The Queen's Contagion Cultures Lecture can help make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic through the expertise and use of the powerful tools of Arts and Science humanistic analysis to help society grapple with our turbulent times.
The concept of resilience describes states and their institutions' ability to absorb and recover from shocks while positively adapting and transforming their structures and means for living in the face of long-term changes and uncertainty.
Abdelkerim Ousman, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College, will explore the concept of fragility that represents the combination of risks and coping capacities in economic, environmental, political, security, and societal dimensions.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, one would expect most fragile states to be insufficiently prepared to face the disease's spread and its consequences, while countries recognized for their resilience like the United States, Italy, and Sweden were far less prepared. However, COVID-19 has revealed that countries’ income levels and types of political regimes are not indicators of resilience or fragility in coping with the pandemic. During this discussion, Abdelkerim Ousman will review cases such as Italy, the United States, Ethiopia, Germany and Cuba and how they demonstrated resilience in a pandemic by three factors:
- whether the health is a public good
- whether the state is relatively autonomous from social classes to ensure the equitable provision of that public good
- whether there is a relationship of confidence between citizens and state institutions
