How COVID-19 held a mirror up to the Arab world

The past two decades have unleashed a flurry of crises and made our world unpredictable and our futures bleak. Whether it is was the financial crisis, terrorism, intractable turmoil in the Middle East, Europe-bound migrants, widening wealth gaps, populism’s re-emergence, extreme weather events — and now a pandemic — the world is overwhelmed, distressed and fearful.

Crises and the uncertainty they leave behind are not new but this particular period’s levels of chaos and discontinuity have led some to describe these as the “postnormal” times. What lies ahead now is a rocky road, filled with impediments requiring new, innovative thinking to navigate before settling into a new equilibrium, but only after adapting to lessons learned from a deep examination of past failures and vulnerabilities.

Despite all our advancements since the last great crisis that reshaped our world, few could have predicted that a pandemic could thrive so well in long-existing faultlines in our societies and ultimately grind entire nations to a halt. COVID-19 on its own is not a new potent phenomenon, nor will it be the last. Pandemics have always been acknowledged in most governments’ risk assessments and periodic analyses by epidemiologists.

However, it is undeniable and unprecedented that a viral outbreak in one country ended up sparking the postnormal era as well as new policy and legislative discussions. This was not a result of its lethality, even with the 1.7 million dead and more than 80 million cases worldwide. It could have been worse, and while vaccines being shipped around the world has elicited some relief, what awaits is a crucial examination, a differential diagnosis of sorts to avoid a repeat of the metacrisis that now grips our world.

Such an inquiry, however, will probably be sidelined for the easier blame-shifting and finger-pointing, some of which has already counterproductively cast aspersions on the World Health Organization (WHO) and intensified Sinophobia in parts of the world. Indeed, China slow-walking its reporting to the rest of the world and the WHO's initially fumbled response sapped confidence in what should have been an engaged and effective global response to an emergent crisis.

However, the consequences of Beijing’s and the WHO's failures pale in comparison to how much systemic socio-economic fractures, inequalities and demographic divides contributed to the pandemic’s longevity. It was this perfect storm of frequently ignored crises that made the pandemic worse, and now force the world to confront the aging mindsets and operating models that are now incongruous with the inherent uncertainty of today’s extremely complex, interdependent societies.

The Arab world has fared better than other regions in curbing the spread, but such an encouraging outcome is no justification for resorting to mere palliative measures such as “building resilience” or rewriting playbooks for some as-yet unknown future threats. COVID-19 held up a mirror the world has consistently looked away from, or whose reflections it distorted in favor of trust and optimism in the robustness of our societies and the strength of the global multilateral order. We cannot afford to look away from the simple fact that the old modes of operating no longer keep pace with today’s globalized economies, leaps in technological advances, population growth, increased mobility and other structural changes.

Alongside building resilience into local capacities, steadying economic pillars or shortening supply chains, the Arab world can learn a great deal from the COVID mirror.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Alongside building resilience into local capacities, steadying economic pillars or shortening supply chains, the Arab world can learn a great deal from the COVID mirror.

First, governments must be wary of a widening “complexity gap” between the old ways and the new ways of doing things. After all, part of the reason the pandemic has lasted as long as it did is because governments had, in their pandemic response arsenals, only flawed plans and policies that overlooked factors deemed irrelevant. Unfortunately, it resulted in a disproportionate impact on poor and vulnerable populations because some of those overlooked factors were the prevalence of socio-economic inequalities, which only exacerbated the spread.

It can only be hoped that future risk assessments stress the importance of non-discriminatory access to adequate healthcare, quality education, gainful employment opportunities and technology, and how these are integral to any resilient society. After all, curbing individuals’ mobility as a pandemic response measure works only when there are adequate social safety nets to address basic needs. In the absence of safety net programs, low income individuals are likely to ignore lockdown restrictions or even quarantines since uninterrupted mobility is of more importance to economic and social wellbeing than the intangible benefit of flattening an epidemic curve.

The mirror has also shifted perceptions on what resilience actually means. Most will be forgiven if they believed it referred only to recovering from a crisis or some carefully managed return to the old “normal.” However, the pandemic’s impact will be felt by generations yet unborn, necessitating new thinking to build resilient communities and economies. Postnormal resilience should be more about a readiness to adapt than the ease of recovery, and this is already evident across the planet.

Over $9 trillion has been pumped into the world’s economy, businesses have embraced the virtual office and the pandemic’s temporary interruption of polluting activities has energized climate consciousness initiatives, which will probably accelerate the “green revolution.” Transformations such as these are already being hailed as “stakeholder capitalism,” and governments, organizations and enterprises are urged to pursue the socially responsible, restore social justice and address wealth gaps. In this way, societies will be ready to face future threats or shocks and be able to retain their ability to operate in changing circumstances, and possibly recover from them.

Additionally, while it may be called a COVID mirror, it is also an important tool of reflection on other crises that may or may not have an impact on public health. For the Middle East, postCOVID lessons are especially useful when redesigning crisis response playbooks to deal with looming threats such as frequent heatwaves and droughts induced by runaway climate change and biodiversity loss.

Indeed, the coronavirus could be a catalyst for crucial transformations at home and abroad aimed at strengthening crisis tolerance and adaptability with as little disruption as possible. However, this will not be a simple undertaking, nor does it have patience for the region’s customary bureaucratic intransigence. What true resilience needs is a deep interest in forecasting and systematic thinking, since the crises to come will not be addressed by solutions designed by obsolete operating models. After all, the next global crisis will probably have neither an incubation period nor a vaccine to inoculate against it.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a non-resident senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is also senior adviser at the international economic consultancy Maxwell Stamp and at the geopolitical risk advisory firm Oxford Analytica, a member of the Strategic Advisory Solutions International Group in Washington DC and a former adviser to the board of the World Bank Group. Twitter: @HafedAlGhwell