The SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic as a Global Risk: Inequality and Human Insecurity

ABSTRACT

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has questioned the dominant international security strategies, and also highlighted the immense contradictions in our global way of life. From a human security perspective, this investigation analyses the pandemic as a risk and threat to social life on a global scale. The conceptual categories of human security and global risk are used to understand the inequalities, structural violence and vulnerabilities that accompany the health emergency and make it a total social crisis. Some of the main risk trends that the pandemic represents are quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. It is proposed that the global pandemic is leading to the suppression of the loopholes of security and certainty provided by modernity, whose contradictions have led us to suffer the most important planetary catastrophe in recent history. Likewise, the pandemic has shown that the strategies anchored to traditional security are not the most appropriate to face the consequences that the current health crisis will have. Therefore, to respond to these risks and threats, it is essential to develop new perspectives on security.