009). Although the Taliban government was
recognized by some states, it was also subject to
much international condemnation, with UN
Security Council Resolution 1267 condemning
the Taliban for its involvement in international
terrorism, the protection of Osama bin Laden
and the training of Al-Qaeda operatives (UNSC
1999).
Following the 9/11 attacks, and after the
Taliban continued to refuse to hand over Osama
bin Laden, then President George W. Bush
launched the War on Terror and started the
active military engagement of the US in
Afghanistan. The main strategic objectives of
‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (OEF) were
capturing Osama bin Laden and toppling the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bush equated
those harboring terrorists to committing
terrorist actions, and stated that those protecting
terrorists “will share their fate” (Bush 2001). In
doing so, the United States wanted to ensure
that Afghanistan would not continue to act as
training grounds for additional international
terrorist networks. However, the operation in
Afghanistan also had a broader scope. Although
concrete targets such as the immediate capture
of Osama bin Laden were at the forefront of
public rhetoric, the desire to develop
Afghanistan into a stable nation built on
democratic institutions was also significant
(Murray 2013). Thus, besides military activities,
Bush’s administration committed to a strategy
coined ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan. Given
the broad scope of these objectives, significant
amounts of time and resources were needed to
achieve all goals and for this operation to be
considered a success.
Fortunately, the Bush administration
was able to count on domestic and international
support for this broad and resource-intensive
policy against the Taliban. The domestic shock
around the events of 9/11 created a sense of
urgency that meant that the Joint Resolution 23,
the resolution to initiate military engagement
“against those responsible for the recent attacks
launched against the United States,” was passed
without objections in Congress (U.S. Congress,
2001). Winning the game of politics at the
domestic level thus enabled a great deal of
options at the international level for Bush.
Furthermore, at the international level, UNSC
resolution 1368 implied that the use of force
against regimes harboring terrorists would be
internationally acceptable under certain
circumstances (Katzman and Thomas 2017).
Although OEF was not authorized specifically
with reference to the UN Charter, this
resolution made international cooperation
easier and made international allies pledge their
(future) support for the cause. Therefore, both
levels of the two-level game as stipulated by
Putnam created a set of choices that enabled the
start of OEF.
American involvement in Afghanistan
during this period was mostly limited to air-
strikes that relied heavily on a strong
cooperation between the CIA and the US
Special Forces. These strikes were mostly aimed
at aiding the Northern Alliance, who conducted
83
most of the fighting on the ground against the
Taliban. At the end of 2001, the fruits of this
cooperation became clear, as the operation
proved to be successful. As the year drew to a
close, the Taliban had left Kabul and their
stronghold of Kandahar, and a majority of the
Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives had fled to
neighboring Pakistan (Katzman and Thomas
2017). In December of that year, a conference in
Bonn hosted by the United Nations established
an Afghan Interim Authority from what were up
until that point disparate opposition groups,
and installed an International Security
Assistance Force that would ensure military
stability in the Kabul area (CFR 2020).
The Bonn Agreement marked a new
phase in the conflict: a period of more overt
nation building (CFR 2020). The US
committed to the establishment of democratic
institutions in Afghanistan, supplying monetary
aid to the new Afghan government and for
infrastructure projects. It further oversaw safety
and order in Afghanistan through increasing
military operations, and after 2003 through the
NATO-led International Security Assistance
Force (CFR 2020). During these first two years,
the number of US troops in the country
increased from a thousand to almost three
thousand (Chugtai and Qazi 2020).
However, this increase in engagement
was disrupted by changing international
commitments in 2003, as the American-led
invasion of Iraq caused a shift in focus for US
foreign policy. As the situation in Afghanistan
appeared to become more stable and headed
towards a resolution, US policy makers and
politicians alike preferred to reallocate resources
to managing the crisis in Iraq – resources that
were originally intended for the conflict in
Afghanistan. This Iraq War appeared to be a
more urgent and important crisis than the
relative calm situation in Afghanistan, and both
the intelligence personnel and troops were
focusing on this newer threat. Staff, financial
sources, and troops were increasingly being
shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. This severely
constrained the opportunities for effective
operations, particularly in the joint manner that
had proven successful in the initial phases of the
war (Salt 2018). More importantly, the transfer
of attention gave the Taliban the time and
opportunity to regroup during this period.
In this early period of the war, we can
clearly see an interplay between the negotiations
at a national and the international level. The
international situation enabled opportunities at
the domestic level, as shown at the start of OEF.
Yet only two years later the changes to the
international conditions severely constricted the
domestic opportunities. Therefore, the changes
in US policy after the start of the war in Iraq
show that the international situation can also
restrict the approaches available to an
administration.

Important Figures

Figure 1. Humanitarian Costs of the US-Afghanistan War

Internally Displaced People (IDP) in Afghanistan
3 750 000

3 000 000
IDP per year in Afghanistan

2 250 000

1 500 000

750 000

0
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

84
Figure 3. Deployed American Troops in Afghanistan
125 000
US deployed troops in Afghanistan

100 000

75 000
Quantity

50 000

25 000

0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

Figure 2. Afghan Civilian Casualties & Us-coalition Airstrikes

15 000
Annual amount of Afghan civilian casualties
Weapons released by the US coalition over Afghanistan

12 000

9 000
Quantity

6 000

3 000

0
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

85
 Figure 4. Afghan National Security Forces’ Increasing Losses
Against the Taliban
12 000
Annual amount of ANSF fatalities
9 000
Quantity
6 000
3 000
0
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
The US-Afghanistan conflict under
the Obama administration
Former President Barack Obama implemented
yet another change in the American approach
towards Afghanistan after his appointment in
2008. Throughout his presidential campaign,
Obama had stated that Afghanistan would be a
high priority in his foreign policy approach
(Miller 2016). This contrasted with the policy of
the Bush administration, which had prioritized
Iraq since the start of American military
activities there since 2003. As Obama had
announced his willingness to commit more
resources to Afghanistan in his campaign, he
had more freedom and support to do so when
he was elected to office.
Notably, however, the situation on the
ground in Afghanistan had changed drastically
since the US had downgraded Afghanistan in
terms of importance on its foreign policy
86
agenda, especially considering how close the
country had gotten to achieving its political
objectives around 2002-2003. However, due to a
shift of attention and resources from
Afghanistan to Iraq, the process of ‘nation-
building’ was stopped in its tracks. The Taliban
managed to regroup, and the conflict re-
escalated around 2005. Data shows that the
number of Taliban attacks rose significantly
from this point onwards, and with it the amount
of Afghani civilians and military casualties (CFR
2020).
The Obama administration thus
inherited a situation in Afghanistan that was
both deteriorating and escalating. His
administration had the domestic political
support to allocate more resources to the
conflict, and consequently imposed an extensive
crisis-management policy which entailed a surge
in the amount of deployed American troops in
Afghanistan. This is illustrated in figure 3
(Gollob and O’Halon 2020). The number of US
troops in Afghanistan rose from 25,000 in 2007
to 100,000 in August of 2010 (Peters and
Schwartz 2016). The Obama administration
used their vast military resources to conduct
counter-insurgency operations (COIN) against
the Taliban. This increase in military activities
resulted in military reactions from the Taliban,
thereby escalating the conflict further (United
Nations 2019). The Taliban were operating on
their home-ground, which gave them an
advantage whilst engaging in a long-dragging,
draining conflict (Posen 2003). Figure 1, 2, and
4 show how this period of COIN operations
resulted in an increase in the amount of
Internally Displaced People in Afghanistan, a
sharp increase in the amount of Afghan civilian
casualties and a gradual increase in the number
of casualties amongst the Afghan National
Security Forces.
Moreover, domestic support for the
extensive COIN operations of the US military
was decreasing and forced the Obama
administration to reconsider its strategy in
Afghanistan. As previously explained, domestic
political support forms the basis of operational
power for national leaders (Putnam 1988).
Therefore, leaders have the tendency to refrain
from decisions and policies that undermine
their domestic support base, and the campaign
promises that had garnered this support. This
phenomenon becomes increasingly important
for politicians in democratic countries during
times of elections, as their re-election is so
heavily influenced by their domestic popularity
at that moment in time. Low-approval ratings
for a national leader in times of elections cycles
therefore provide an added incentive to revise
certain policies that have evidently decreased
their popularity among the general population.
The Obama administration found itself
in a situation like this around 2011-2012.
Between 2010 and 2012, the approval ratings
for the president were low, forecasting a tough
presidential election campaign in 2012 (Gallup
2012). This low popularity could be attributed
to several factors, such as the global economic
87
recession of 2008, but also to the expensive and
violent war in Afghanistan. Several public
opinion polls between 2009 and 2011 recorded
an all-time low support for the policies of the
government with regards to Afghanistan
(Polling Report 2011). The upcoming
presidential election of 2012, in combination
with low-approval ratings for the Obama
administration, incentivized the administration
to revise policies that were unpopular. This
created a desire to withdraw a substantial
number of US troops from Afghanistan.
However, withdrawing US troops
without showing the international community
and the American population that the surge of
troops had resulted in tangible achievements
would be seen as a defeat for the US in general,
and as a political defeat for Obama specifically.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011
thus provided the Obama administration with a
reason to conduct a partial withdrawal from
Afghanistan without suffering substantial
political fallout in the international and
national political arenas. Finding Osama Bin
Laden had been one of the core political
objectives of the US, having been set out already
by the Bush administration at the starting stages
of the intervention in Afghanistan, and the
Obama administration managed to accomplish
this (CFR 2020). It is therefore no surprise that
Obama announced a gradual withdrawal three
months after the assassination of Bin Laden, “as
the US had achieved success in Afghanistan”
(Chughtai and Qazi 2020). Moreover, Obama’s
COIN strategy could be framed as a success to
his domestic audience, as became evident by the
positive public reactions in several American
cities after hearing the news of the capture of bin
Laden (Cox and Wood 2017). Additionally, the
shift in policy from COIN to partial withdrawal,
which aligned more with the preferences of the
American audience, came at a crucial time right
before the presidential elections of 2012.
The following withdrawal of the large
number of American troops from Afghanistan
was realized through a timetable (Chughtai and
Qazi 2020). Around 2012, the number of US
troops had decreased to around 10,000. Even
though the US had achieved its political
objectives of eliminating Osama bin Laden, the
conflict in Afghanistan raged on. Obama’s surge
had escalated the conflict and pushed the
Taliban to develop its military capabilities in
such a way that it was able to continue the fight
against the American troops (McNally and
Bucala 2015). Now that the number of US
troops in Afghanistan had decreased from
100,000 to a mere 10,000, the burden of
continuing the conflict and securing the
previously made gains shifted to the Afghan
National Security Forces, the ANSF (Gollob and
O’Halon 2020). The Taliban proved to be more
of a match for the ANSF once they had to
operate without significant assistance from the
US (McNally and Bucala 2015), as is visible in
figure 4 from the amount of ANSF casualties
(Gollob and O’Halon 2020).
Thus, the situation in Afghanistan
became hard for the Obama administration to
manage and almost impossible to resolve. On
the international level, a commitment of
resources was required in the Levant to tackle
the rise of the Islamic State, Daesh, which tied
into a larger geopolitical struggle in Syria
between Turkey, Iran, Russia, the Kurds and the
US. In Afghanistan, the Obama administration
had opted to withdraw due to the domestic
unpopularity of their counter-insurgency
strategy. This meant that the US’s ability to
change the course of the conflict in Afghanistan
was constrained due to a limited amount of
available resources. Additionally, the Taliban
had developed into a competent military force
over the years, proving to be a strong rival to the
ANSF, and the Afghan government ran the risk
of being overrun without American support
(Hezir 2014). Due to the US’s limited available
resources in Afghanistan, it could not assist the
ANSF to such an extent that a resolution of the
conflict would be possible. The conflict seemed
then to come to a stalemate between the Taliban
and the Afghan government where, due to
continued American military presence, neither
side was able to overpower the other.
88
Interestingly, this situation made peace-
talks a realistic and potentially rewarding option
for all actors involved in the conflict.
Domestically, achieving a peace-agreement
would mean that the sitting American
administration could frame the country’s long
operations in Afghanistan as having been
successful, and terminate them after many years
of expensive and casualty-laden wars. In the
international political arena, it meant that the
US could reallocate resources from Afghanistan
to other areas like Syria, Iraq, or the Pacific,
where American interests had to be furthered.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan without at least
a peace-agreement would be seen as a defeat by
both the international community and the
domestic sphere. Therefore, every US
administration hopes to withdraw from
Afghanistan with either their strategic objectives
achieved or with a negotiated peace-agreement
with the Taliban, so they would be able to claim
that their operations have been successful.
Nevertheless, the Taliban understood
that by continued use of violence, it could push
the US towards constructing peace-talks in a
three-party format, consisting of the Taliban, the
Afghan government, and the American
government. Therefore, even though the
situation on the ground seemed to be ripe for a
peace-agreement and withdrawal, violence
continued to ensue. It appears that still today,
the Taliban continues to act according to the
logic that inflicting costs on the Afghan
government and the US could push these parties
to make more concessions in a future deal.
The US-Afghanistan conflict under
the Trump administration
Following the elections in 2016, a new
administration came into office led by former
President Donald Trump. Crucially, the foreign
policy Trump has espoused to execute in
Afghanistan when running for presidency was
significantly different from that which he had
enacted in practice. After Trump won the
presidential elections in 2016, the new
administration was dealt a difficult hand.
Although the former President had been vocal
about his desire to pull out of Afghanistan, the
situation on the ground did not allow for him to
follow through on these plans. There was a
palpable conflict between the promises he had
made to his base, and the reality of an
increasingly violent conflict in Afghanistan
where the Taliban was gradually gaining the
upper hand. These factors led to the surprising
announcement of Trump’s 2017 security
strategy. In contrast to his initial plans, the
President soon started engaging in a long-
winded path to resolution, which resulted in
peace talks with the Taliban at the start of 2020.
In the remainder of this article, it will be shown
that the changes in Trump’s Afghanistan policy
can be understood through the lens of the two-
level game.
The newly elected president of the
United States has been vocal about the need to
withdraw from Afghanistan even before his
political career started. Throughout the years, he
has expressed this on social media platforms,
arguing that the war was a waste of money and
American lives (Diaz 2017). It is, however,
important to note that in the 2016 election
cycle, both candidates Clinton and Trump did
not mention the conflict in Afghanistan often.
The decrease in troop levels and financial
commitment by the Obama administration had
decreased the importance of the conflict in the
eyes of the public. This was strengthened by the
fact that there were other security threats that
demanded attention, such as the expanding
Islamic State and the Syrian conflict, or
increasing tensions with North Korea (Dorani
2019). Thus, although Trump had been very
vocal about his opinions on the war, it was not
a key concern in the elections compared to
previous cycles. The conflict between the
demands of the domestic level and the realities
of the international situation was therefore
easier to resolve for him than for his
predecessors.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump faced a
difficult situation when he came into office. His
89
previous statements about immediate
withdrawal did not align with the deteriorating
situation on the ground (IISS 2017). Since
Obama initiated disengagement, the Taliban
had become stronger while the Afghan forces
were being significantly weakened. Thus,
although withdrawal aligned with Trump’s
isolationist foreign policy, it was clear that this
was not a legitimate option at that point in time.
Moreover, despite repeated calls from the US,
other states were not willing to contribute
sufficient resources to the government of
Afghanistan in their fight against the Taliban.
Due to its earlier established military presence,
and the high-quality of its military apparatus, the
US was still the most capable and likely actor to
support the Afghan government against the
Taliban. This difficulty was further exacerbated
because the US had started this war, and a
disengagement without a defeated Taliban or a
signed peace-deal would mean a loss of face for
the US both in the international community
and in front of the administration’s domestic
audience. Perhaps even more crucial, an
established Taliban regime in Afghanistan could
turn into a base of operations for terrorist
networks who seek to harm US targets globally.
From the perspective of the US, maintaining the
costly stalemate in Afghanistan, where neither
the Taliban nor the Afghan government seemed
to be able to topple the other, was eventually
favored over withdrawal.
Consequently, the combination
between international and domestic factors only
left two options to the president, both of which
meant continued engagement. One was the
proposal made by General John W. Nicholson,
which promoted a relatively small increase in
troops to assist and prepare the Afghan National
Security Forces, or to do nothing and remain in
a stalemate (Dorani 2019). The anti-engagement
camp argued in opposition that any increase in
resources was futile and thus wasteful.
According to them, the complexity on the
ground did not permit effective engagement,
and the resources would be better spent on
Trump's campaign commitments to his
 Photo by UX Gun • unsplash.com

90
supporters (IISS 2017). After one of these
pessimists, Steve Bannon, left the White House,
the President was provided more room to alter
his political strategy. This is because there were
less conflicts within his inner circle, and because
the severity of the situation on the ground
outweighed Trump’s previous statements.
Furthermore, as already mentioned, public
opinion on the Afghanistan conflict had not
been central to his election and thus it did not
restrict him as much as one might expect. This
resulted in a consensus that an increase in
engagement was the most suitable solution.
The pro-engagement camp argued that a
relatively small increase in troops would be
enough to reverse the stalemate and they
vehemently disagreed that it would be futile.
They argued that it was necessary to continue
the War on Terror and avoid Afghanistan
becoming a breeding ground for further terrorist
activities. This argument was strengthened by
the high mortality in terror attacks perpetrated
across Europe by the Islamic State. Daesh’s
perceived ability to inflict so much damage was
linked to its ability to train individual cells in its
Caliphate, giving it an advantage over other
organizations that did not have training
grounds. Although Daesh was mostly centered
around Syria and Iraq, the fear of organizations
training in Afghanistan in a similar manner was
revitalized in this period (IISS 2017). This
reminder that the War on Terror had not yet
been won gave the pro-engagement camp more
power, since they saw Afghanistan as a clear
‘battleground’ to focus on in this war (similarly
to the previous presidents). They also saw US
influence in Afghanistan as central to a stable
South Asia; particularly with regards to the
increasing nuclear armament in Pakistan, and
the potential effect this would have on the
relationship between Pakistan, China and India
(Dorani 2019).
All these concerns were clearly visible in
the new South Asia Strategy that President
Trump revealed at Fort Myers on August 21st,
2017. Trump announced a small increase in
troop deployments, and his clear focus was on
91
“killing terrorists” (Trump 2017). At first
glance, his policy was similar to that of his
predecessor, however there were also some
important changes from previous US policy in
the area. The former President switched from a
time-based approach (announcing a timeline for
disengagement) to a condition-based approach:
meaning that the US would only pull out based
on the conditions on the ground. Trump also
eased the rules of engagement on the ground,
enabling the American military to take a
stronger position against the opposition, but
also increasing the number of air-strikes. Within
the region, Trump also sought to take a more
hardline approach towards Pakistan, and
increase the strategic relationship with India,
which he hoped would provide support on the
ground. Lastly, Trump attempted to stay true to
his motto of America First, and to ensure that it
would look like he kept his promises to his
constituency he distanced himself from the
‘nation building’ project.
This South Asia Strategy provides a good
example of how foreign policy is often informed
by the negotiations that are happening at the
different levels of the game. Trump’s initial
instinct was to pull out of the conflict. This is
what he had loosely promised his voters, and
some members of his early cabinet had urged
him to do so. However, the experience of direct
withdrawal from Iraq and fears over the regional
and international stability meant that this was
not a feasible option. These international
constraints ensured that the disagreements at
the domestic level were resolved and that
continued engagement became the only viable,
and most pragmatic course of action. This
pragmatism appealed to Trump and his self-
proclaimed “problem solver” mentality and thus
allowed a clear range of options at the second
level that were pursued.
However, the increase in military
engagement and aerial campaigns by the US and
its allies resulted in an upsurge in violence by the
Taliban and the Haqqani Network (CFR 2020).
As a response to this violence, Trump said at the
end of January 2018 that he did not “see any
talking taking place.” Only days later, however,
at the end of February of that same year, the
Taliban issued a statement calling for talks with
the United States to negotiate an end to the
conflict. Remarkably, instead of the US, it was
the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani who offered
the Taliban an opportunity for legitimate
political negotiations.
This precisely exemplifies a change at the
international level that impacted domestic
decisions in the US. Although the US initially
refused to enter negotiations, observers soon
noticed that the war was still at a stalemate and
the realization dawned that it was too costly to
continue. This meant that a political settlement
became the most viable and desirable option to
see the war to an end. In a reversal from Trump’s
previous statements, the administration decided
to enter direct negotiations with the Taliban
(Mashal and Schmitt 2018). Representatives
from both the Taliban and the US government
met in Doha, Qatar, in 2018. It is important to
note that the appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad,
an Afghan-American diplomat in charge of these
negotiations, was central to these developments
and aided the negotiations substantially
(Kelemen, Hadid and Romo 2018).
These talks between the parties seemed
to have reached a conclusion in September of
2019. The deal, drawn, called for the gradual
withdrawal of US troops over 16 months, which
would be met with counterterrorism efforts by
the Taliban (Baker, Mashal, and Crowley 2019).
During the negotiation process there were
increasing tensions within Trump’s inner circle,
at the domestic level of the game. Mike Pompeo,
Secratary of State at the time, was a staunch
supporter of Khalilzad and the deal he was
proposing, however he was firmly opposed by
national security advisor John R. Bolton. This
domestic tension over the peace talks, combined
with issues on the Afghan side, meant that the
talks were definitively broken off by President
Trump after a US soldier was killed in a Taliban
attack (Baker, Mashal and Crowley, 2019).
Soon after this, the departure of John
Bolton enabled the internal pressures to reach a
92
conclusion on the domestic level. Combining
this with a clear external commitment by the
Taliban at the international level meant that the
peace talks were resumed only three months
later (Thomas 2020). On the 29th of February,
2020, the United States and the Taliban had
reached a comprehensive peace agreement that
was signed by Khalilzad and the Taliban’s chief
negotiator Mullah Baradar (“Agreement
Bringing Peace,” 2020). They agreed on a
significant reduction of US troops that would
result in the complete withdrawal of all US
forces within 14 months. Furthermore, they
agreed on assistance in intra-Afghan talks and
the removal of sanctions on Taliban members.
In exchange, the Taliban ensured that Afghan
soil would not be used for terrorist activities and
other activities that could harm the US and its
allies. These peace talks were only possible after
the US had reached internal agreement at the
domestic level. The breakdown of the peace
talks in 2019 was clearly influenced by internal
disagreement as well as changes at the
international level. Once these constraints were
lifted the focus on the negotiations at the first
level (between the Taliban and the US) was able
to resume. This case thus demonstrates the
importance of agreement at the domestic level
to enable crisis management and conflict
resolution at the international level.
Conclusion
This paper has explained and examined what
the two-level game between domestic and
foreign politics entails, and how it influences
politicians and policymakers in general. This
framework has been applied to the US-
Afghanistan conflict, in order to understand the
rationale behind the different strategic
approaches of various American administrations
with regards to the conflict. It has become clear
that the domestic support for the commitment
of time, resources, and human capital to the
conflict in Afghanistan has been a critical factor
in the policy-making and political decisions of
different US presidents. As was shown, the Bush
administration enjoyed broad domestic support
for its original approach, which later also
entailed a phase of nation-building, but adapted
its policies in the wake of changes at the
international level. Decreasing domestic support
for Obama’s COIN strategy forced the
administration to drastically decrease the
number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan.
The Trump administration remained limited in
its ability to force a favorable settlement of the
conflict due to the promises that it has made to
its domestic audience regarding the Afghanistan
conflict. This explains why the Trump
administration sought to negotiate a peace-deal
with the Taliban, which is a 180 degree turn on
the original political and strategic objectives of
the US as formulated in 2001. The achievement
of a peace-agreement became more urgent as the
presidential elections of 2020 came closer, with
the Trump campaign hoping to be able to frame
the resolution of the conflict and the bringing
home of troops as a victory to its domestic
audience.
Additionally, this article has shown that
changes in the international political arena
impact this very same policy-making process.
The invasion of Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008
and its subsequent political backlash, and the
emergence of Daesh have been pointed out as
events that caused policymakers and politicians
to reconsider their previously conjured policies
targeting the Afghanistan conflict. Once a state
has committed to a certain foreign policy, the
international political arena might change in
such a way that the allocated resources are of
better or more urgent use elsewhere than had
they been allocated along the lines of the
previously agreed foreign policy. Volatility forces
policymakers to reconsider the importance of
certain issues in the international political
arena, as resources to tackle these changes are
limited. The nature of the international political
sphere, which is marked by selfish actors who
operate in a structure in which power is
horizontally distributed, makes for a high-level
of volatility.
93
The consequences of these simultaneous
pressures from the international and domestic
levels on the decisions of politicians are reflected
in the discontinuous foreign policy of the US in
regard to the conflict in Afghanistan. Strategies
of intervention and nation-building have been
traded in for aggressive counter-insurgency
operations and air-strike campaigns. This
discontinuity has increasingly militarized the
conflict and pushed the Taliban to develop its
capabilities and transform itself into a
competent military force vis-à-vis the Afghan
National Security Forces. An even balance of
power between the ANSF and the Taliban,
combined with limited and constrained US
involvement in the conflict, explains the current
situation in Afghanistan and the ongoing peace-
talks.
Finally, these findings are critical to take
into consideration when framed in the light of
crisis-management. Theoretically sound crisis-
management policies, such as intervention and
nation-building or extensive COIN operations,
are thwarted by the volatility of the domestic and
international political arenas. This volatility
disrupts the time and resources that are given to
execute these policies. The possibility that the
effectiveness of a preferred policy might be very
sensitive to changes in the domestic or
international arena should be taken into
consideration when politicians decide on which
policy to promote or implement in order to
manage a certain crisis. The various policies of
US administrations, which have been
constrained or reversed due to changes in the
two-level game, serve as an example of this. In
essence, ‘reality’ can thwart the success of
theoretically sound crisis-management policies.
Therefore, policymakers find themselves trying
to balance a precarious agenda that both garners
domestic support and international acceptance.
Crisis-management policies, especially those
concerning armed conflict, must therefore
account for these constraints and be designed in
a manner far less susceptible to alteration. As the
conflict in Afghanistan continues to drag out,
our eyes are pointed at the incoming Biden
administration to see if it finally manages to
formulate a clear-headed policy that can win the
two-level game.
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Polling Report. “Afghanistan.” Pollingreport.com, 2015.
https://pollingreport.com/afghan.htm.
Putnam, Robert D. “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The
Logic of Two-Level Games.” International Organization
42, no. 03 (1988):
427. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818300027697.
Qazi, Alia Chughtai, Shereena. “From the 2001 Fall of the
Taliban to 2020 Afghan Peace Talks.”
www.aljazeera.com, September 12, 2020.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/12/from-
the-2001-fall-of-the-taliban-to-2020-afghan-peace-talks.
Reuters Staff. “Biden Administration Will Review Deal with
the Taliban: White House.” Reuters, January 22, 2021.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-US-afghanistan-
idUSKBN29R2NG.
Salt, Alexander. "Transformation and the War in Afghanistan."
Strategic Studies Quarterly: SSQ 12, no. 1 (2018): 98-126.
.
95
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). “The
Trump Administration’s Afghanistan Policy.” Edited by
Jonathan Stevenson. Strategic Comments 23, no. 9
(October 6, 2017): i–iii.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13567888.2017.1388018.
Thomas, Clayton. “Afghanistan: Background and U.S. Policy:
In Brief.” Congressional Research Service (CRS),
R45122, 2020.
Trump, Donald. “Remarks by President Trump at Lunch with
Members of the United Nations Security Council.”
January 29, 2018.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-
statements/remarks-president-trump-lunch-members-
united-nations-security-council/
Trump, Donald. “Remarks by President Trump on the Strategy
in Afghanistan and South Asia.” August 21, 2017.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-
statements/remarks-president-trump-strategy-
afghanistan-south-asia/.
U.S. Congress, Joint Resolution to authorize the use of United States
Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks
launched against the United States, S.J. Res 23. Approved
September 18, 2001.
https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ40/PLAW-
107publ40.pdf
United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. “Reports
on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict.”
UNAMA, September 9,
2015. https://unama.unmissions.org/protection-of-
civilians-reports.
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S/RES/1267, 1999.
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Of Civilians In Armed Conflict: 2019 I.”
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utive_summary_-
_afghanistan_protection_of_civilians_annual_report_2
019_english.pdf

Photo by Ivan Aleksic • unsplash.com
The Serbia-Kosovo Normalization
Deal: Everything We Should Know
Written by Lior Hamovitz
O
n September 4th, 2020, the long-
clashing Serbia and Kosovo signed a
normalization agreement at the Oval
Office in Washington D.C., declaring a mutual
desire for better diplomatic and economic
relations. This agreement, championed by the
Donald Trump administration, has been
contradictorily referred to as a historical
96
!"
achievement one the one hand, and has been
deemed to have little influence on the resolution
of the conflict between the two parties on the
other (Stojanovic and Bami 2020). Unpacking
its contents and context may therefore provide
some more clarity on why such differing views
arose. The seemingly intractable conflict
between Serbia and Kosovo serves as one of the
best examples for how, often, crises cannot be
contained to a singular moment in time, and
spill over onto decades of during strifes that
need to be managed.
Background of the Conflict
Understanding the background of this conflict
is a difficult task, as its history has been
convoluted by the different accounts of the
ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians. When the
Slavs arrived in the Balkan region, between the
seventh and tenth centuries, the Serbs among
them had settled in the area of Kosovo. By the
twelfth century, Kosovo had become both the
political and spiritual center of the Serb people.
In the fourteenth century, Serbs had clashed
with the Ottoman empire armies in the Battle of
Kosovo, an event which later became deeply
embedded in their national history and identity.
The legacy Kosovo’s loss became an inseparable
part of Serbian national consciousness.
However, by the eighteenth century, Kosovo had
begun to lose its Serbian ethnic majority – as
many Serbs had left the region, and many
Albanians moved in from the newly liberated
territories. In the aftermath of the Balkan wars
and following the independence of Albania,
Serbia insisted that Kosovo had to remain a part
of its territory, regardless of Kosovo’s Albanian
population.
In light of the events of World War II,
and the subsequent wave of national liberation
that followed, the Albanians of Kosovo came to
think of the territory as theirs, a territory that is
unjustly not unified with the greater state of
Albania. These feelings were heightened when
Kosovo was integrated in the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, rather than becoming
independent. Following the death of Tito,
Yugoslavia’s former president, in 1980,
Albanian nationalism became more eminent,
and its manifestations more frequent. These
were characterized by ethnic hatred towards
Serbs and immense pressure for them to leave
Kosovo, which was similar to the aggressive
97
expulsion campaign they had experienced
during WWII at the hands of Albanian
Kosovars. By 1990, Serbian historians have
come to claim that around 400,000 Serbians
were forced out of Kosovo, only in the past
couple of decades (Bieber and Daskalovski
2003). The Serbian people have, thus, developed
resentment towards the state of Kosovo, which
proved unable and unwilling to adequately
protect them, a resentment that gave rise to
Serbian nationalism.
While the Albanian perspective does not
wholly contradict this historical progression,
some interpretations of these events differ. The
Albanians hold that Serbs had colonized the
Balkan region, and that their aim had always
been to occupy the Albanian people. During the
nineteenth century, some Albanian historians
even claimed that Serbians were trying to falsify
the country’s historiography in order to expand
its rightful territory. Consequently, following
the Balkan wars, Serbia and its government are
believed to have taken brutal measures to alter
Kosovo’s ethnic balance, expelling and even
killing Albanians in the region. In the years after
WWII, specifically between 1950-1966, nearly
half a million Albanians were forced to leave
Kosovo and emigrate to Turkey, with those
remaining, harshly treated by the Yugoslavian
and Serbian rule (Bieber and Daskalovski
2003).
In 1997, after several decades of a
fruitless battle for independence, many Kosovar
Albanians became disillusioned with their
community’s efforts in the fight and the slow
progress they were making. Taking measures
into their own hands, they commenced an
armed rebellion against the Serbian state and its
institutions which had been subjugating them
for years (Bieber and Daskalovski 2003). This
conflict then further escalated into a war
between Serbia and Montenegro, and the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led by the
Albanian rebels. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization intervened in the war too, leading
an aerial campaign that was meant to get the
“Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back”
(Radio Free Europe 2019). The termination of
the war was marked by the Kumanovo Treaty,
which had paved the way for international forces
to monitor the region, and disbanded the KLA.
Overall, the armed conflict had taken the lives
of thousands of people and displaced over a
million Kosovar Albanians (OSCE 1999, 13).
The Serbian and Albanian claims for
Kosovo stand on inconclusive legal grounds,
with Serbia arguing for a historical right over the
territory, and Albania claiming a practical one
based on their ethnic prevalence in the
population. Each state interpreted the
dissolution of Yugoslavia differently: Serbia saw
it as meaning that Kosovo becomes an internal
matter of the state, and Albania believed that the
autonomy Kosovo previously had as a province
within Yugoslavia had been upgraded to full
independence (Bieber and Daskalovski 2003).
However, there is no uniform legal framework
that can determine which of the claims trumps
the other. Regardless, in 2008 Kosovo
unilaterally declared its independence, one
which was recognized by over 100 states, 23 of
which are members of the European Union
(Russel 2019). International recognition and
specifically European integration have become
central concerns for both Serbia and Kosovo.
The Deal Itself
Now this is the tricky part. In practice, the deal
signed on September 4th, 2020, by Serbian and
Kosovar leaders, was not technically a bilateral
agreement, but rather two separate contracts
(Lika 2020). These agreements were drafted
under the logic that improved economic
relations, and the respective economic
prosperity of the two states, are the key to a
subsequent improvement of political ties. The
documents signed by the two parties elaborate
on the expansion of connectivity between them,
through rail and highway, and a deep-sea port in
the Adriatic, along with other loan-based
ventures aided by the US (Lika 2020). However,
98
“These agreements were
drafted under the logic
that improved economic
relations, and the
respective economic
prosperity of the two
states, are key to a
subsequent improvement
of political ties.
while rhetorically promising, the deal offers little
to no real political change for Kosovo and
Serbia’s tense relationship (Jegic 2020). It has
furthermore been deemed by legal experts as not
legally binding (Przybylski 2020). For these
reasons, rather than discussing the terms of the
agreement, many of which are likely to be altered
or neglected, it is more crucial to understand
who is benefitting from the novel normalization
deal, and how.
Trump: The Big Winner
Arguably, there are only two people who are
practically benefitting from this new deal. The
first of the two is President Donald Trump.
Leading up to the contentious US elections, the
Trump administration became more aggressive
in trying to promote quick processes that could
be credited to the President, who had tried to
portray himself as a problem-solver (Przybylski
2020). Along with the normalization deals
between Israel and the United Arab Emirates,
just as between Israel and Bahrain, came this
normalization agreement between Kosovo and
Serbia, the long warring foes.
In truth, this deal has far more to do
with Trump and his vision for the United States
than with any other party. For example, the new
roads and infrastructure meant to be built
between Kosovo and Serbia use loans granted by
the US, and the country is also set to found a
permanent presence in the Serbian capital, in
the form of an International Development
Finance Corporation office. Of course, these are
manners by which the US reinforces the
Balkans’ dependence upon it, with the hopes of
drawing a wedge in the alliance between Serbia,
China, and Russia (Przybylski 2020). Pertinent
for this goal, too, is the agreement’s clause which
calls for the parties to both prohibit and actively
remove 5G technologies that originate from
“untrusted vendors” (Jegic 2020). While
inexplicit, the provision clearly refers to
technologies such as those provided by the
Chinese giant Huawei. Along these lines, both
parties to the deal have agreed to broaden their
technological cooperation with the US, sharing
information regarding flight passengers and
more.
Perhaps most importantly, Trump
referred to the new relationship between Kosovo
and Israel as “a great day for peace in the Middle
East” (Trump 2020). That is, regardless of the
fact Kosovo is not in the Middle East. For
Trump, however, that does not matter. What
matters is that he had promised his voters to
ensure an American withdrawal from the
Middle East, a decades long involvement which
has seen the deaths of many American soldiers
and resulted in extensive international
controversies. In reality, the Trump
administration has not been able to make such
great strides towards this goal, but ‘Middle-
Easternizing’ Kosovo, as well as the
aforementioned deals between Israel, the UAE
and Bahrain, are designed to portray President
Trump as a peace maker and a broker of
solutions – as opposed to his opponent Joe
Biden, who had previously supported President
99
Clinton’s decision to militarily intervene in the
Balkans (Jovic 2020).
The Israeli Connection
The second in line to gain from this agreement,
is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Israeli
domestic politics have experienced some of the
tensest times in the history of the country. With
great difficulty to curb the infection rates, long
lasting lockdowns and vast protests against his
regime, Netanyahu had to find new ways to
assert himself as Israel’s longest residing Prime
Minister (Peleg et al. 2020).
Under the championship of Trump and
his office, the new normalization agreement
between Kosovo and Serbia oddly included the
provision that both states establish an embassy
in Jerusalem. So far, only two other countries in
the world have recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital: the US and Guatemala (Przybylski
2020). For Israel at large, and Netanyahu
specifically, this is a huge victory in the realm of
international recognition, especially as Kosovo is
a Muslim-majority state and can thus be
classified by Netanyahu as a win resembling that
of the formalizing of the country’s relationship
with the UAE and Bahrain. Not only that, but
the deal also stipulates that both Kosovo and
Serbia designate Hizballah, the Lebanese
political party with an armed militia, as a terror
organization (Lika 2020). They will not be alone
in doing so, as many Western countries have
defined Hizballah in its entirety, or at least its
military wing as a terror organization.
Nonetheless, this provision in the agreement
clearly has nothing to do with the Balkan states
and everything to do with the project of creating
a unified front against Iran. Again, this is
another victory for Netanyahu and his appeal as
the guardian of Israeli security, who has, for
years now, warned the international community
against the risks of the Iranian regime and its
involvement in Lebanon and Syria. Meanwhile,
the resolution of the Kosovo-Serbia conflict
appears nowhere in sight.
What Does This All Mean for the
Balkans?
Opinions vary widely on the actual bearing the
agreement would have on the Balkan states in
general, and Serbia and Kosovo in particular.
Some may claim that it signifies Serbia has
finally given up on its aspiration to be reunited
with the Kosovar Serbs in northern Kosovo, and
essentially accepted Pristina’s authority over
them, rendering any hopes for the maintenance
of the existing status quo unattainable. In fact,
many of the deal’s points address the way
northern Kosovo shall be politically and
institutionally managed from now on, with
increased municipal sovereignty to the Serbian
community of Kosovo as per the provisions
made in the 2013 Brussels Agreement (IFIMES
2020). However, even though the agreement
seems to be full of rhetorical significance, in
practice it might not be so meaningful. The deal
itself is abundant in ambiguities, à-la the
Brussels Agreement for normalization between
Serbia and Kosovo, which saw little to no
manifestation. Much of the deal’s contents and
“…it is the inclusivity of
political institutions
which can propel the
inclusivity of economic
ones, and not the other
way around.
100
provisions are thus bound to be filled in later,
changed, or altogether forgotten (Prelec 2013).
Moreover, it is important to note that
the idea that economic ties can lead to better
political relations is not as widely accepted as
one might think. Specifically, in the case of
Serbia and Kosovo, it is the lack of a diplomatic
relationship itself, as well as vast political
corruption and internal legal issues, which
prevent the two countries from being able to
foster better economies (Jegic 2020). Indeed,
many agree that it is the inclusivity of political
institutions which can propel the inclusivity of
economic ones, and not the other way around
(Lika 2020). Despite the agreement’s attempt to
create economic collaboration between the
parties, it can certainly be claimed it holds little
substance in terms of improving the political
and social conflict they have been involved in for
decades (or even centuries).
In terms of the political provisions of the
deal, the two most crucial ones are these:
(1) Serbia has agreed to suspend its efforts to
prevent or undo the recognition of the state of
Kosovo by other countries, for the duration of a
year; (2) for that same year, Kosovo has agreed
to suspend its efforts to join international
organizations (Lika 2020).
What does this mean? Well, in essence,
it means that things are at a standstill. Serbia has
agreed to neglect a fight that has so far been
instrumental for its national identity, and
Kosovo has agreed to halt the continuation of its
long campaign for recognition. What is a mere
year in the life of a nation, one may ask? Possibly
quite a lot, in the case of these two. The Serbian
leaders of northern Kosovo have already once
rejected the provisions of this normalization
agreement in 2013 and were left feeling betrayed
by the Serbian government (Prelec 2013). As the
history of the region has shown us, these types
of sentiments can often lead to an aggressive
response, one that the Serbian government
cannot afford if it wishes to have its membership
application to the EU reconsidered. This
application is further complicated by the
establishment of a Serbian embassy in
Jerusalem, a move wholly opposed by the EU
and its foreign policy. On the Kosovar side,
things are no less, if not more, complicated. The
aforementioned “Middle-Easternizing” of
Kosovo can too regretfully prove detrimental to
its potential integration into the EU, an
organization known for its strict adherence to a
European identity centered around Christianity
in the guise of secularity, a reluctance to expand
itself, and for growing anti-Muslim sentiments
(Jovic 2020). Trump’s categorization of Kosovo
as a Muslim state and its agreement to establish
an embassy in Jerusalem, push Kosovo’s EU
dream further and further out of reach. As it
appears then, for now, the Balkan region
remains manipulated by great power rivalry and
is in no better vantage for negotiations than it
was prior to the signing of the agreement.
References
Bieber, Florian and Zidas Daskalovski. “Claims to Kosovo:
Nationalism and Self-Determination.” In Understanding
the War in Kosovo. London: Routledge, 2003. IFIMES.
“2020 US-Serbia-Kosovo Agreement: New Era of
Serbia-US Political and Economic Relations.”
www.ifimes.org. September 25, 2020.
https://www.ifimes.org/en/9903.
Jegic, Denijal. “Trump’s Kosovo-Serbia Normalisation Deal Is
All about Israel.” Al Jazeera. September 28, 2020.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/9/28/trum
ps-kosovo-serbia-normalisation-deal-is-all-about-israel/.
Jovic, Dejan. “Trump’s Serbia-Kosovo Deal ‘Middle-Easternizes’
the Balkans.” Balkan Insight. September 10, 2020.
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/09/10/trumps-serbia-
kosovo-deal-middle-easternizes-the-balkans/.
Lika, İdlir. “Analysis - Kosovo-Serbia ‘Agreement’: Lots of
Noise, Little Substance.” Aa.com.tr. September 14,
101
2020. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/analysis/analysis-
kosovo-serbia-agreement-lots-of-noise-little-
substance/1972892.
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
“Human Rights in Kosovo: As Seen, As Told. Volume
I, October 1998 - June 1999.” OSCE. May 11, 1999.
https://www.osce.org/odihr/17772.
Peleg, Bar, Noa Shpigel, Nir Hasson and Josh Breiner. “Anti-
Netanyahu Protests Resume in Jerusalem, across Israel,
in Shadow of Right-Wing Violence.” Haaretz. October
17, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-
news/.premium-anti-netanyahu-protests-to-resume-in-
jerusalem-across-israel-as-restriction-lifts-1.9242122.
Prelec, Marko. “The Kosovo-Serbia Agreement: Why Less Is
More.” Crisis Group. May 7, 2013.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-
asia/balkans/kosovo/kosovo-serbia-agreement-why-less-
more.
Przybylski, Wojciech. “Unpacking the Serbia-Kosovo Deal -
Western Balkans.” Visegrad Insight. September 10,
2020, https://visegradinsight.eu/western-balkans-
serbia-kosovo-deal-vejvoda/.
Radio Free Europe | Radio Liberty. “Operation Allied Force:
The NATO Bombing Of Yugoslavia.” March 24, 2019.
https://www.rferl.org/a/operation-allied-force-before
after/29831978.html#:~:text=NATO%20then%20byp
assed%20the%20United.
Russell, Martin. "Serbia-Kosovo Relations: Confrontation or
Normalisation." European Parliamentary Research Service
(2019).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/docum
ent.html?reference=EPRS_BRI(2019)635512.
Stojanovic, Milica and Xhorxhina Bami. “Kosovo and Serbia
Sign ‘Historic’ Deal Under Trump’s Auspices.” Balkan
Insight. September 4, 2020.
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/09/04/kosovo-and-
serbia-sign-historic-deal-under-trumps-auspices/.
Trump, Donald (@realDonaldTrump). “Another great day for
peace with Middle East…” Twitter. September 4, 2020.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/130192
4019147616257?s=20.

Photo by Christopher Burns • unsplash.com
Invisible Emissions from the Internet:
Should We Care?
Written by Ami Kinoshita and Judith Rybol
H
ave you ever wondered if all the quick
google searches, emails, social
networks, online communication and
video streaming you engage in daily might be
bad for the environment? Surely, you regularly
plug in your various devices to charge, but that’s
just a few kWh of electricity per year, cannot be
too bad, right? Besides, electricity could be
powered by renewables, so you probably never
102
!!
really worried about this too much, if such
thoughts came to you in the first place.
Well, should we care? How much energy
does the internet as a whole consume and how
damaging is this environmental impact? If you
include the whole global machinery: powering
all the personal devices, production of hardware
and handling e-waste, but also data processing
and transmission, running and cooling these
massive servers in big data centers – what does it
really add up to? And, importantly, what is the
added impact of the last year, since everyone was
sent into home office, video conferencing
exploded and streaming content suddenly
seemed to be the only distraction from
quarantine loneliness? The straightforward
answer to these questions concerning the extent
of environmental impact through increased
Internet use is, surprisingly: no, it’s not that bad.
However, this does not mean we should be
indifferent to it, because the balance between
increasing internet demand and efficiency
improvements could easily slip. We will explain
how and what you can do about it.
According to the latest available data by
the International Energy Agency (IEA), the
entire internet used about 800 TWh in 2019,
which is less than 1% of global electricity (IEA,
2020). This does not mean that internet use and
infrastructure has not increased in the last years
as a consequence of ever-rising digitization. The
main reason why we remained on track in terms
of internet energy use so far is because of
enormous efficiency improvements throughout
the internet infrastructure, which managed to
offset the higher electricity demand due to the
increased internet use (IEA, 2020). This is truly
amazing, considering that such technological
development has been made continuously and
successfully. Yet, the IEA also talks about
continuous “exponential growth” – and since
the outbreak of the COVID-pandemic, we have
all become painfully aware of the true, barely
comprehensible and terrifying meaning of this
term. Let’s include some figures that
demonstrate the aforementioned expected
growth:
• Since 2010, the amount of internet users
has doubled, currently, it comprises 4.1
billion people (53.6% of the global
population), and they are expected to
double again until 2025 (IEA, 2020;
Griffiths, 2020)
• Since 2010, internet traffic has
multiplied by 12 and is expected to
double again over the next 2 years (IEA,
2020)
103
• Until 2022, internet traffic is predicted
to increase by another 60%, but the
energy demand from data centers alone
at least will stay constant (Masanet et al.,
2020; IEA, 2020)
• Since 2010, electricity use of a typical
data center server decreased by 4
(Masenet et al., 2020)
• Since 2010, the power (Watts) needed
per storage unit (terabytes) has decreased
by 9 due to efficiency and storage density
improvements (Masenet et al., 2020)
• The spring lockdown of 2020 led to a
surge of more than 40% in internet use
globally (IEA, 2020; OpenVault, 2020)
The Neglected Story of Hardware
Impact
The internet, in the sense of data traffic,
processing and storage, uses less than 1% of
global electricity. So far so good. But if you add
the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated
with the hardware, meaning the production and
disposal of all the servers, computers, phones,
cables and gadgets, we arrive at 3.7% of all global
GHG emissions – which is about as much as
caused by the aviation industry (Griffiths, 2020).
This is where it gets serious: whilst flying has
been subject of continuous scrutiny and is
described as a climate sin, our internet use
(including the hardware needed for this), whilst
not as severely scrutinized, is equally harmful.
Having a closer look at the breakdown of
energy consumption associated with the
internet, you will find that the production of
computers covers 17%, of smartphones and
television 11% each, and 6% is the production
of other items, whereas the running of data
centers is responsible for 19% of the internet’s
energy need, and running terminals and
networks covers the remaining 20% and 16%,
respectively. This reveals that the energy needed
to power public infrastructure (55%) accounts
for more energy consumption than the
production of end user hardware (45%) (The
Shift Project, 2019). Nevertheless, the footprint
of hardware is everything but negligible, yet
rarely included in internet energy calculations
like for example the IEA numbers quoted above.
As far as the distribution of electricity use
between communication technology (CT)
infrastructure, such as data centers, transmission
networks and consumer devices are concerned,
there is a strong trend anticipated that the
‘network and data center infrastructure’s share
in electricity use’ will surmount the ‘direct
electricity use’ such as for charging our
computers and phones (Andrae and Edler,
2015). This is because the energy costs of
infrastructure are less transparent to consumers,
while predictions show that in less than a
decade, the proportion of direct electricity
consumption by devices will decrease by 50% to
35% (Andrae and Edler, 2015).
Prospects for Data Centers, the
Explosion of Digital Information
and Renewables
Before we dive deeper into this complex
thematic, a word about how the internet actually
works. Or better, which parts of this gigantic,
half-invisible data machinery use the most
energy. To store and process information
accessible through the internet, IT companies
have data centers around the world filled with
computer servers (Glanz, 2012). Every little
action performed on the internet, like
downloading, sending, posting, buying or
researching, is facilitated by these data centers
(Glanz, 2012). Preventing the overheating of
these massive halls stacked with high
performance servers requires cooling systems of
industrial scale, which adds considerably to the
energy necessary to run the servers themselves
(Glanz, 2012). Due to the expansion of internet
usage during recent years, these data centers
with their cooling systems devoured around 198
TWh of electricity in 2018, which is equivalent
to the output of about 25 1GW nuclear power
plants (Ayanoglu, 2019). Although heavy
insurance policies and exploding user demand
used to make data centers rather energy
inefficient, recently, this has changed, especially
104
over the last decade, which saw great
improvements in efficiency, computing power
and, notably, the emergence of ‘hyperscale’ data
centers, which are a lot more energy efficient
through their size alone (Glanz, 2012; Masenet
et al., 2020; IEA, 2020). Around a third of these
big data centers are located in the United States,
where they make up for 3% of national
electricity demand (Glanz, 2012; Ayanoglu,
2019). This is problematic, as the majority
(63.5%) of electricity in the US is still generated
through polluting fossil fuels, and some
companies deliberately put their data centers in
US states with especially cheap – and dirty –
electricity generation like Virginia (Ayanoglu,
2019). Additionally, most data centers were
built in warmer latitudes instead of more
northern places where natural cooling would be
high and thus less energy-intense artificial
cooling required (Ayanoglu, 2019). Yet, big
internet companies like Google, Amazon,
Netflix and co. are not known for being resistant
to innovation, so they have made various
pledges and arrangements to improve efficiency
and climate friendliness of their data centers,
which seems to slowly shed its fruits by now
(Ayanoglu, 2019; Masenet et al., 2020). Still, the
question remains, will these (promised) changes
be sufficient? Can efficiency improvements
continue to keep up with this exponential
explosion of data and internet use to come? And
how serious and advanced are these companies
(especially the “Big Five” in terms of market
value and dominance - Amazon, Apple, Google,
Facebook and Microsoft) really with their
transition to renewable energy?
The tech giant Apple seems to have
reached the target of operating their data centers
worldwide with 100% renewable energy (Apple,
2020; NRDC, 2020). Further, Apple’s
production process has been certified zero waste
to landfill, which would prevent e-waste at least
on the manufacturer’s side, and they have
reduced 466,000 metric tons of GHG
emissions; equivalent to the emission of
100,000 cars over one year (Apple 2018;
Morgan, 2020). Google is also doing rather well.
They are the biggest technology corporate buyer
of clean energy (Ambrose, 2020). Similar to
Apple, they also claim to cover the energy
demand from their data centers and offices
through renewable energy (Hölzle, 2016;
NRDC, 2020), although they still rely on carbon
sources to some extent, when- or wherever the
availability of carbon-free energy is naturally
limited (Google, 2019). Taking an example from

“Due to the expansion of

their worst-case scenario, their data center in
Taiwan only used renewable sources for less
than 20% of its electricity consumption in 2017.
To counter this, and increase carbon-free
sources for their local data centers, Google has
established its own project: “24/7”, as well as internet usage during
signing up to an investment of 2 billion USD on
wind and solar energy in 2019 (Ambrose, 2019; recent years, these data
Google, 2019). Microsoft has also shown their
commitment to clean energy by implementing a
centers with their cooling
carbon fee (Morgan, 2020; NRDC, 2020). systems devoured around
However, all this self-published data
should be taken with caution. Reliable 198 TWh of electricity in
information about these big data companies’
real environmental friendliness is sparse, they 2018, which is equivalent
tend to be especially ambiguous about their
handling of e-waste, and assessing the truth
to the output of about 25
behind all their image-conscious green energy 1GW nuclear power
claims proves equally hard and tangled (Ipsen,
2018). On the other hand, some observers claim plants
that very recently, they discern a slight trend
from obvious initial greenwashing to actual
sustainability action by some of these
companies, like Google and Amazon (Geman,
2020). Once more a sign that this matter is
complicated to judge, let alone for a lay person.

105
The Problem with e-Waste
Back to hardware, and looking beyond
electricity and greenhouse gases, we also cannot
ignore the severe environmental impacts of e-
waste. The typical lifespan of an electronic
device is around 3-5 years, after which many of
them end up in landfill, are incinerated or
dumped overseas (Cravioto et al, 2017; Laville,
2020). Reportedly, 155,000 metric tons of
electronic waste is being thrown away like this
annually in the UK alone (Laville, 2020).
But should e-waste not usually be
recycled? Unfortunately, in reality less than a
sixth of the potentially reusable resources from
the e-waste were recycled or reused in the US
(Ossola, 2014). If disposed of in an
uncontrolled way, the harmful metals contained
in it, such as mercury and lead, can seep into the
soil and contaminate groundwater (Jackson,
2016). Consequently, worldwide e-waste may
only make up for 2% of all landfill waste, but
represents 70% of the toxic waste found in
landfills (Ossola, 2014). Keeping in mind that
the US is a developed country makes the
difficulty for e-waste recycling worldwide
apparent. Considering that recycling one
million laptops could save energy equivalent to
powering 3,500 US homes for a year, this issue
would definitely deserve more research and
attention (EPA, 2020).
“…less than sixth of the
potentially reusable
resources from the e-
waste were recycled or
reused in the United
States.
106
Covid-19 Impacts on Internet
Energy Consumption
So, how did the energy footprint of the internet
change with the Covid-19 pandemic? Statistics
show that in Europe, places which experienced
a peak in self-isolation policies also featured a
spike in internet traffic, up to 70% in some cases
(Beech, 2020). Nevertheless, overall GHG
emissions have declined in the wake of the
global lockdown period (IEA, 2020; Quéré et al.,
2020). The power sector, for example, emitted
5% less CO2 over the first half of 2020 (Liu et
al., 2020). Also, transportation and aviation
were responsible for the large emission declines
(Quéré et al, 2020; Liu et al., 2020). Let’s
remember that the internet is still only
responsible for 1% of global electricity use and
3.7% of GHG emissions, including hardware.
In the case of a lockdown, this means that the
emission reductions from a low running
economy and reduced general consumption
largely offset the bit of increased emissions from
the spikes in internet use.
When evaluating the larger
environmental impacts and internet use during
the pandemic, we need to consider several
complexities, such as teleworking. According to
a recent literature review, teleworking uses less
net energy than non-teleworking; meaning
teleworking should be more sustainable
(O’Brien and Aliabadi, 2020). This is mainly
because teleconferencing requires no emission-
intense travel like flying or car trips, in contrast
to in-person conferences, which again offsets the
energy impact of the internet (O’Brien and
Aliabadi, 2020). However, such a direct
comparison does not entirely do justice to
reality, as there are many rebound effects. For
example, when people telework, they are more
likely to own a car and drive more, which again
would boost emissions (O’Brien and Aliabadi,
2020). Another study revealed that computer
plug load in home offices was still high although
people were absent, just another implication to
be considered when talking about teleworking
(O’Brien et al., 2017). Also, the impact of Covid-
19 on both the economy and teleworking
arguably varies strongly between countries. As
far as the direct lockdown offsetting effect is
concerned, we could assume that some of our
new internet and video conferencing habits will
prevail, while the GHG reduction effect from
the rest of the shutdown economy will slowly but
surely vanish. Of course, these speculations
would need to be verified with scientifically
grounded models.
Concluding Thoughts
So, what should we do? If you have read until
here, you have already made a significant first
step – unlike most people, you are now aware
that yes, also the internet does produce
emissions to some extent. Share that insight. It
is not evident to expect environmental damage
from sources we cannot see physically, but we
should raise more awareness about this. Delete
old emails, which are lingering in data centers.
Think for a moment before you save that
document on your cloud for backup – would an
external hard drive also do for this one? Data
center efficiency improvements cannot be the
solution forever; there is a limit, they will always
need at least some energy to function. Video call
“Data center efficiency
improvements cannot be
the solution forever.
if this means it will save yourself a long car or
even plane trip. Bring your old devices to a
recycling point. But more importantly, buy less
gadgets in the first place. Is it an option though
to refuse state-of-the-art technology for
sustainability’s sake, if you want to credibly
partake in this globally interconnected society
and make a change? More still, is the
107
environmental footprint of our internet use
(including hardware) even worth worrying
about, when other industries and consumption
habits are so obviously a bigger climate threat?
Given that the internet constitutes such a
powerful, handy tool to help us organize, lobby,
research and work for a more sustainable world?
That might be something worth of further
research. But for now, we can state that the
energy consumption of the internet use has been
kept constant through efficiency improvements
despite its increased demand. On the other
hand, the entire climate footprint of the internet
hardware and e-waste is a bit more worrying –
think of the aviation industry as reference again.
Both the impact of the Covid-19 lockdowns and
the sustainability claims of big tech companies
are hard to judge and contextualize. So above all,
what we can currently do is to try to hold
hardware producers, big data companies and
policy makers accountable to their current
climate pledges and urge them to implement
better ones – or at least educating ourselves and
each other about this issue.
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Ambrose, Jillian. “Tech Giants Power Record Surge in
Renewable Energy Sales.” Guardian News and Media.
(January 28, 2020). Accessed January 4,
2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/20
20/jan/28/google-tech-giants-spark-record-rise-in-sales-
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Apple. “Apple Now Globally Powered by 100 Percent
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Power, Structure and Responsibility:
Police Reform in the United States of
America
Written by Lucas van den Heuvel and Caoimhe Ní Shúilleabháin
T
he infamous and prolific murder of
George Floyd by policemen of the
Minneapolis Police Department defined
a watershed moment in the history of policing
for the United States and triggered fundamental
questions about the ‘peacekeepers’ of our
society. Are the police a necessary part of any
society? Are they truly there for protection of
human lives? And which lives in particular?
These questions are but a few of the ones we
110
!"
need to ask again and again when it comes to the
phenomenon of policing. They are not new, as
the old mantra “who guards the guardians?”
suggests. They are both ancient and modern for
good reason. Policing of society must be a
continuous conversation for the sake of all its
members. In this article, we examine ‘broken
window policing’ as one of the most essential
elements of police practice in the US both
before and after Floyd’s death. We review the
controversial cornerstones of policing policy and
subsequently assess the impact of civil unrest
and politics on the current evolution of these
policies.
Policing in the US prior to the
summer of 2020:
In order to take a bird’s eye view of policing in
the US over the last few decades, we must focus
on a theme which is common across different
state police departments since the 1990s - a
theory that informs most American police
officers about the precarious balance between
authority and brutality. In this article, the theory
of ‘broken windows’ policing is that common
link. To begin with a definition coined by
criminologist George Kelling, the term ‘broken
windows’ policing refers to increased police
focus on petty crime in the belief that this will
dissuade more serious crimes. In other words:
“To stop major crimes from occurring police must first
prevent small signs of “disorder” from proliferating,
such as graffiti, litter, panhandling, public urination,
the sale of untaxed cigarettes and so forth” (Camp
and Heatherton 2016).
It emerged during the US’s nation-wide
crackdown on exponentially rising levels of
crime in the late 1990’s. Though crime rate has
dropped since this period, the causes for decline
are subject to much debate; from drug reform to
the legalization of abortion (Ford 2016); (Levitt
and Dubner 2014).
There is little controversy at the
hypothetical core of this theory – numerous
experiments carried out by researchers at the
University of Groningen show that a tendency
toward crime was more likely in a context where
petty crime or signs of disorder were more
abundant than in contexts where they were not
(University of Groningen 2019). However, the
real-life practice of this form of policing has led
to crucial criticism from a range of sources. The
most common condemnation is that broken
windows policing opens the floodgates to
unchecked discrimination and racism. Beyond
111
this, it has been criticized as zealous overreaction
to symptoms of problems rather than the
problems themselves that are faced by
communities (Levitt and Dubner 2014).
“…broken windows
policing opens the
floodgates to unchecked
discrimination and
racism.
The policy has been used to support initiatives
such as the “National Suspicious Activity
Reporting Initiative,” which made seemingly
benign activities of everyday life (such as using
binoculars, asking questions in local
offices/stores) potentially dangerous. It is used
to collect information on people, track them,
gather a record of their activities, and eventually
place them under arrest (Camp and Heatherton
2016, 107). In this example, everyone becomes
a suspect. However, it is not feasible for a police
officer to always view everyone as capable of
committing a petty crime and therefore, some
prioritization mechanism must come into play.
This is where America’s particularly grim history
with race relations becomes obvious. Pressure to
aggressively pursue small crimes that, in effect,
could be committed by anyone, leads police to
rely on preconceived ideas of who is most likely
to commit a crime. Moreover, the lack of
proportionality between use of force and the
crime in question leads to the kind of situation
where selling untaxed cigarettes can cost your
life, as it did with Eric Garner in 2014.
“Pressure to
aggressively pursue
small crimes that, in
effect, could be
committed by anyone,
leads police to rely on
preconceived ideas of
who is most likely to
commit a crime.

112 Photo by Clay Banks • unsplash.com

 It has also been argued that this
aggressive reaction to minor offences
perpetuates existing societal issues by focusing
on symptoms rather than root causes. For
example, in the 2010s, Skid Row, Los Angeles,
was subject to routine inspection by police
officers under the guidance of one of the broken
windows theory’s most ardent supporters: police
commissioner William Bratton. In one of the
“largest concentrations of police power
anywhere in the world,” the inhabitants were
regularly arrested for crimes such as jaywalking,
sitting on the sidewalk, or holding an open
container with liquid (Camp and Heatherton
2016, 82). These acts which would hardly be
recognized as crimes in other parts of the city are
condemned because of the nature and
demographics of the area - as most of its
inhabitants are either very low or no-income
earners and many are homeless with a larger-
than-usual proportion of the population
suffering from mental/physical illnesses. Police
punishment for these kinds of crimes therefore
reprimands people for their desperate situation
(over which they have little-to-no control) rather
than malevolent intent. From a larger, state
perspective it could be argued that this is a case
of the wrong choice of sector to deal with the
issues at hand. As stated by Angela Davis,
“Broken windows policing produces such fatal
encounters wherein the overfunded segment of the
state dominates, assaults and helps to reinforce the
eradication of another” (Davis, 2003).
Broken windows theory is often described by its
proponents as a form of community policing,
but under such conditions this inevitably makes
police officers into social workers, peacekeepers,
mediators, psychiatrists, educators and more.
These are their responsibilities after going
through only basic six months’ training, armed
with guns, handcuffs and the power to arrest
(Kates 2020). This overwhelming responsibility
and the implications of putting it in the hands
of police forces seems incongruent with the type
and amount of training they receive. Failure is
written practically all over this approach.
113
“Police departments
answer to different
political organs so there
is little federal oversight
in policing policies and
laws.
Policing in the U.S after the
summer of 2020:
The summer of 2020 brought the topic of
policing in the US to the forefront of the
national agenda. The death of George Floyd
served as a catalyst for nationwide protests and
demonstrations, and the Black Lives Matter
movement gained significant momentum and
support (Adedokun 2020). Historical and
systematic issues concerning racism and policing
were catapulted into a wider societal debate,
which excluded very few people. The slogan
“Defund the Police” was picked up by many
people protesting police brutality in the USA
and demonstrating the demand of police
reformation (Adedokun 2020). Now in early
2021, it has been over half a year since the death
of George Floyd. What kind of police reform has
taken place within those months, and what is
there still to do?
With over 18,000 different police
departments in the US, implementing structural
changes on a national scale is difficult (Bates et
al. 2020). Police departments answer to different
political organs so there is little federal oversight
in policing policies and laws. Activists and
communities have named a host of different
measures that they believe could be taken to
increase public safety. Reducing the budget and
scale of police departments is on the top of that
list. Alternatively, measures such as re-
engineering 911 call centers and dispatching
centers to create an alternative to police
response, investing in community-based services
and resources for housing, education, and
limiting contact with police by decriminalizing
certain minor offensives have also been named
as ways to reform policing (Vera Institute 2020).
Several local school boards have decided to
discontinue their association with police
departments in order to mitigate the presence of
police in public schools. This has happened in,
for example, Oregon, Denver, Oakland,
Virginia, and Wisconsin. Many of these local
school boards intend to implement alternative
help forces into the school that can address
problems with a different approach, such as
psychologists (Vera Institute 2020).
Outside of the school environment
changes have also been implemented. In San
Francisco it was announced by the mayor that
police officers will not be dispatched for
noncriminal 911 calls, and that instead a new
form of service workers would be introduced to
these tasks, who are trained in nonviolent ways,
including the mediating of situations. Several
other cities have announced similar initiatives.
The request to defund the police has not
remained unheard, and many cities and councils
have announced that they will reduce funding
for police departments. Alongside this, city
councils have declared their plans to reconstruct
police departments. The city council of
Minneapolis, for instance, shared they are going
to disband the entire police department and
reinstate a new agency with more focus on
community safety and violence prevention (Vera
Institute 2020).
To reform policing on a nationwide
scale, a change in the constitution would be
necessary. ‘Qualified immunity’ is a concept
giving law enforcement and other government
officials immunity from civil suits over certain
actions, if they can show they were not in clear
violation of constitutional or established
statutory rights (Millhiser 2020). However, the
issue this brings is that every context and
situation is unique and there are no precise
114
guidelines on how to deal with certain situations
in detail. This law was meant to enable law
enforcement to do their jobs and not worry
about being sued for every use of violence.
However, this means that police are often left
unmonitored when mistakes are being made
and violence is used inappropriately and
disparately. This behavior is then left unchecked
and could potentially happen again. Federal
institutions like the Supreme Court, Congress,
and the President have the power to implement
such a change (Millhiser 2020). Federal
lawmakers can amend the existing qualified
immunity law and reign back the immunity law
enforcement has, to make law enforcement
more aware of their actions and the legal and
societal consequences they might have (Millhiser
2020).
To conclude...
The new measures introduced as a result of
widespread protests reflect some of the key
issues embedded in broken windows theory.
The separation of police and school bodies, the
introduction of ‘service-workers’ to answer 911
calls, and re-engineering of 911 call centers all
help to redefine the role of police forces. The
police are no longer expected to perform such a
multifaceted role, as social workers, caretakers
and community activists. Reducing their
responsibilities in this manner allows funding to
be diverted towards more appropriately
qualified individuals who can help to solve the
root causes of “broken windows” rather than
punish the symptoms. However, there is still
much to be done to ensure a society in which all
members feel safe and have faith in law
enforcement. The incoming Biden-Harris
administration have stated that they plan to
reign in the broadness of qualified immunity
which could bring about change in the attitude
of law enforcement. Only time will truly tell
what will come of these discussing, but the first
steps in the right direction are beginning to take
shape.
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Photo by Isaac Mehegan • unsplash.com

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Dear Readers,
We are incredibly proud to have presented you with this first edition of the Roosevelt
magazine, and we thank you for joining us on this reading journey. We hope that now,
having read the magazine, it became clear to you why the theme of Crisis Management
was most apt for describing world affairs of late. Personally, we feel that the experience
of working on this magazine taught us a tremendous amount about the people around
us, their interests and their minds.
The goal for this edition was not only to entertain our readers but also to provide truly
informative stories and papers. While we as an organisation have ended our venture
into this theme, we as the Editors-in-Chief hope to have been able to communicate a
particularly crucial point: crisis management is much more than its literal
interpretation. Most importantly, in our eyes, this magazine depicted alternative angles
to crisis management and how it should be conceptualised. The papers our authors
wrote showed how one should conceive of a crisis as a larger phenomenon within a
civilization’s trajectory. Simultaneously, smaller aspects of crisis management should
be considered, such as ‘what are the unseen factors that we do not consider when
approaching crises?’; much like the invisible emissions from our smartphones. These
are reminders that everything, especially the challenges we face in the 21st century,
will not give space for superficiality.
But, what happens after?
Looking into the future was essential for us when creating this magazine. What stood
out, and what we want to remind our readers about, is that to approach the future
successfully, we need not only to look at the big and small questions that we are
currently posed with, but understand how we have reached a certain point, and where
this understanding guides us to in the future. Constructing this magazine has brought
us a more nuanced way of thinking about crises, and we hope to have translated this
to you. We urge every reader to reflect upon the papers you’ve read and the intricacies
we highlighted when thinking about the crises you will eventually have to confront.
Regardless of how big or small it might be, we wanted to convey that it is always
beneficial to think in all directions and all depths.
Last but not least, being able to collaborate with the excellent authors of these papers,
our editors, and the hard-working Heads of Research has been an experience like no
other. This magazine could not have been published without everyone's involvement.
We'd like to publicly thank everyone who made this edition of the Roosevelt possible!

Your Editors in Chief

Theodor Stabile & Hanisha Kanani

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