The entire world is right now grappling with a common enemy-it doesn’t have nuclear weapons or weapon of mass destruction (WMD’s) but a mere virus that has rendered the world exhausted, and unrecognizable. A protein molecule with a sheer covering of lipids that has brought the most powerful economies and their health systems down to their knees. Lo and behold, the coronavirus.
A deadly virus, COVID-19 first emerged in late 2019, when a mysterious illness was reported in Wuhan, China. The cause of the disease was soon confirmed as a new kind of coronavirus, and the infection has since spread to many countries around the world and become a pandemic. Due to its huge impact this pandemic will be the greatest upheaval that has occurred, since the Second World War. As yet, 147,376 deaths and millions of people are infected by coronavirus. As a result of this current outbreak, the world will see shift in the security preferences, from traditional to non-traditional paradigms. States will focus more on human security which not only includes military aspect but also includes health, education, economic, environment and personal aspects.
There has been a long history of pandemics of various viruses which have caused massive destruction in terms of human deaths. For instance the Spanish flue pandemic (1918), great plague of 1665, Black Death (1347), smallpox, cholera (early to mid-19th century) etc. evident from this is the fact that the current pandemic of coronavirus is not a new situation which the world is suffering from because it had a previous history where millions of people have died due to a health threat. The only difference is the nature of virus. States, despite the history of various pandemics, have neglected the importance of health in terms of security, and now thousands of people are dying due to the negligence of states towards health security.
The core obligation of a state to its citizens is to protect them from all kinds of threats. For centuries main focus of our nation states has been towards traditional threats. But this pandemic has made us believe that every person on this planet is under a threat. This threat is not one of the usual traditional threats instead it is a non- traditional health threat. COVID-19 has forced nation states to believe that there is more to security and securitization. Now states will be forced to rethink their approach and will have to focus on non-traditional aspect of security instead of spending trillions on arms and militaries.
According to a recent data from “Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s total military expenditure increased to $1822 billion in 2018 which is 2.6% more than the expenditure in 2017”. This shows that every year states spend billions of dollars on building their military assets to protect them from each other. Taking in account of the current pandemic, all states are now being seen as fighting together against a common enemy -COVID-19 and the billions of dollars spent on military assets are now being questioned as the death count is increasing exponentially due to a health threat not by a military attack by another state. For instance a third world country like Pakistan, the military expenditure reached to almost 12686 USD million in 2018, but Pakistan and countries like us invested much lesser on health sector as it hardly allocated around 2% of the GDP in the budget 2019-20, as a result of which we are unable to aggressively fight the pandemic of coronavirus, same is the situation with the most developed countries like United states, United kingdom and European union. This threat has made Pakistan and almost every other country realize that these million dollar jets and high end artillery is of no use.
The damage done by the current pandemic will take an enormous time to reach recovery but new realities will emerge as this pandemic will move towards to its end. This will require states to change priorities and shrink their defence expenditure, to prepare themselves from any future pandemics. Governments will focus on producing and building up stocks of essential medical equipment like vaccines, ventilators, diagnostic tests, developing a more extensive security approach towards both external and internal developments. In other words states will take all necessary measures to protect its citizens from any future global outbreak. Ultimately and evidently there may be a paradigm shift in the current world order, which may lead to heavy investment in social sector particularly the health as the pandemic has severely threatened the human security irrespective of boundaries, across the world.
