International Relations

Populism, nationalism, and an intensifying rivalry between the United States and China are testing the cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As its 10 member States battle the effects of Covid-19 amid political and territorial crises, the group has struggled to overcome internal differences and address profound external challenges.

Major multilateral institutions have long claimed that their market-oriented trade rules reduce poverty and advance development. Instead, they hold back the developing world from a more human-centric, social-justice approach that it needs to reach its potential. South Africa has the potential to set an example of how a global “middle power” can drive change. The Covid-19 pandemic has provided extra impetus – and a test.

The outbreak of the pandemic could have spelled disaster for Venezuela, already two decades into a political, social, economic and health crisis. The combination of a collapsed national health system and economy, a complex humanitarian emergency, a continuous stream of migration, an internal political conflict with international ramifications, a population with high levels of malnutrition, has seriously hindered the development of a successful vaccination programme. Thus far,  Venezuela has administered the fewest number of Covid-19 vaccinations in relation to its population size of all the countries in South America.

Health inequality increased sixfold in South Africa under COVID-19, suggesting that the crisis affected the health of the poor far more than the relatively well-off. Race is not a significant predictor of vaccine hesitancy, but trusting social media as an information source is positively correlated with vaccine hesitancy. South Africa has pushed hard against opposition to the proposal for a waiver of IP for Covid-19 technologies at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The rate of COVID-19 vaccination in Israel is one of the highest in the world. However, vaccine rates are not evenly distributed among the different population groups. Arab citizens and the Ultra-Orthodox population, who have suffered the most from the pandemic, are vaccinated at lower rates than the general public. Moreover, social media disinformation campaigns that have characterized the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, in general, and the vaccine, in particular, has been one of the causes of vaccine hesitancy.

US President Joe Biden is visiting Europe for the first time, on the occasion of the G7, NATO and EU-US summits. The opportunities for a new era of transatlantic cooperation are immense, but the window of opportunity to seize them is small.

The Covid-19 pandemic has become Chile’s most consequential public health challenge in a century. Chile’s measures included guidance regarding, among other items, education, health (sick leaves, diagnoses, hospital capacity, partial and spatially targeted lockdowns), mass events, border controls, supply and transportation. Since then, the evolution of the disease in the country has been similar to that of other countries around the world, with periods when cases increased followed by periods when cases declined, yet without ever declining to a point when one would assume the emergency was over.

The “scandalous inequity” in COVID 19 vaccines exposes acutely and in distinct ways the structural cleavages in our global health system. With the Global North having siphoned much of the available vaccines, the Global South pays heavily with lives and livelihoods. Civil society experts from India and South Africa unpack the waiver proposal and highlight intersecting ways that vaccine power regimes further existing gender and social inequities in developing countries.