Is Climate Change Crisis a New Global Security Threat? Evidence from the Quality of Government Dataset

Over the past decade, climate change has become one of the most important issues to citizens in countries around the world. As the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated, no country is immune from actor-less threats like novel disease outbreaks and climate change. When combined with other security threats like transnational terrorism and ubiquitous cyberattacks, it becomes one of the key global security threats. However, while there have been many theoretical arguments that the overall impacts of climate change on international security are inevitable, and predictable posing escalating risks to stability and security, with potentially far-reaching consequences, the empirical evidence of this link is limited. This study takes an important step in filling this gap by measuring the effect of climate change on the global security quantitatively based on the quality of government (QoG) dataset. Contributing to the growing body of work on climate change and global security, this study suggests that (1) climate change crisis can be considered an existential global security threat;and (2) developing countries are the most impacted by climate change and the least able to afford its consequences. © 2022, Council for Social and Economic Studies. All rights reserved.

Rethinking the Infodemic: Global Health Security and Information Disorder

The discourse on the infodemic constructs the combination of the pandemic and disinformation as a new source of insecurity on a global scale. How can we make sense - analytically and politically - of this newly politicized nexus of public health, information management, and global security? This article proposes approaching the phenomenon of the infodemic as an intersecting securitization of information disorder and health governance. Specifically, it argues that there are two distinct frames of security mobilized in the context of infodemic governance: information as a disease and information as a weapon. Drawing on literatures on global health and the emerging research on disinformation, the paper situates the two framings of the infodemic in broader discourses on the medicalization of security, and securitization of information disorder, respectively. The article critically reflects on each framing and offers some preliminary thoughts on how to approach the entanglements of health, security, and information disorder in contemporary global politics.

The Forum on the Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic in International and European Politics

The Forum opens with Rychnovská's 'Rethinking the Infodemic', which aims to shed light on the newly politicised nexus of public health, information management, and global security. The Forum then proceeds with Kazharsky and Makarychev's 'Russia's Vaccine Diplomacy in Central Europe'. [...]the Forum concludes with Resende's 'Pandemics as Crisis Performance', which proposes to conceptualise the crises that came with the pandemic as constructs and performances in which populists try to increase the antagonism between the people and the elites.