As the world prepares for partial economic collapse, watches energy markets dive, and contemplates whether a new world order will emerge in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) has been moving quickly to help affected countries recoup some of their financial losses.

On April 28, a video conference of the BRICS foreign ministers was convened to discuss the bloc’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, its impact on international relations, and the economies of the member states: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The ministers agreed to allocate $15 billion to the NDB so that it could set up a special loan instrument to support the revival of economies and help meet the emergency expenses incurred for responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

The NDB is in discussions with Brazil and South Africa for loans of $1 billion each, following an emergency loan to India for the same amount. All three loans are along similar lines to the China loan. “And we stand ready to do more, if our members request it,” said NDB President K.V. Kamath.

The BRICS nations further held discussions on ways to step up cooperation within the bloc to contain the pandemic, as well as to revive the economies once travel restrictions and lockdowns imposed in most countries to curb the spread of coronavirus have been lifted.

The proposed BRICS summit in July in St. Petersburg, Russia, may be postponed. 

In March, the NDB approved a RMB 7 billion ($990 million) loan to China and then issued a RMB 5 billion ($700 million) bond in the Chinese capital market to cover that loan. At its fifth annual board meeting last week, the NDB said that it is cognizant that the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unimaginable hardship and suffering for millions of people around the globe. It noted that the governments of BRICS countries, in close partnership with multilateral fora and the international development community, have reacted proactively and pledged unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus packages to respond to challenges caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

South Africa is moving quickly to try and flatten the curve while also turning to the to the NDB and other multilateral institutions such as the African Development Bank, the African Export-Import Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank to fund some R20 billion ($1.1 billion) to purchase much-needed medical supplies.

The Health Department’s acting Director-General Anban Pillay told Parliament that South Africa had less than half the ventilators it expected to need at the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, while it needed to source around one hundred million surgical masks for healthcare workers and patients and more than ten million N95 respirators.

In his fifth address to the nation in as many weeks on April 21, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a R500 billion ($27.5 billion) stimulus package that is equivalent to one tenth of the economy. Although Ramaphosa had been praised for his swift action to contain the spread of the virus with his first address on March 15, a mere ten days after the first coronavirus case had been reported in the country, the government has been criticized for its slow response on the economic side, as the national lockdown has seen a drastic reduction in economic activity.

Although the lockdown succeeded in cutting the daily increase from 243 on March 27 to only seventeen the following day, and then kept the daily increase below one hundred until April 17, there has recently been a trend upwards, and most epidemiologists expect some form of lockdown to continue until after the normal winter flu season—or in other words, until September. On April 23, the daily increase was 318 and the total case number was 3,953 with seventy-five deaths. 

In his speech, Ramaphosa said the health of South Africans was his primary concern, and that that is why the first item mentioned in the breakdown of the R500 billion total was an extra allocation of R20 billion to fund the health response to fight the coronavirus. This R20 billion will also be used to source COVID-19 tests, of which more than 140,000 have been already undertaken so far. Already several firms in the automotive sector have switched from making car parts to producing ventilators.

Michael Sachs, adjunct professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and former head of the budget office in the National Treasury, said he believed that South Africa could access $20 billion from the development finance institutions.

“For me it is a no-brainer, as the finance from these institutions will be far more favorable than what South Africa can get in the international capital market,” he said in a virtual presentation at the Centre for Development and Enterprise.

He noted that the Institute for International Finance had shown that South Africa was an outlier, as its capital market had been more severely affected than other countries. Its government bond yield had increased by 160 basis points since the start of the year, and its currency had depreciated by some 25 percent.  

“The cost of not financing these operations is unambiguously greater than the cost of financing, but the government faces a binding financial constraint. Responding to these imperatives means accessing external official creditors, deploying the whole public sector balance sheet, and maintaining government access to capital markets,” Sachs said.

Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, in his media presentation on April 24, said that time is of the essence—an application to the NDB for $1 billion has already been lodged, and the Treasury was busy following up.

“We will do whatever it takes to support those who need it. We will also take full advantage of this crisis to restructure the economy, but we are not in the business of printing money,” Mboweni said.

“With over $16 billion in approved projects, and roughly 150 staff compliment, I think we all agree that now is the opportune moment to uncover the full potential and might of this institution,” Mboweni said in his speech to the NDB board on April 20.

At its board meeting in December 2019, the board approved three projects aggregating to approximately $1 billion, bringing the NDB’s portfolio to fifty-two projects with loans aggregating to $14.7 billion.

In the two months that lockdown measures have been put in place around the world, governments have been caught in a tug-of-war between economic interests and the fight to save lives. The human toll of the coronavirus that surfaced in 2019 is almost incomprehensible—over 215,000 deaths worldwide—and the economic reckoning paints a picture of more casualties to come from poverty, evictions, and food insecurity, amongst other factors. More than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the beginning of the crisis, and 81 percent of the global workforce has been affected by full or partial lockdown conditions according to International Labour Organization (ILO) data. 

This is the quandary that governments have to deal with as they struggle with the decision to reopen businesses amidst the COVID-19 pandemic—and there’s no one clear answer. In the United States, protests to end state lockdowns have even manifested at state capitols in Utah, Wisconsin, and Virginia, among others as some governors have resisted White House calls to go back to business. This public discontent makes the relationship between economic and health interests shockingly tangible, and spurs the conversation surrounding the role of governments in addressing economic downturn and helping struggling enterprises back to their feet. 

In a special webinar entitled “Public Policy Interventions to Support Enterprises During the COVID-19 Crisis”, hosted by the American University in Cairo’s School of Global Affairs and Public Policy on April 28, Enterprise Development Specialist at the ILO’s Decent Work Team for North Africa Miguel Solano drew upon ILO recommendations to build a roadmap for resurrecting the global economy. 

Solano began by identifying three phases of what economies go through during and following a pandemic: generalized reduction in economic activity; reactivation of business activity; and recovery. Though the first phase has been a common global experience—different institutions have estimated that the global economy will lose anywhere from $1 trillion to $5 trillion in 2020—different countries have progressed between the first and second phases on different timelines. 

That’s not to say that all workers, however, are experiencing the pandemic equally. Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), tourism, retail, manufacturing, and hospitality sectors, and informal economy workers are particularly vulnerable. 

Just as specialized care may need to be taken with these workers, each phase of reopening will require a different policy. In the initial phase, governments can support enterprises to temporarily convert their production to help respond to the pandemic: General Motors, Tesla, Ford, Nissan, and Formula 1 have shifted to ventilator production, while Fiat has begun producing masks. This is an example of the way the needs to retain jobs and simultaneously save lives from COVID-19 can be reconciled.

Meanwhile, governments can help other enterprises adapt to new market conditions, like physical distancing. They can make tools for maintaining communication, like WhatsApp, more readily available, support digital payment channels, and provide web-based training on digital marketing and service delivery. In Egypt, Solano says, more and more businesses are coming online and advertising on social media. 

Lastly, governments can help enterprises cover fixed costs. They can offer temporary subsidies to cover labor costs, conditional on employment retention and based on enterprise size, which Solano says is happening more in wealthy countries. 

Or they can encourage financial institutions to reschedule repayments, as he points out was the case in Latin America. Canada is providing enterprises with grants at “replacement rates” for fixed costs, which are based on previous tax filings over the past two to three years. These means of easing access to credit and other financial services are “sort of a mantra at all levels of the pandemic”, Solano says.

The second stage will shift its focus to consumers: to survive in the long-term, “what companies need is customers with cash to spend,” Solano notes. At this point, governments will need to roll out a demand policy—they can stimulate demand through employment-intensive investment (with preference given to MSMEs), give tax incentives to stimulate local sourcing of multinational enterprises, and craft campaigns to restore consumer confidence. 

The COVID-19 crisis has also made countries acutely aware of their vulnerability to supply chain disruptions, as well as of the need for a more agile and responsive business environment. One remedy may be to build digital marketing platforms across cities, subnational regions, and even neighboring countries. 

However, despite our best efforts, the private sector—particularly in those vulnerable communities—will exit the pandemic as a damaged good. The priority of the third phase of reopening will be to spur recovery as quickly as possible, while incorporating building blocks toward a more sustainable future. MSMEs would benefit from programs to boost productivity improvement, expand the number of technical schools that help entrepreneurs enhance management capacities, or to provide vouchers so that new entrepreneurs can access the expertise of business service providers. Governments should consider some interventions that will help the informal economy direct its operations to less-saturated sectors. Lastly, investment in infrastructure could improve enterprises’ access to supplies and markets and help them reach more customers.

All three of these phases need to be marked by tripartite social dialogue between governments, enterprises, and workers for an inclusive and time-bound response. Alternatives for layoffs through reduced work time and reorganization of business operation and flexible methods to keep business operations running should be central topics of discussion, and can even be taken up at the bipartite level as well to be most effective.

Solano also emphasized that government transparency is a precondition to effective response. “Governments do have an obligation to provide timely and up-to-date information about containment measures,” he offers as a reminder. 

The better they provide information, the better enterprises can forecast and plan. Moreover, without transparency, it will be impossible to guarantee full occupational safety and health to essential workers—another responsibility assumed by governments. 

Though he gives a number of specific recommendations, “We need to be creative to come up with solutions,” Solano enjoins. 

As governments across the globe make major disaster declarations due to COVID-19, many victims of domestic violence have found themselves locked at home with their abusers. Forced to shelter in place, victims of domestic abuse have become even more vulnerable. 

United Nations Secretary General António Gutteres urged all governments to put women’s safety first as they respond to the pandemic, observing that, “Peace is not just the absence of war. Many women under lockdown for Covid-19 face violence where they should be safest: in their own homes.”

Media reports from different countries describe an alarming increase in domestic abuse incidents during the pandemic. China was the first country to impose government-mandated lockdowns. It was also the first to report spikes in domestic abuse. In Hubei province—the center of the coronavirus outbreak—domestic violence tripled from forty-seven reported cases last year to 162 cases in the first quarter of 2020. This threefold increase, however, might be an undercount. Activists stress that Chinese police were not taking cases seriously, leaving victims of domestic abuse, most of whom were women, to deal with this problem themselves. 

The epidemic showed the ineffectiveness of China’s domestic violence law, which was adopted in 2016 after many years of advocacy. Leta Hong Fincher, the award-winning journalist and author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, argues that women in China are actively discouraged from prosecuting domestic abusers because “the government thinks it would lead to chaos.”

The Communist Party in China sees the family as a vital part of social consolidation. Thus, maintaining the family and preventing divorce at all costs is viewed as beneficial for society. Meanwhile, marriage registration offices in various provinces in China have reported an unprecedented rise in divorce filings since their reopening in March. While this could also be the result of delayed applications due to the shutdown, officials believe that the increase is mainly a result of the quarantine. 

In Russia, where domestic violence was decriminalized in 2017, the COVID-19 quarantine led to a sudden increase in the number and severity of domestic violence cases. Neglected by law enforcement and courts even before the pandemic, victims of domestic violence have been cut off from the social networks they previously relied on. Shelters and community centers in Russia also had to shut their doors despite the recent surge in help requests. The director of the Independent Social Women’s Center in Pskov expressed concern to The Moscow Times that online services will not be enough when the victims are most in need. 

In Kazakhstan—where domestic violence was also decriminalized three years ago—local activists reported the most notorious domestic abuse cases. This was dramatically illustrated when reports on April 8 revealed that a man burned his wife and two daughters alive in their house during the COVID-19 quarantine. NeMolchiKZ (DoNotBeSilent) a leading women’s rights group in Kazakhstan, released a petition calling for comprehensive protection measures for victims of domestic violence. The group addressed President Tokayev and the government, demanding criminalization of domestic violence in the country. 

However, even in countries where laws against domestic violence exist, the number of domestic violence cases has soared. Uncertainty, economic and social stress, self-isolation, and restrictions on movement have dramatically increased the number of women and girls facing abuse. From Brazil to Germany, France to Australia, activists report spikes in the number of domestic violence cases. In Italy, activists report that helpline calls have dropped sharply. Instead, they receive hundreds of desperate emails and text messages, suggesting victims are in close proximity to their abusers and cannot talk over the phone.   

Human Rights Watch reported that lockdowns have led to various triggers, including increased social stress, breakdowns in community support mechanisms, and cramped and difficult living conditions. Alcohol purchases and consumption have risen dramatically during lockdowns too, including in the United States. The Guardian, CNN, and other media further reported that Americans were purchasing firearms in record numbers.

Similar to natural disasters, COVID-19 brought a loss of human life, economic and social distress, and deterioration of health and human services. The pandemic has also followed the lead of other disasters as it relates to domestic abuse, as broad evidence suggests domestic violence increases in numbers and severity during and after disasters. Such trends have been illustrated by diverse events, from Hurricane Maria’s 2017 assault on Puerto Rico to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington. Reports indicate that domestic violence increased by up to 46 percent in the aftermath of the eruption.

Researchers argue that even when the pandemic declines and more usual routines return, the impact of economic and psychological strains might last for months, if not longer. This means many families will face a prolonged period of COVID-19 hardship.

The current state of lockdowns and increased time spent at home raises many questions. Shall we expect a new post-pandemic wave of domestic violence after the quarantine is over? How many victims of domestic violence will survive the pandemic? How should communities help those in need? 

As the world is set to fight this deadly virus for the foreseeable future, domestic violence victims will continue to wage a lonely, largely unseen war for survival.

This article was written as part of the Addressing Global Crisis Project (AGC), which is run by the University of Central Florida’s Office of Global Perspectives & International Initiatives (GPII). 

The first reports of the breakout of a respiratory disease in China were not about the struggles of ordinary Chinese people. They were stories of unilateral action by the central state, of whistleblowers being silenced, and of the doctors who raised the alarm dying from the disease they were trying to contain. The first public reactions to a possible outbreak in the United States from the White House were not of strategies to help combat the disease, but claims that the illness was a hoax, followed quickly by racist accusations against Chinese people in the United States. Similarly in the UK, a one-week lag between the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy that should have allowed for more strategic thinking, instead resulted in a dangerous decision to ignore advice from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other European countries, and to focus on mitigation rather than containment.  

How does a local outbreak of a disease become a global pandemic? The short answer is politics. More specifically, the politics of an international order in which too many countries believe their own mythologies about power and control, and where international cooperation and solidarity has been reduced to a zero-sum game. The situations in China, the UK and the United States are united by a common thread—powerful countries that position themselves as global leaders acting with such near-sighted, dogmatic commitment to their political ideology that they fail to respond adequately and in a coordinated way to a global threat. This pattern replicates itself to a smaller extent in various regions around the globe, leaving many people in the world exposed to unnecessary risk—particularly in regions like Africa. 

In March 2020, China was praised in many quarters for having taken the drastic measures needed to rein in the COVID-19 outbreak a month earlier. But these reports overlooked that China was aware of an outbreak by at least the end of December 2019. Dr. Li Wenliang first raised alarms about a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan in early December, but instead of being listened to, was detained and forced to sign a document admitting that he had “seriously disrupted the social order”. A week later, he fell ill and eventually died of COVID-19 in February. In the interim, the Chinese government spent a significant amount of diplomatic energy, particularly in Africa, urging countries not to cancel travel connections with China and downplaying the impact of the disease in Wuhan. By the end of March, the official death rate in China was around 3,300, although there are credible reasons to believe that the real number is higher. 

In the UK, by the time Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the government’s plan to respond to the disease, Italy had already implemented a nationwide shutdown, and the WHO had already declared the virus a pandemic. But instead of following official WHO guidance on managing the disease, Johnson announced a plan for “mitigation,” essentially allowing the disease to run unchecked for several crucial days. On March 12, Johnson announced that “families are going to lose their loved ones before their time,” but that the UK government would not take any extraordinary measures to contain the outbreak. Four days later, he was forced to recant and take harsher measures. By April 11, 8,974 people were dead in the UK and the number was still rising (with Johnson himself among the critically ill).

Meanwhile, in the United States, an administration governed by a disbelief in science fueled dangerous denial among its acolytes, who acted irresponsibly toward themselves and others. President Donald Trump first denounced COVID-19 as a hoax, then collapsed onto racist tropes, blaming China and Chinese people for the virus, until finally acknowledging the threat of the disease in mid-March. By the time U.S. citizens were advised to wear masks in public beginning April 4, 7,392 people had died, and Los Angeles and New York City, two of the largest cities in the United States, were under lockdown.

Our geopolitics have failed

COVID-19 is by many measures the most complex global political challenge in contemporary history. In addition to the death and suffering it has caused, the illness has piggybacked perfectly onto the idiosyncrasies of contemporary politics, compounding the damage and establishing itself as a formidable challenge to so many of the presumptions on which modern lives are based. Countries with the best public health systems on paper are buckling and inching toward collapse. The poorest parts of the world are so far watching in alarm but have broadly been spared the worst of the outbreak. And the idea of a global community coming together at a time of need has been significantly undermined by petty nationalism, confusion and lack of coordination at multiple levels, with poor countries mostly abandoned to their own devices. COVID-19 has been the unmaking of modern international relations. 

This pandemic is fundamentally different from the flagship crises of the 20th and 21st centuries in some key ways, and governments are clearly struggling to develop appropriate metaphors and approaches to handle it. Significantly, the politics of the modern era have been defined by war—both practically and metaphorically—and war metaphors dominate the reactions to COVID-19, even though they are proving to be insufficient and, in fact, counterproductive. Appeals to nationalism and strong borders, rousing rhetoric about coming together to defeat the enemy, and calls to arms that effectively amount to “stay at home and do nothing” sound hollow and out of sync when the enemy is neither in uniform nor particularly moved by rhetoric.

Instead, much of the international response has been characterized by a hoarding of supplies and information, to the detriment of mounting a coordinated response. When the enemy is so small that it does not even count as a living organism, countries are floundering and it is unclear if the systems built over the last one hundred or so years are equal to the task of collective survival. Even as the disease rages on, the geopolitics of great power contests continue to shape the international response. Taiwan, which perhaps has had the most success at controlling the disease, is largely shut out of international policy platforms because of its politics with China. The United States has refused to reduce sanctions against Iran despite the widespread deaths caused by the illness. And the countries that lay claim to the title of great power have put the safety of billions of people around the world at risk by shunning collective, coordinated action in favor of inward-looking, protectionist policy.

Where does this leave Africa?

For Africa, COVID-19 is a critical reminder of just how peripheral the continent is in the current geopolitical framework. When the outbreak first went international, there was some talk about Africans being immune given how few cases were reported here. But what later emerged was a continent broadly disconnected from global travel, and the probability of infected persons traveling to Africa was simply lower. Once cases in Europe—by far the continent most connected to Africa—started to spike, cases in Africa also started to increase. Now countries that spent weeks watching instead of preparing are facing their biggest health crises since the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1990s. 

At the same time, the collapse into nationalism and self-preservation in other countries is a jolting reminder that African governments are far too dependent on the benevolence of other regions, plus the secondary benefits of containment progressing well elsewhere. In international relations (IR) theory, the cornerstone of great power politics is that smaller nations reap the indirect benefits of a great power that can mobilize political, economic and social resources. Thus, a strong U.S. military can be justified from an IR perspective through its capacity to provide protection and intervention in countries like Somalia when the government is aligned with the United States. Of course, there is also a significant measure of risk, in that two great powers squabbling can lead to proxy wars in other parts of the world (as in Africa during World War II and the Cold War). In countries like Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and even South Africa, the Cold War was very much a hot one with heavy military and civilian casualties spent for the sake of international powers. 

In terms of public health, it is well established that high levels of immunity in one part of the world do have positive benefits in others. This is one of the principles behind mass immunization campaigns—that if a threshold number of people is vaccinated against a disease, there does not have to be mass vaccination; other people will derive secondary benefits from that collective immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity that influenced the UK’s initial approach to COVID-19. But experts have quickly pointed out that herd immunity only works if the entire world is working toward the same goal, and crucially, if a vaccine exists. Without any kind of medical intervention to stop or slow down a disease, it simply means that the disease will kill many people while we await a vaccine.

An external reading of Africa’s response to COVID-19 suggests that, except perhaps for Nigeria, which activated its Centre for Disease Control very early in the pandemic and began localized responses to the disease, countries were hoping to benefit from some form of herd immunity in other parts of the world. Rather than take proactive measures to manage international travel and activate public awareness campaigns early, most countries waited for cues first from China and then from the West. There is a level of complacency embedded in this—the idea that other countries will get this thing under control so that we do not have to—that speaks to the dependence that the current international order creates. Weaker countries are so accustomed to great powers having their politics in order that they fail to take measures to manage their own domestic challenges, such that when the outbreak happens, their response muscles have atrophied so much that responses are weak and inadequate.

In countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe, official travel advice was initially shaped by China, which barred citizens from leaving Wuhan and then pushed for flights between China and Kenya to continue. Even when it became clear that almost all the cases in Africa were coming through Europe, there was a delay in barring arrivals from the continent, relying perhaps on European countries to control their own citizens’ exit. African countries were waiting for cues from other parts of the world before formulating policies on entry and exit measures, and of course by the time the policies came it was too little, too late. 

Great power politics foster dependency in weaker countries who rely on the quality of leadership in powerful nations for their survival. With the rise of populism and nationalism in other parts of the world, it is clear that this dependency is a major vulnerability for citizens of weaker countries. The UK’s herd immunity model failed to consider what would happen once the disease was exported from the UK to countries with much weaker public health systems. It did not acknowledge that citizens of the UK travel, while in fact the UK has the largest population of citizens living abroad of any European country. Without proposing a ban on international travel for UK citizens alongside the herd immunity model, or measures to support the public health systems of other parts of the world, the UK was essentially telling countries around the world to which UK citizens travel that they were on their own. This is antithetical to the philosophies of global solidarity that theoretically underpin the UK’s aspirations to leadership. 

Still, the most striking example of the risks of such dependencies is the United States. Members of Trump’s own administration have publicly criticized the president’s handling of the crisis, not just for leaving the entire country vulnerable, but people further afield as well. An investigation by the Washington Post revealed that the administration knew about the COVID-19 threat but took seventy days to respond, in part because Trump essentially eliminated the pandemic response structure that the Obama administration created after the SARS outbreak of 2012. This had knock-on effects for exposure to other countries around the world. For example, the Kenyan pilot who flew the last flight from New York to Nairobi before the government closed Kenyan airspace died of COVID-19, presumably having caught the disease in New York. 

The way forward is self-reliance

For Africa, the unchecked arrival of travelers from all of these countries and other parts of Europe has introduced a disease that, at least based on the availability of facilities, not a single country on the continent can handle. Experience from other countries shows that a significant number of COVID-19 cases are critical, and critical cases need treatment in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to survive. In 2012, Italy had 12.5 ICU beds for every 100,000 people, and has been overwhelmed by the disease. Kenya, for example, has an estimated 518 ICU beds with ventilators in the entire country of 47 million people, and would certainly be quickly overwhelmed by an outbreak. Uganda has more ministers than ICU beds—31 cabinet ministers, 49 ministers of state, and only 55 ICU beds.

Should African countries have beefed up their local capacity earlier? Certainly, these are failures for which the leaderships of our countries are responsible. Egypt and South Africa, two of the largest economies on the continent, have already entered a phase of community transmission, with other countries like Kenya and Nigeria preparing for an uptick in cases over the next few days. But a truly international mindset should also have pushed countries with better facilities to show leadership and contain the outbreak within their own borders earlier. This is the leadership that great power politics promise, and this disease has demonstrated that it is hollow, given that each pretender to the throne quickly collapses to self-interested, inward looking ideological action at the expense of the weaker countries in the world. 

In fact, COVID-19 is a great moment to stop and ask if it is time to end great power politics altogether. These politics have always been dangerous. Proxy wars have destabilized entire continents. Great power politics are premised on competition, and challenges like COVID-19 require generosity and collaboration, values that militaristic positioning undermines. A national ethos focused on appearing strong rather than being strong is inherently vulnerable to threats that cannot be defeated by military or political strength. When countries are dependent on the internal politics of other countries for their very survival, they are unduly subject to the vagaries of ideological contests over which they have absolutely no control.

Seamus Heaney’s introduction to Beowulf captures the futility of great power politics perfectly: “Little nations are grouped around their lord, the greater nations spoil for war and menace the little ones, a lord dies, defenselessness ensues, the enemy strikes, vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic for living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed, the wheel turns, the generations tread and tread and tread.” African countries are unnecessarily vulnerable because they failed to invest in their national healthcare systems, because they waited to see how more powerful nations would react rather than take proactive measures, and because they did not realize how little internal ideology within these greater powers has the survival of Africa in mind. Leaders on the continent sleepwalked into a catastrophe.

In many other areas, such as managing national healthcare systems and building just economies, COVID-19 is inviting the world to imagine a different way of working. For African nations, so unnecessarily dependent on either China or the West, this is a time to stop and re-evaluate, perhaps drawing from the late Ghanian President Kwame Nkurumah’s exhortation to face neither East nor West, but forward.

Political economy looks at how power dynamics govern the allocation of economic resources on international, regional, and national scales. This is not always antithetical to the idea of “free markets” which informs mainstream economics on how resources should be allocated. In fact, “free” price-driven and for-profit exchange can only be conducted within a governance framework that embodies certain power relations and that determines the possibilities and restraints facing market transactions. This ranges from private property and rule of law enforced by states in their national territories to international and regional rules-based trade and investment agreements. Power is hence central and critical in understanding how human societies deal with issues of material provisioning i.e. the economy. Power comes in different guises, either in the institutionalized forms of states, international organizations and other authoritative bodies and discourses or in the un-institutionalized forms of violence and civil and international conflict. 

Notwithstanding its exact form, power is decisive in mediating and shaping dynamics like demography, natural resource-management, and political, economic, and social institutions through which cooperation, competition, and conflict are conducted. In this framing article, political economy serves as a lens onto a complex and multilayered reality in the Middle East and North Africa. It strives also to offer some foresight not only about what awaits this troubled region of the world but also how to find a way out of its ongoing ordeals.  

Two surpluses and two deficits

I will focus on four big overlapping challenges that face most Middle East and North African countries. MENA’s troubled present seems to be rooted in two surpluses and two deficits, borrowing from the language of economists. First is a population surplus, with one of the world’s highest population growth rates and a youth bulge that overwhelms the capacity of national economies to generate growth and create adequate jobs for the new entrants. The second surplus is in oil and natural gas, which has defined MENA’s mode of insertion into the world’s economy and geopolitics since the end of WWII. Despite these natural riches and some gains in socioeconomic development, the region has fallen short of creating regional and national models for inclusive, equitable and environmentally sustainable development.

Alongside these two surpluses, MENA is facing two major deficits; one is natural while the other is sociopolitical. Severe water and arable land shortages (and hence food insecurity, being the largest net food importer in the world) trouble the region, especially given the demographic pressures mentioned above. This is exacerbated by climate change and the high density of international and civil conflicts in the region. In turn, the remarkable intensity of conflict in MENA is the most dramatic expression of the sociopolitical institutional deficit on all international, regional and national scales. Since the end of the Cold War,  the institutional capital that post-independence states once possessed has steadily eroded. This has allowed conflict to flourish in the region, either in the form of inter-and intra-state violence or in recurrent popular protest movements calling for social justice and political and economic inclusion on a generational, ethno-sectarian or tribal and subnational territorial basis. 

Institutions are extremely important. They constitute the human instruments for collective cooperation and coordination within and between societies. Institutions refer to formal and informal rules as well as mixes of the two, that govern the behavior of individuals and groups rendering it predictable and reliable. It is hard to imagine economics or politics in the absence of some institutional arrangements. Markets cannot exist unless there are mechanisms for information circulation and agreement enforcement. States rely on institutions ranging from organizations and agencies, to political parties and mediating channels with societal groups, in order to assert their authority, build legitimacy and deliver public services.

As functionally important as institutions can be, they are not readymade. They are rather the result of long-term, often unintended and non-teleological, evolution. This makes history central to understanding the presence or absence of institutions and their structures and functions. For a number of historical factors, mainly dating back to the formation of the contemporary MENA after the end of WWII and with the advent of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, the region has lacked much of the institutional framework needed to optimize the allocation of economic resources as well as tackle questions of state and human security.

Roots of MENA’s institutional deficit

On the one hand, post-colonial states in MENA assigned themselves the task of modernizing their societies. Whichever institutional capacity and legitimacy they once enjoyed has significantly been dissipated in the past several decades. Indeed, top-down authoritarian modernization has made some strides in areas of social and economic development. However, it has failed remarkably in offering inclusiveness for young and more-educated populations, with higher expectations for economic and political participation. Rounds of fiscal crises, international conditionality, and the implementation of neoliberal measures reinforced exclusion and established stronger ties between wealth and power in the hands of limited elites. This proved exceptionally explosive in cases where elite formation happened along primordial lines, as was the case in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, to mention a few. 

The crisis of the state in MENA is by no means new. But, it has never manifested itself on such a scale and with such intensity as the developments that have unfolded since 2011. Popular uprisings have overwhelmed almost all MENA states, starting from the Arab revolutions of 2011, the upheaval in Turkey as of 2013, the second wave of the Arab uprisings in 2019, and all the way to the recent—and still ongoing—turmoil in Iran. The rise in civil protest and anti-regime popular mobilizations has ushered the region into an extended period of intra- and inter-state conflict in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. These dynamics have debilitated national states further and provided regional and global dynamics to civil conflict, converting many broken states into battlefields for competing outside powers. 

On the other hand, MENA has historically lacked the institutional capital for regional cooperation. Not only has geopolitics, due to oil abundance and the existence of Israel, made the region home to colonial and neocolonial interventions, unlike any other region in the world (with the possible exceptions of Central America and the Sahel in Africa), but even the potential for intra-regional economic cooperation was often wasted. For instance, the heavy capital-labor exchange between oil-rich, population-poor Arab countries and population-rich, oil poor ones since the oil boom of 1973 onward has not culminated in the creation of institutionalized, long-term, and deep regional integration. Intra-MENA trade and investment flows are still negligible compared to Latin America and East Asia, not to mention Europe or North America. 

It is safe to say that the absence of the “right” set of institutions has wasted the potential of optimally using the oil and gas riches of the region for long-term and sustainable development. It is not that MENA has recorded no socioeconomic accomplishments, for it has. Since independence in the 1950s and 1960s, the region has made some significant advances in areas of socioeconomic development including life expectancy, educational attainment and per capita income. Using Human Development Indicators (HDI), MENA’s record would put it in the middle between East Asia and Latin America on the one hand and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa on the other. Most of these advances, however, were heavily dependent on the region’s role as a major exporter of raw materials. They did not contribute much to redefining how the Middle East and North Africa relate to the rest of the world by diversifying economies, building competitiveness and increasing labor productivity. For four decades or more, MENA has failed to redefine its mode of insertion into the global division of labor. Its development, as well as much of its political arrangements nationally and regionally, remained reliant on continued access to oil and gas rents. This could inform us on why the region has failed overall in the creation of vibrant and dynamic, labor-intensive, as well as skill-intensive and high-value-added, economic sectors that could have absorbed the increasingly educated young men and women looking for meaningful employment. 

Oil and natural gas have also been a curse exacerbating conflict within, between, and over the MENA almost since their discovery in the 1950s. They have perpetuated the institutional void, otherwise needed for regional and international cooperation and coordination in areas of economy and security. Structural features, like rentierism—wherein a state derives most of its national revenue from the sale of domestic resources to external clients—and oil dependency, contributed to rampant corruption, patronage, and state capture. Because oil and gas extraction do not create many jobs or encourage the growth of other sectors, they have exacerbated an exclusionary model inherently incapable of creating enough good jobs, amid not only greater demographic pressures but also higher expectations by a more educated youth.

It is hard to imagine that such a sad state of affairs would render MENA in a good position to deal with its demographic surplus, and water and arable land shortages. Ecological explanations have been given for some of MENA’s most terrible conflicts in the Sudan and Syria which coincided with extended periods of drought and an intensifying conflict over arable land and water supplies. Access to fresh water is increasingly becoming an issue of regional contention: the two prime examples are of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia feuding over the Renaissance Dam on the Nile River; and the tension over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers between Syria and Iraq on the one hand and Turkey on the other. Water management here requires a high level of institutionalized coordination on an international scale, which is not only absent but is unlikely to be engendered in such a conflict-ridden context. 

The final diagnosis is that MENA is currently an area under heavy demographic, economic, and ecological pressures, which have resulted in instability and a high concentration of violent conflicts. Moreover, the region as a whole is becoming less relevant amid declining energy prices and the United States’ ongoing—and seemingly disorderly—disengagement from it, promising further exacerbation of distributional conflict and chaos.

Is there a way out of this?

MENA might be a special region in the world due to its location, oil riches, and colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial history. It is, however, not unique. Many of the challenges above are commonplace among other places in the Global South, whether with regards to inclusive development after four decades of neoliberal globalization, hampered nation-state building, or derailed democratization efforts. Even when it comes to the current overconcentration of violent conflict in MENA, Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s and Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed such episodes. We hence have to think of MENA in comparative terms while considering its specific historical conditions.

How can the region make its economic development more inclusive, its national and regional economies diversified away from oil, and its politics more representative and stable and environmentally more sustainable? There is no easy answer. The issue is neither technical nor technocratic. It lies also far beyond the traditional focus on fixing macroeconomic indicators and public finances a la IMF and World Bank models. Nor will subscribing to the globalization orthodoxy help much in an age of de-globalization and with the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism being shaken—perhaps beyond repair—since the meltdown of 2008 and amid the rise of right-wing populism and neo-protectionists in the core economies.

The road is political and the path has already been opened with all the pressure emanating from below—from citizens themselves. Unleashing the development potential is a socio-political issue of economic repercussions, not just vice versa. Enabling entrepreneurship to take root is key, and this has to be indigenous, extending far down to the broad base of private-sector establishments in productive sectors rather than solely targeting foreign direct investment or enclave sectors that have no linkages with the rest of the economy. 

Once again, institutions are critical for such transformation to materialize. Regional and national economies in MENA must strengthen institutions that can furnish skill formation and technological upgrading for a majority of economically active individuals and establishments. Access to financial and physical capital is one critical area that requires major regulatory changes to furnish inclusion of the broad base of private enterprises. 

This all requires major institutional changes in how states are articulated with society and the economy as well as how MENA states relate to each other. Institutional change is a political issue that has to do with altering state-society relations addressing questions of legitimacy, stability, and representation either through reform or revolution or both. It is a long-term open-ended process that follows no preformed plan. 

The good thing is that it already began almost a decade ago, with the popular uprisings of 2011. Despite the immediate negative aftermath of these events—which ushered the region into a series of civil wars, state failure and relapse into authoritarian rule—a long-term and open-ended transformation has started. The most defining feature of this change is the sustained pressure from below for increasing popular participation. All that academics, experts and other members of the intelligentsia can do for now is push in what appears to be the right direction.

 

The Middle East is the only region of the world that does not have an inclusive multilateral process dedicated to the promotion of regional stability. Attempts to create such a system have always foundered on the region’s myriad tensions and complexities. The question, then, is whether the dramatic events of the past few years have made the current moment ripe, at last, for beginning such a process.

At heart, regional security systems have two key elements. First, they create a set of agreed-upon regional standards of conduct, and second, they create an accompanying process of dialogue intended to give those standards effect. As experiences in Asia (Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)), Africa (Organisation of African Unity), Europe (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)), the Western Hemisphere (Organization of American States), Eurasia (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), and South Asia (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) show, these processes do not in themselves end regional competition. They set standards of conduct and create mechanisms whereby they can be discussed. 

They also create a means for discussion of issues before they become sources of conflict. Where conflicts do arise, these frameworks do not always result in resolutions; if the countries directly concerned do not wish to end a dispute, they cannot be forced to. In these cases, regional systems can help manage a conflict and prevent it from spreading—these are not trivial things.

The question of the kind of security that these systems seek to establish is also important. Briefly, inclusive regional systems seek to further what is known as cooperative security, which means that the participating states have established norms of conduct and an inclusive mechanism in order to cooperate with each other to implement them. The other type of security arrangement that can exist in regional contexts, known as collective security, exists when a particular group of states within a region band together to resist intimidation or aggression. NATO is one example of a collective security agreement. Importantly, it does not have to be an “either/or” arrangement with respect to the kind of security mechanism that can exist in a region. In Europe, for example, both NATO (collective security) and the OSCE (inclusive, cooperative security) exist, and the trick is that such arrangements should not undercut each other, but seek to complement each other’s basic objectives.

A region can be defined as essentially an area where states believe they have a particularly close set of relations due to history, culture, geography, or some other factor. Countries can belong to more than one region simultaneously. Moreover, within regions there are “sub-regions”—areas where states have unusually close relationships due to proximity. For the purposes of this essay, the Middle East is defined as the states of the Arab League plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey, with some states belonging to more than one region. This essay also defines the Middle East as containing the following sub-regions: the Persian Gulf, the Levant, and the Maghreb, with some states belonging to more than one sub-region.

Middle East Regional Security

The Middle East has had multiple disputes, often with significant involvement from outside powers, in its recent history. Though most of the world’s attention has been focused on the Arab–Israeli dispute, there have been many different security challenges in the region. Indeed, fighting between and within the states of the region, beyond Israel and Palestine, has consumed many more lives than that tragic conflict. Moreover, the only instances of the use of weapons of mass destruction in the region, both between and within states, have been for reasons having nothing to do with the Arab–Israeli conflict. And yet, attempts to create an inclusive regional system have foundered on fears that such a system, if it included Israel, would by default “normalize” relations with that country before the Palestinian issue was resolved. Some countries in the region are also of the view that the question of Israel’s ambiguous nuclear status must be addressed before an inclusive regional security system can begin.  

Of course, the region is not without experience in multilateral diplomacy around security issues. The Arab League is the premier regional institution, though it does not include Iran, Israel, or Turkey—three states key to regional security. The league has tried to be both a cooperative security institution (setting down norms of conduct between the Arab countries) and, at times, a collective one (exploring various kinds of military and security coordination between Arab countries). It must be said that the League has not done particularly well at either of these. Its members have been too jealous of their sovereignty and often too suspicious of each other to fully cooperate within the League for either purpose. Sub-regional institutions have also existed within the Middle East. Perhaps the best known is the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It has also sought to act as a collective security mechanism against (at various times) Iraq and Iran, with the participation of the United States, and as a cooperative security mechanism with regards to relations among its own members. Again, the success of the GCC at both of these tasks has been mixed.

The only attempt to create a regional security system was the Arms Control and Regional Security Working Group (ACRS), which was part of the multilateral track of the Middle East peace process in the early 1990s. ACRS foundered, as did all of the multilateral groups, over the normalization of relations with Israel, but also over the question of Israel’s ambiguous nuclear status. The group was also not inclusive of the region’s states; for a variety of reasons, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya did not participate. That said, ACRS did accomplish much in terms of beginning the exploration of how an inclusive, cooperative regional security system could work, and significant discussions and even negotiations over regional security and confidence-building took place. ACRS also developed a draft of a statement of principles on regional security, which was agreed upon except for the difference over Israel’s nuclear status. That draft could serve as a starting point for consideration of these issues. There have also been several important projects at the Track Two level, which brought together regional experts for an in-depth exploration of these issues (For more on all this, see the “Further Reading” list).

The Situation Today

Much has changed since ACRS went into abeyance. Notable developments include the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath; significant changes in many states since the so-called Arab Spring; conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere; the emergence of ISIS and other new forms of religious extremist groups; the continued rise of Iran as a perceived threat (and the accomplishment and then apparent demise of the nuclear agreement—the JCPOA); and the perception that America is not so fully committed to regional stability as in the past, along with the rise of Russia as a power in the area. All of this has created a regional picture that seems even more unstable than at any time since the end of World War II.

Under such circumstances, one may question the value of steps to begin an inclusive, cooperative Middle East Regional Security System (MERSS).  Indeed, if one believes that a regional security system must be born fully formed, it is impossible to imagine that the lofty principles that are contained, for example, in the ACRS principles will be widely respected across the region anytime soon. But no other regional security system was ever born fully formed. In all of the other cases, there were significant issues and conflicts when the initial steps were taken.  

Had it been the case, for example, that the countries of Asia did not begin to talk while the Vietnam War was raging, ASEAN would never have begun. Had it been the case that European countries did not talk to each other until the division of Germany had been resolved, the CSCE (which later became the OSCE when the Cold War ended) would never have been started. And yet, both ASEAN and the CSCE/OSCE played significant roles in helping to manage the end of these conflicts and also in promoting stability in those regions to this day. Moreover, not all regional security systems included everyone at the outset. However, a seat was left open for them to join when they were ready—none of these systems began by permanently excluding countries that would have to eventually join for the systems to work.

The key, in all cases, is that some states in the region began the work to create a cooperative system and left places open for others to join as they were willing to abide by the principles of the regime. Additionally, a fundamental aspect of such early efforts was a recognition that certain issues could not be resolved right away, but that cooperation and dialogue could be sought in certain areas while conversation continued about issues that could not be resolved immediately.

Looking Ahead

How, then, might efforts to create an inclusive MERSS begin in this environment?  There are at least five points to consider. First, the creation of a MERSS will be a long-term process, as it has been everywhere else, which will likely begin with a few regional actors stepping forward. Without naming names, there are some countries in the region that have a history of being prepared to talk while others do not. Those others will join as they are willing, and a seat must be left for them. It is important, then, that the process not begin as an exclusionary one, but also that it not wait until everyone is ready—that is a recipe for never getting started. There will have to be a core group of states who will begin the conversation with the expectation that others will join when they are ready. 

This leads to a second consideration, which is the definition of security.  Trying to be both a cooperative and a collective security system does not work because the two kinds of security regimes have different functions.  Importantly, as in other regions of the world, the two types of security arrangements should not be seen as mutually exclusive—one can band together with a select group of like-minded states to resist perceived intimidation from others, even as one also tries to have a broader and more inclusive conversation with those others to see if rules of behavior can be established and tensions lessened. Some in the region in recent years have called for informal alliances between Israel and various Arab states to contain Iran. Perhaps these will work and perhaps they will not, but the key is that such arrangements would be quite different from an inclusive and cooperative MERSS, which would have as its goal to stimulate discussions, including with Iran and others, in an attempt to address, or at least manage, the issues that divide the region.  

Another aspect of the question of defining security, and one very much heightened in importance today, is the question of including social, economic, environmental, and other such issues in discussions about “security”.  Finding ways of cooperatively dealing with the consequences of rapid social, environmental, and other changes is an increasingly important element of how the region manages its future. This was apparent before the crisis over COVID 19 erupted; it is even more the case today. These issues should be firmly on the agenda of any system that might be created.

The combination of the need for an expansive agenda and the fact that not all countries will be willing to join an official process right away leads to a third consideration, which is the need for a flexible, creative approach in structuring the initial stages of the MERSS. If, as noted above, the official process of starting the MERSS may only involve a few of the region’s states in the first instance, how can others participate in discussions? The key, as has happened elsewhere, notably in Asia, is to create a multi-layered process. If there are certain issues that are not yet ripe for discussion on the official level, a structured and long-term semi-official dialogue can allow them to be explored and developed until the day comes when governments are ready to tackle them. Similarly, if there are countries that are not yet ready to join an official process, they could participate in semi-official discussions as a way of beginning to engage. The Asian experience, where a standing, semi-official dialogue process exists alongside the official one, can be instructive here. This flexible approach, in which there can be different layers of dialogue to accommodate different issues and actors, is known as the geometry variable.

A fourth consideration is the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. While it is true that this is not the only conflict in the region, it is also true that it occupies a special place in regional politics. It will be difficult to sustain an inclusive regional process involving Israel without recognition of this reality. The fact that, in recent years, a number of leading Arab regimes have been willing to informally hold discussions over security with Israel in the absence of peace with Palestine indicates how important these countries believe it is to include a new relationship with Israel in their security calculations. But the fact that they are not prepared to do so officially is also notable. Perhaps the key here is to move away from the view that official regional dialogue involving Israel will only be possible once there is a final peace agreement with Palestine and toward a view that the beginnings of such a dialogue can be a positive contribution toward such an agreement. If a new government finds its way to power in Israel, the underlying sense of the Arab Peace Initiative may yet be proven and could form the basis for this.

Finally, there is the issue of the role of outside powers. As noted, the Middle East has seen an unusually significant involvement of outside powers over many years. It seems unlikely to imagine that this will end, though the exact nature of that involvement is shifting as the U.S. commitment to the region changes and others, notably Russia, play a larger role. While the history of the Middle East is unique, other regional systems, notably in Asia and Africa, have developed some rules of the game on how outsiders and regional states interact. It seems a long way off, but one can imagine a role for a MERSS to help create some common understanding of the proper role of outside powers in the Middle East. In the meantime, a structured discussion between regional states and outsiders of how the region and the outside world might properly interact could be an opportunity for dialogue.

While none of this will be easy, other regions have shown that significant differences over fundamental issues need not prevent at least the beginning of an inclusive dialogue on cooperative regional security. The key is to keep expectations modest and remember that these processes take decades to hit their stride. The fundamental security problems of the region cannot be ignored in the initial stages of discussions, but expecting a nascent regime to magically solve them is neither realistic nor productive. Those who step forward to begin should be mindful of the tremendous issues facing the region, of course, but they should not be so daunted as to be paralyzed into never taking the initiative. Other regions have shown that patience, flexibility, creativity, and perseverance can lead to significant results.

As the global novel coronavirus 2019 pandemic nears the end of its third month, the economic fallout from COVID-19 represents nothing less than the gravest crisis since the 1929 Great Depression. International stay-at-home orders led to a collapse in global demand, emptying city streets, shuttering factories, grounding air travel, and leaving most global shipping in stasis. Loretta Mester, the president of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, summed it up when she called it a “huge, unprecedented, negative shock”. 

It will take years for the full impact of COVID-19 to be accurately assessed. When the rate of infection finally subsides, governments around the world will begin a slow process to restart the global economy. They are currently trying to plan it, though they lack any identifiable precedent for what is required. No one now seems quite sure if we will be able to return to the status quo ante, or, if in trying to get back to normal in fits and starts, we will see the trajectory of global growth forever altered.  

What we can start to see, or at least start to try to discern, are the impacts that will have long-term effects, particularly for the Middle East and North Africa region. The first involves the unprecedented collapse in oil prices, a result of overall demand drop, paired with Russian–Saudi tensions that erupted into an all-out price war, the final disposition of which will remain up in the air for some time. The second likely impact is that, like the global financial crisis of 2008, the role of the United States as an imperfect guarantor of international fiscal stability will remain important to the international order, despite recent commentary about the rise of multipolarity or other emerging great powers. 

It becomes necessary then to explore what the twin impacts of changing global oil markets and the international fiscal order mean for the future trajectory of geo-economics in the MENA region, and what the role of the United States will be in those. Despite repeated predictions that the United States would pull back from the Middle East, exhausted after decades of military intervention, a post-COVID-19 world will likely see more intense U.S. involvement in the region, and the increased profile of China. 

Global Oil Markets

Almost as soon as the markets became aware of how widespread the COVID-19 outbreak was in China, global oil prices began to slide. As the shutdowns spread throughout the United States and Western Europe, the price of the global Brent crude oil benchmark collapsed. As Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency said, “the oil world has seen many shocks over the years, but none has hit the industry to the degree we are witnessing today”.

The disjointed response by major oil producers began almost immediately and lasted until early April. As prices continued to fall, no major producer wanted to be the first to cut its own production, lest it lose market share to others. Even with no customers on the horizon, everyone continued pumping. The last time oil prices had experienced such precipitous declines, Russia and Saudi Arabia partnered under an unofficial OPEC+ arrangement to help manage oil production, and consequently prices. 

That arrangement broke under the pressure of COVID-19, with Russia rejecting an early March proposal from OPEC to cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day. Subsequent to Moscow’s veto, Saudi Arabia and Russia entered into a full-scale price war, with Riyadh announcing it would set record high production levels. 

The Russia–Saudi sniping, similar to the 2014 price war, directly implicated the United States, whose unconventional producers, particularly those who use hydrofracturing, are one of the targets. Not only did the price cut bleed their profit margins at a more aggressive rate than their Saudi or Russian competitors—the unconventional production methods mean higher productions costs, which become uneconomical as the price lowers—but the private debt markets on whom they would depend for operating capital were frozen due to COVID-19. 

Hence President Donald Trump’s strong desire to get a price war ceasefire. He put public pressure on both Moscow and Riyadh to make a deal, backing it up with the threat of tariffs on Saudi crude oil imports, a symbolic threat that still had strong rhetorical effect. Eventually, in early April, Saudi Arabia and Russia finally coordinated, with the rest of the OPEC membership, to a near ten million barrel per day cut, though only time will tell if it is properly implemented. Even if the production cuts go into effect, it still remains to be seen if they  can make oil prices exit a bear market—the decline of the West Texas Intermediate price benchmark to below zero for May deliveries is emblematic of the challenges ahead.

It is hard not to think this entire experience is a sobering reality for an administration that had, for so long, touted America’s “energy dominance”. Almost immediately after President Trump took office, he promised the American people that the United States’ status as an oil and natural gas producer would give it unparalleled geopolitical leverage. Instead, COVID-19 helped remind the world that oil is a globally traded commodity, subject to conditions beyond the control even of the U.S. president. In the short-term, it is notable that U.S. domestic producers as a whole will have their roughest operating year on record. 

Over the long-term, however, it demonstrates there is no simple relationship between how Washington feels about energy security and what its posture will be toward the Middle East. Despite years of commentary about “energy independence” and “energy dominance,” U.S. production cannot extricate itself from developments in the Middle East. Not only do tensions have a direct bearing on price, but the politics of the region will continue to draw Washington in. This is especially true given the expected economic fallout.

U.S. Financial Leverage and the Middle East  

One trend that seems immune to COVID-19 impacts is the United States’ financial supremacy. The U.S. dollar is the principal currency of global investment and trade. As the full consequences of the global pandemic set in during February and March 2020, emerging market economies led a rush to safety in the U.S. dollar. This emergency action, combined with the need to curtail normal economic activity, will likely exacerbate budget and currency problems for vulnerable countries in the region. It will also, at least in the short term, increase the influence of U.S. sanctions, which are dependent on the centrality of the dollar to global commerce. Both will have profound foreign policy consequences as a new presidential administration takes office in January 2021, whether it is Joe Biden or a new Trump term. 

Such dominance was the cornerstone of the Trump administration pre-pandemic foreign policy. The Trump administration did not hesitate to throw its financial weight around as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. It maintained its maximum economic pressure campaign against Iran, adding new entities involved in various sectors of the Iranian economy to the U.S. sanctions list. The administration also argued against any effort to relax its sanctions approach in light of COVID-19, arguing that the law allowed sufficient exemptions for humanitarian trade. 

Regardless of the merits of that debate, it does have important consequences for how the region sees U.S. leadership in a wider context. Take as an example the debt burden of middle-income Middle Eastern and North African states, which has always been a worry but now is far more acute because of the global macroeconomic context during a pandemic. Unfortunately, the administration’s coercive posture does not have an incentives-based corollary that could ameliorate this situation. 

That is not to say that there could not be a plan in the future. The Trump administration’s plans for solving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through financial investments could not make a significant impact. Many administrations have spilled ink with Marshall Plan-like development plans for the region that have similarly gone nowhere. Even in a post-COVID-19 world then, the United States may default to an approach ill-suited to the region’s requirements after the pandemic, prioritizing security threats over a cohesive economically based or driven foreign policy strategy. 

A Slowly Changing Competitive Nexus in the Middle East

Both of these factors do present an opportunity for one power in particular to recast its role: China. As the COVID-19 index patient, China is now only beginning to open up from its lockdown, buoyed by a superficial impression that it responded better than the United States or Western Europe, and that it was more generous in aiding others. This soft power advantage could be easily combined with significant fiscal resources to double down on its pre-pandemic global strategy to reshape the international order in a way that is more amenable to its political and economic system. 

China’s delivery of testing kits to the region may be followed by investment and debt relief which, though on the surface welcome, may come with the same string attached that has marked many Belt and Road Initiative projects elsewhere. This trend would be reinforced by the growing impression that Russia’s traditional intervention in the region is destructive, and the United States’ contribution is uneven, and principally military and not economic in nature. 

Rebuilding Ahead

The international order will not endure beyond COVID-19 without significant shifts, both economic and political. More so than post 9/11 or the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, the structures of our current political economy have been shaken in profound ways. The international community now has an opportunity to consider the foundations on which that order will be rebuilt. 

The first concrete steps in this process cannot take place until later this year, after the American people vote in a presidential election fundamentally reshaped by the effects of COVID-19. Much as the Trump administration or its Democratic rival would like to believe, the United States will probably be heavily involved in the Middle East.

Global oil markets, which in normal times are one of the most critical inputs into the global economy and support the national budgets of much of the Middle East, will likely spend the summer trying to track implementation of the production cuts deal. The existential question of whether oil demand will return to “normal” will occupy oil market watchers for the rest of the year. 

Likewise, the wider economic context will also present challenges for the next decade. We are only seeing the very early days of a significant debt crisis for not only the emerging market world, but also a number of important states in the Middle East and North Africa. 

The visitation of the U.S.–China economic competition will only add a layer of complexity to the centrifugal tendencies of the region, particularly since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Regardless of the course of the recovery, the United States, and its relationship to other major powers in the Middle East, will be a crucial dynamic. Whether that means it will be able to build a stronger regional political and security order than what had previously existed will be the question that dominates the agenda for years to come. Given the profound disjuncture that COVID-19 has visited on the region in the first quarter of this year alone, it is hard to be optimistic.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world works, produces, learns and communicates. Since March 2020 (and earlier for states like Italy and China), countries have closed their proverbial and literal doors—halting immigration, closing restaurants and cafes, and shifting schools and universities to online learning—in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. However, though these measures have been successful in limiting casualties in countries like New Zealand and South Korea, health systems in many countries have been overwhelmed by an influx of patients requiring critical care. 

Dr. Hossam Badrawi, who founded the Nile Badrawi Hospital and has served in the Egyptian Parliament, outlined the challenges faced by the Egyptian healthcare system in a special webinar series titled “Health and Educational Challenges of COVID-19 in Egypt and Beyond”, which was held by the American University in Cairo’s (AUC) School of Global Affairs and Public Policy on April 22. He outlined three sequential priorities for response to the coronavirus: widespread testing; global coordination in preventing transmission across borders; and strengthening the quality of Egyptian healthcare as well as the system’s capacity. 

“We don’t have more than 460 ventilators available [in Egypt], and the number of critical beds are very little,” Badrawi said. But, he cautioned against increasing resource quantity without equally strengthening service: “If I say Egypt has 120,000 hospital beds, this does not mean that they can accommodate and treat.”

In considering service delivery, testing is critical. Badrawi noted that Egypt performs only 250 coronavirus tests per day, achingly behind countries like Germany, which was reported to perform over one hundred thousand tests per day in the beginning of April.

Badrawi theorized that the slow rate of testing in Egypt makes the mortality rate of COVID-19 in the country—roughly 6 percent—seem unnaturally high, as a large number of low or moderate-severity cases are likely left unaccounted for.

Associate Provost for Transformative Learning and Teaching Aziza Ellozy, who also participated in the dialogue, cited an unnamed article that theorized that the efficiency of the German response to the coronavirus—which, in addition to rigorous testing, included aggressive contact tracing, an increase in intensive care beds, and laudable adherence to social distancing measures—likely has to do with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dual role as a scientist and a politician. Indeed, for its nearly 150,000 cases, Germany has seen only five thousand deaths, as opposed to the twenty thousand in neighboring France—which, similarly, has had 158,000 cases. Egypt would do well to integrate the spheres of politics and science more deeply, she and Badrawi stressed.

In this regard, Badrawi acknowledged that politics and science appear to some as diametrically opposed: politics is about public acceptance and manipulating desires instead of evidence-based knowledge and imposing change, he summarized. Yet, “You need the politician to convince, but you need the scientist to direct,” he counterbalanced. Creating a separate room in Parliament where more scientists are taking part in political decisions may lend a different perspective to decision-making, he proposed. 

One of Badrawi’s final points on the matter was that one need not be a scientist to think scientifically. Ellozy, in her position as Associate Provost and founder of the University’s Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT), knows this well, and discussed the need to provide students with the tools to sift through scientific or intentionally biased information.

Cultivating such critical skill sets is one of the areas for improvement at AUC—and in Egyptian higher education more broadly—brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ellozy said. “We want to have learners who can function in this global world”, which requires proficiencies in connectivity and data literacy.

“Digital learning is the way forward.”

AUC was, however, relatively prepared to make the first steps toward this new academic paradigm when COVID-19 began to aggressively spread around the world. Ellozy praised the Provost’s Office for having a contingency plan in place for the physical closure of the University, and cited CLT’s existing focus on faculty integration as integral to quickly providing instructors with the tools to maintain the quality of their tutelage online.

Challenges do remain, however, including the transition to assessing students online. Without working face-to-face, it can be more difficult to proctor examinations, and specialized software may be necessary to monitor student online activity during exam times. But, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted that traditional examinations may not be the best way of assessing students’ performance, Ellozy remarked. Online learning presents educational institutions with unique flexibility in offering alternative assignments, which should be retained even when in-person instruction is once again possible.

Succinctly put, now is the time for educational innovation. To find ways of maximizing our technological resources, “we don’t need to reinvent the wheel”, Ellozy says. She points to South Africa as a pioneer in using mobile phones for education; companies like Vodacom and Siyavula provide e-learning applications that operate free of data charge, so they are accessible to students across income levels. Moreover, Ellozy notes that the Internet gives us access to resources developed around the world free of charge.

Badrawi looks through a similarly optimistic lens toward the educational prospects borne by the coronavirus. He explained that because of the changes necessitated by the virus, we have discovered potential in Egyptian students, professors, and institutions that would have been left otherwise untapped. With the knowledge that the capacity of young people is so great, Egyptian society—both in the educational system and in other sectors—must rise to a new level.

In his view, the path forward is multi-pronged: high-quality education must be made available to all, which Ellozy adds must include greater Arabic translation. Furthermore, Badrawi outlines a need for educational autonomy, arguing that integration with the state constrains institutional flexibility and power to innovate. 

Badrawi nevertheless stresses that a vital responsibility of educational institutions is cultivating the personalities of young people—not just imparting knowledge. With coronavirus-enforced digitization, young people have access to arts and culture that must be brought into the halls of schools and universities. 

If such can be done—if students are more holistically cultivated, as opposed to being simply taught to regurgitate—Egypt will have succeeded in breeding a generation of leaders. Therein lies the opportunity of the COVID-19 pandemic: society’s eyes have been opened to the need for global leaders, and it has been brought face-to-face with the resources needed for today’s students to fill the gap.

Eco-cities and sustainable urban development are being heavily promoted worldwide and are gaining accelerated interest. There are dozens of new cities in China alone that claim to be sustainable or environmentally-friendly. Such new utopias are being planned in a number of other countries, and there are also rising numbers of enclave residential developments on urban fringes that boast eco-sustainable credentials. At the same time, even more interest and money are being directed toward making existing cities sustainable, smart, and ecologically correct. These concepts are coming to pervade urban planning and design disciplines, and they have stimulated the interest of a wide range of private companies and foundations—as well as governments—who see urban sustainability and the products that will be required as an extremely important part of any new tech future. They are also spawning specific standards and awards with which to measure and rank the march toward sustainability goals; a whole sub-industry of sustainable urban conferences and expositions is already well established.

However, the concepts driving these eco-city trends are extremely wide ranging, and it could be said that they are more than a bit fuzzy, with some labels of sustainability being applied to products and processes that are little more than new real estate products, property ventures, new consumer lifestyles, and other high-tech urban fixtures. The most common aspects of urban sustainability are pretty well-known and can be briefly summarized as evolving around three main principles: low-carbon, green, and smart/connected. These have come to imply a large number of specific actions and investments. Some of these are sensible and obvious, but some overlap, and are contradictory, or are frankly little more than cosmetic.

These are concepts and trends that have captured both public and investor interest in the West and have spread throughout the world. So how do Arab countries stack up? Here we take a quick look at ongoing eco- and smart-city initiatives found across the region and their even more ambitious proposals. Our aim is to separate fiction from reality and to consider the corporate as well as government motives operating behind the promotion of these twenty-first century artifacts.

To do this, it is important to divide Arab countries into two types. On the one hand, we have the rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, who have sovereign wealth funds and huge discretionary budgets, and whose sustainability challenges are intimately tied up with their hydrocarbon-based economies. We also have the rest of the Arab countries, all of whom have large and rapidly expanding cities with substantial portions of their populations who remain poor by any measure. These countries may have some petroleum and natural gas resources, but they remain lower middle-income countries whose development trajectories rest on promoting diverse and productive economies. 

Eco-urban Experiments and Policies in Gulf Countries

Any consideration of eco-sustainability in the Arab countries of the Gulf must take into consideration four main facts. First, Gulf countries are huge consumers of energy. The world’s highest consumer is Qatar (at 17,922 kilograms of oil equivalent per capita, 2.5 times that of the USA), and Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) all rank globally within the top ten. Second, Gulf countries are also massive greenhouse gas polluters. In 2014, the world average of carbon dioxide emissions per capita was 4.76 metric tons, whereas for Qatar the figure was 43.86 metric tons, with other Gulf countries not far behind. On the other hand, countries like Egypt were relatively very low polluters.

Third, Gulf countries have enormous foreign labor forces without which they could not function. In 2010, the UAE and Qatar led the pack with 88 and 86 percent, respectively, of their populations made up of foreign residents and with 96 and 94 percent of their workforces composed of immigrants. And Bahrain and Kuwait had over half of their populations and over two-thirds of their labor forces made up of foreigners. Only in Oman and Saudi Arabia did the number of foreigners represent less than half the population. 

Fourth, Arab countries in the Gulf have  for decades made diversifying their economies and reducing dependency on oil revenues important parts of their national strategies, but even after the near collapse of oil prices in 1998, and again in 2016, none have made measurable progress.

Faced with these rather discouraging facts, it is informative to look at how Gulf states are taking up the urban eco-sustainability banner. The UAE has probably done the most to promote sustainable urbanism, or at least invested the most both into experiments and rhetoric. In 2007, the government of Abu Dhabi launched Masdar City on a 6.35 square kilometer site next to the airport, based on a masterplan by Fosters + Partners. It was to be a new, “zero-carbon” high density town and “one of the world’s most sustainable cities,” relying wholly on solar energy, doing away with private cars (replacing them with Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT, pods), introducing micro-climate enhancements (including a vernacular wind tower), and erecting green buildings with smart energy management systems. 

The Masdar experiment has garnered a huge amount of media interest. It now boasts a small number of modernist buildings, including those of the International Renewable Energy Agency and a handful of iconic global companies such as Siemens, Honeywell, and General Dynamics. But thirteen years after its establishment, Masdar remains very much a work in progress. Its modest target of a population of fifty-two thousand is far from being reached, and today there are less than 1,000 residents, most of whom are students at the Khalifa Institute of Science and Technology. Over 85 percent of the city’s surface area remains undeveloped. As a 2016 Guardian article puts it, “the world’s first planned sustainable city—the marquee project of the United Arab Emirates’ plan to diversify the economy from fossil fuels—could well be the world’s first green ghost town.” Instead, the Masdar initiative itself has metamorphized into a clean-tech lab and showroom, and its real calling, that of a platform for corporate experiments targeting the global market for eco-urban products, is now firmly in place. 

The UAE has experimented with other urban sustainability initiatives, particularly in Dubai. These include a massive 200-megawatt (MW) solar power plant south of the city, which is being expanded to 1,000 MW; the only mass transit network in the Gulf states (four lines, driverless trains, and 46 stations, all air conditioned, mainly used by commuting foreign workers); and several other eco-features and regulations recently introduced by the municipality. The policies underlying these initiatives are mostly city-wide and generic, and thus have greater potential than Masdar to have some sustainability impact, but they will not at all reduce the UAE’s enormous dependence on hydrocarbons.

Dubai is also home to a recently completed upscale private residential compound called, unsubtly, “Dubai Sustainable City,” which covers about fifty hectares with 500 eco-connected villas and a ban on cars in most areas. Name aside, Dubai Sustainable City is simply a developer’s residential neighborhood project shoehorned into the edge of Dubai’s massive urban sprawl, but one that makes heavy use of eco features as its main selling point. It hardly qualifies as anything approaching carbon-footprint sustainable, since inhabitants are totally car-dependent to get anywhere and electricity consumption per household remains sky-high.

Like the UAE, Saudi Arabia has discovered that in order to diversify its economy away from fossil fuels, urban sustainability principles can help promote new urban ventures and new economic pursuits, and the roll call of the kingdom’s recently launched new cities is impressive. In 2005, King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) was begun on a huge 137 square kilometer Red Sea site 100 kilometers north of Jeddah, aimed at a population of half a million people. Of its various elements—a major port, industrial complexes, leisure, resort, and residential zones—the most-high tech are university campuses flanked by two R&D parks and a “Smart City”. Unfortunately, KAEC remains a work in progress, and by 2020 (the year it was planned to be completed) only some 10 percent of the total land area has been developed, few industries or tech companies have settled in, and the population does not exceed ten thousand residents. 

Undaunted, the kingdom has also announced at least four other new cities in the desert, the progress on which has been extremely slow. Even existing cities are getting a “sustainability wash” with a heavy emphasis on healthy lifestyles. A recent symposium entitled Sustainable Riyadh centered on four “well-being” projects to promote sustainable development, conservation, socioeconomic wellbeing, cultural nourishment, and the promotion of healthier lifestyles.

All of these plans have been completely eclipsed by the 2017 announcement by Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman of the “gigacity” NEOM, where interconnected, futuristic, and sustainable city concepts have been raised to dizzying heights. To be built on an enormous 4,000 square kilometer slice of desert on the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba (almost half the area of Lebanon) and estimated to cost $500 billion—not counting huge expected foreign investments—NEOM promises to be everything that is modern and cutting edge. Space-age artifacts abound, such as domestic robots, cloud seeding, flying taxis, hologram teachers, an artificial moon, a theme park with robotic dinosaurs, and glow-in-the-dark beaches. It is evidently aimed mainly at well-off jet-setters, and according to the plan, residents will be able to choose from more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than in any other city on earth (what a metric). 

However, progress on the ground has so far been very thin. NEOM Airport is nearly finished, the first phase of a workers’ village that can accommodate ten thousand laborers has been built, and the Saudi government is already hosting events at the site to generate investment and media attention (such as wind suit jumping and car rallies). A check using Google Earth images from 2018 and 2019 shows that practically nothing has been built, and the only new road is a coastline-hugging highway that is still under construction. 

Qatar has been taking a more urban-grounded approach to sustainability. Since 2012, it has been developing “Downtown Doha,” which when finished will “produce one of the most eco-friendly city districts in the world”. It features solar panels, shaded streets, LEED-rated energy efficient buildings, and a separate greywater system. It includes the central interchange on Doha’s new metro network that will play an important role in ferrying fans for the World Cup in 2022. The main stadium for the Cup is being built in a totally new thirty-eight square kilometer waterfront development called Lusail City, which, according to its developer, will be “a smart and sustainable, modern city” that will absorb part of the projected growth of Qatar’s population and economy. As is often the case with many sustainable urban projects in the Gulf states, attempts are made to integrate the spirit and aesthetics of traditional architecture with sustainable design and modern technology. And in most cases, it is the contracted Western design firm that conceives these architectural integrations.

The other Gulf countries—Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—have been late to join their neighbors in promoting sustainable eco-cities, and what little they have accomplished is until now mostly cosmetic. In 2009, for example, the Bahrain World Trade Center was completed in Manama, a tapering dual tower structure whose main iconic feature is three massive wind turbines suspended between the two towers. The Bahrain Smart Cities Summit was held in 2019, and the government is currently in the process of banning plastic bags. Private developers in Oman are promoting a couple of residential enclaves outside Muscat (Medinat Al-Irfan and Blue City) that boast natural and eco features, and the Omani government has placed great hope in the new port and industrial city of Dukm in the south of the country. This project aims at opening up the sparsely settled region and also at diversifying the economy, but sustainability does not feature prominently as one of its promotional features. Kuwait aims to develop a 250 square kilometer satellite “Silk City” across the Jaber Causeway, which will include a center for environmental studies, and it is planned to be surrounded by a green belt of gardens. However, the main feature of the new town is a planned 234-floor mega skyscraper, hardly something that is eco-sensitive.  

Eco-urban Experiments and Policies in Other Arab countries

While non-Gulf Arab countries have nothing like the resources of the Gulf states to pursue utopian urban dreams and promote sustainability of the built-environment, some of these countries have also begun down this path, at least in terms of rhetoric and declared long-term goals. Of these, Egypt has probably gone furthest, especially in the last few years. This has been based on the government’s long history of creating urban settlements in the desert, and since the late 1970s at least twenty-four new towns have been established while many more have been announced or are in the planning stages. The creation of these new towns has been part of the country’s spatial policy to deflect population growth away from the crowded cities of the Nile Valley and Delta and is the main underpinning of its Vision 2030. Unfortunately, the record shows that, while the new towns around Cairo have enjoyed huge public and private investments and are now the loci of mega-malls, private universities, hospitals, and corporate headquarters, their successes in attracting new inhabitants has been decidedly meager. According to Egypt’s official census, from 1986 to 2017, the eight new towns in the deserts around Cairo increased by only 0.9 million inhabitants, whereas over the same period the whole metropolis added a whopping 10.6 million persons.  

Until recently, these new towns have not been promoted as being particularly eco-sustainable, and in fact—with their extensive sprawl, very low densities, unoccupied housing stock, heavy water use, total reliance on private transportation, huge energy consumption, and intended social exclusion—they represent the antithesis of anything approaching sustainability. But since 2014, over a dozen “fourth generation” new towns have been announced, of which New Al-Alamein, New Mansoura, and especially the New Administrative Capital are already under construction and are being heavily promoted as being eco-smart. As declared by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, their aim is “to establish a new model for life in Egypt that depends on smart cities and keeping pace with the highest levels of global development in this field”. Private developers in these towns have leaped onto the eco-train to promote their projects, alongside the government which extolls digital, connected, and high-tech systems, and public buildings that are purported to be green and are being covered with solar panels. But the fact that, in terms of urban form and urban systems, these fourth generation’ cities repeat the excesses made in earlier new towns seems not to matter. 

The hype surrounding these new smart cities seems to be ever-increasing. A special four-page spread on real estate in Egypt in the January 28, 2020 edition of the country’s leading daily was devoted to the need for and advantages of these Generation 4 cities, with the lead article implying that investment in them was the path to a superior “quality of life” for Egyptian citizens. And the same day the Egyptian Mail, reporting on an al-Azhar conference, managed to link religious discourse renewal with the nation’s sustainable development. It seems everything can be construed in terms of sustainability.

Morocco has also ventured into the world of eco-cities, although at a slower pace than Egypt. In 2004, the government began a program called “Villes sans bidonvilles” (cities without slums), which includes the creation of fifteen new towns by 2020 to reduce the pressure on existing cities, keep potentially anarchic urban development under control, and offer new living spaces to meet the needs of different social strata. Zenata, designated an “eco-site” in 2012 and located between Casablanca and Rabat, is one of these. A public-private venture, its designers say their systemic approach is unique in building a sustainable, environmentally friendly, and well-connected city. Aiming to have a total population of 300,000 with 100,000 jobs, Zenata is still in its initial phase with few inhabitants (but an Ikea mega store is already open). Other new towns in Morocco that have at least some eco/smart features are Ville Verte Benguérir (being built by the main Moroccan phosphate company) and Chrafate, a new town near Tangier and Morocco’s Automotive City. 

A few other non-Gulf Arab countries have begun to prepare for an eco-urban future. In Jordan, a Bus Rapid Transit system is being built for Amman (much welcome in a city with horrible traffic and almost no public transport), and there is talk of creating a new, modern satellite city east of the capital. In Algeria, there have been discussions about the need for environmental urban planning, and a new “sustainable city” plan for Algiers has been elaborated. Similarly, the city of Oran has adopted a zero waste, energy efficiency and capacity building program. And in Tunisia, instead of creating new eco-cities, the government has been talking about a “programme national des villes durables en Tunisie” to be applied to existing urban agglomerations.

Eco-babble or the Real Deal?

Unfortunately, although certain elements and activities that claim an eco-sustainable pedigree are likely to become more and more prominent, overall these are developments, and the new towns or urban fringes in which they are located, continue the following five depressing trends:

First, the real estate sector, particularly that which promotes new suburban, high-end and gated-community developments, is a huge and growing industry throughout Arab countries and is already firmly entrenched in the urban landscape. It is mostly a mechanism for attaching eco-embellishments onto a project, something that could be called “greenwashing,” as a way for developers to market their products and to give them advantages over their competitors. For example, in Daily News Egypt’s recent “Real estate outlook 2020” special, projects were described as having such elements as cascading green terraces, floating pools, interactive roofs, spectacular green environments, smart homes with fully integrated services, solar energy lighting, walkable boulevards, jogging and biking lanes, vertical forests, privacy and round-the-clock security. But in the same breath, these projects are also described as emphasizing exclusive living, luxury apartments, private and pristine landscapes, universal brand introductions, scenic views of manicured lawns and extensive water features, avant-garde communities, smart parking, utmost comfort, privacy, and serenity, and ultra-smart and contemporary designs.

Such promotional campaigns can be found in almost all Arab countries, and point toward urban futures that will be ever more exclusive and segregated, no matter how greenwashed they appear.

Second, the private car is fixed to remain the defining feature of urban transport in both new and existing urban agglomerations. Mass public transport—especially metro systems—in spite of experiments in cities like Cairo, Dubai, and Amman, remain under-developed. Cairo’s third line is still only half finished, while ground-breaking for its fourth line has been delayed again and again. And instead of introducing cost-effective Bus Rapid Transit systems, the lure of high-tech monorails to connect Cairo with satellite new towns seems to have won the day, even though these are outrageously expensive and unproven even in the West. Sure, in some Arab cities the idea of adding in electric buses, promoting electric cars, or introducing smart, shared vehicle systems may sound like alternatives to the internal combustion engine, but these are cosmetic additions that are not going to erode the addiction to the private car that is needed to navigate over ever-increasing urban sprawl. 

Third, the marketing of everything that can be construed as eco-urban is rapidly being transformed from niche to mainstream. We have already seen how Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s zero-carbon city, morphed into an eco-urban product development and marketing platform. This trend toward marketing and branding has been a common sight in Arab countries for years, but recently it seems that the idea has been, well, put on steroids. Take, for example, Abu Dhabi’s 2020 World Future Energy Summit, “the leading global industry event and exhibition for future energy, cleantech and sustainability,” with government and business leaders, 800 specialist exhibitors and 33,500 visitors from 170 countries. In a similar vein, there is the 2020 Intelligent Cities Exhibition and Conference, running for the fifth year in Cairo and touted as “the region’s leading smart and sustainable cities event,” which will be attended (coronavirus permitting) by “the most influential consultants, vendors, technology providers, systems integrators, CIOs, real estate investors, developers, mixed-use developers, industrial zone developers, contractors, city planners, architects, designers, and government and telecom authorities”. 

This hyper-marketing of everything that could be considered even remotely smart, eco-urban, and clean-tech is probably an unavoidable consequence of both today’s intense mediatic attention on the effects of climate change and an enduring faith in technological miracles. But the real estate and eco-products being marketed are certainly not going to save the planet by themselves. Some of the products may improve connectivity and have a marginal eco-utility, but overall, these “best practices on building and managing the cities of tomorrow” are mostly just add-ons that reinforce existing low-density suburban sprawl and trends that favor car-oriented transport, exclusive neighborhoods, and high-energy urban futures.

Fourth, there is an inexorable appetite for even greater consumption of energy in cities, and Middle Eastern cities are no different. Much is made of reducing carbon footprints and shifting to renewables in Arab countries, but although there have been some recent laudable advances, projections of the already huge hydrocarbon consumption in both Gulf and non-Gulf cities continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Intermittent supply from growing solar and wind projects and the resulting lack in grid stability and integrity will continue to plague their greater use for years. In other words, covering roofs with solar panels is not going to be anything like transformative.

Fifth, digital, interconnected, and app-based smart cities are mainly a matter of personal convenience, automated systems, and controlled space that are not, perforce, transformative and eco-friendly. Sure, they allow for big data and expand the miracle of the internet, but is this the face of a new world of Arab cities or simply a way toward more convenient consumerism? As Life.ai CEO David Ladouceur put it for Forbes Magazine in November last year, “Many smart city projects have not met their goals. IoT [the Internet of Things] may make some efficiency gains, but it doesn’t automatically improve quality of life or reduce complexity… a true digital city requires technology that fades into the background and interactions that are seamless and focused on a positive human experience.”

To wrap up, some of what is happening to promote eco-sustainability in Arab cities is welcome, at least in (somewhat) introducing sustainability awareness and values, investing in more eco-friendly infrastructure, and integrating eco-friendly products into market economies. But anything transformative will be a long slog in the Gulf where weaning citizens off sky-high energy consumption (not to mention migrant labor) will not be easy. And in other Arab countries, there may be some practical eco-innovations that are being introduced, but these are small beer and tend to support decidedly unsustainable Western lifestyles and those which favor their tiny middle classes. In the end, with all the noise about urban sustainability in Arab countries, the word “cosmetic” comes very much to mind.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website on crisis and emergency risk communication states that “The right message at the right time from the right person can save lives.” 

In exploring mediated messages from U.S. President Donald Trump and the medical and public health experts during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that there was not always a “right” message, that the “right” person wasn’t always giving it, and that lives may have been lost unnecessarily due to delayed responses to the virus. 

The COVID-19 crisis in the United States is unique for multiple reasons, and those reasons create competing narratives throughout the crisis. It can be argued that the occurrence of the  virus during a presidential election year with a deep political divide in addition to competing narratives, a federal system, a culture of individual rights, and a capitalist economy all serve to create a disjointed response that impacts risk management.

The Nature of Argument and Source Credibility in Risk Management

Before explaining the current situation in the United States relative to the virus, it is important to provide some underlying theory. Experts and public officials are making arguments to persuade citizens to adjust their behavior to “flatten the curve”: i.e., to spread the number of cases over a longer period to better ensure availability of medical supplies and hospital beds. Argumentation research identifies three spheres of argument: public, technical, and personal. Public sphere arguments are designed to persuade listeners to a given position, often partisan. The technical sphere produces arguments from experts who persuade through data and their own expertise. The personal sphere, as the name suggests, addresses arguments impacting our personal lives. What makes the COVID-19 crisis an especially complex one in the United States is that all three spheres are operating simultaneously, and often with competing narratives. Briefings are not conducted by health experts alone, as is done in many countries, but are shared with the president, who often projects a political agenda and makes comments on medical issues that often contradict the experts. 

As arguments are made in the public and technical spheres during a public health crisis, credible sources are essential to sound decision-making and behavioral change. Credibility is also of three types: initial, derived, and terminal. Initial credibility results from a person’s expertise before ever presenting an argument. Thus, the medical experts on the coronavirus task force were chosen for their long-standing experience in dealing with infectious diseases and pandemics. The president, vice-president, cabinet secretaries, governors, and mayors also come to the microphone with credibility as leaders who are charged with ensuring the public good. Through communication via the media, experts derive additional credibility based on the soundness of their data-driven arguments, their language, and their ability to demonstrate empathy for the audience. The combination of perceived and derived credibility culminates in terminal credibility—a persistent trust level at the message’s conclusion that is important for behavioral change. 

In crisis situations, experts and political actors are advised to follow several guidelines to mitigate the crisis and retain trust and credibility. The CDC statement at the start of this essay succinctly states some of those guidelines. The challenge in public health crises is in finding the “rights”, especially in a highly charged political environment. Professor Matthew W. Seeger of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, an expert on crisis communication and risk management, summarized the following: honesty; candor; openness; collaboration and coordination with credible sources; communication with compassion, concern, and empathy; accepting uncertainty and ambiguity; and messages of self-efficacy that help individuals know what they can do specifically to reduce risk. The media, as the conduit between experts and the public, serves a vital function in risk management. Although the White House Coronavirus Task Force holds daily televised briefings, many Americans don’t watch every day. They get their summaries from nightly news, newspapers or news sites, and social media. With an entrenched political divide, media outlets with clear political agendas—and a president who tweets daily about fake news—messages intended for risk management have greater potential to miss the mark. This is especially true as individuals seek out information that is consistent with their political philosophies and election year partisanship. 

For some, the public and personal spheres play a larger role, frequently through social media, than the technical sphere. To date, however, a large majority of Americans give higher approval ratings to technical sources, especially Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, than to politicians. Fauci has a 78 percent approval rating compared to Trump’s 46 percent and Congress’ 44 percent. In vanquishing an invisible enemy, however, it only takes one or a few who discount the experts to create a cluster or community spread. Thus, words matter and the coordination among experts, politicians, and media is essential. 

A Crisis Mired in Partisan Politics

When pundits and academics have the benefit of time to fully analyze the 2020 COVID-19 crisis in the United States, it will be impossible to do so without framing it within the 2020 presidential election. The fractious political divide in the country led by a highly volatile president known for his scathing tweets, demands for loyalty, and preference for rallies over briefings in addition to an opposition party determined to defeat a president who doesn’t play by their rules is not the ideal scenario for a crisis. As knowledge of a new virus emerged out of China, America was more focused on a crowded Democratic primary, President Trump’s campaign rallies, impeachment proceedings, record-breaking stock values, and low unemployment. President Trump hoped to ride to a second term on the back of economic prosperity—a common reelection formula for a sitting president. The media reported on the virus’ spread, but the reality had not hit U.S. shores until the first travel-related case coming out of Wuhan was announced by the CDC on January 21 in the state of Washington. Reports coming out of Washington increased awareness, but serious public health messaging was not taking place nationwide.  

Countless written words and on-air minutes are dedicated to the role of politics and failed leadership in the evolution of the U.S. response to COVID-19. Describing all of the political posturing occurring during the pandemic response would fill several articles. However, the most commonly shared news stories on social media are the timelines researched by the New York Times and The Washington Post. They show that public health experts and Trump advisors were reporting to the president about an impending pandemic, and what Trump was saying to the public was not grounded in the reports. Advisors predicted significant spread with the potential for millions of infections, thousands of deaths, disruption of lives and the economy, and the need for quarantining and social distancing. Trump’s narrative, however, between January 22 and March 11—two days before he declared a national emergency—included the following: “And we have it totally under control”; “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”; “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. . . .Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”; and “Just stay calm. It will go away.” 

Trump and his supporters defend his actions by noting that he announced a travel ban on non-U.S. citizens coming from China on January 31 effective February 2, and that the CDC began screening passengers from Wuhan and imposing quarantines on January 17. Some public health experts called it a band-aid that wouldn’t keep the virus out of the United States because it was spreading beyond China. Over forty thousand authorized travelers entered the United States from China since the ban. At the April 13 briefing, the president was in full campaign mode, showing a three-minute video praising his “early” response and sharing laudatory remarks from some governors. The video was a rebuttal to comments made by Fauci in an appearance on CNN the previous day. Fauci was asked if the country could have saved lives with February rather than March social distancing and stay at home orders. Fauci responded, “. . . you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives.” 

A Trump supporter and one-time opponent to Nancy Pelosi for a Congressional seat, DeAnna Lorraine, tweeted, “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. Fauci was telling people on February 29 that there was nothing to worry about and that it posed no threat to the U.S. public at large. Time to #FireFauci.” Trump, in retweeting Lorraine’s post, added, “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up.” 

The Twitter story evoked outrage from both sides and concern from many—even Republicans—that Trump would fire Fauci. The White House responded that Fauci was not fired. At the daily White House briefing, Fauci—an expert in diplomacy after serving during six presidencies—explained that he was responding honestly to a hypothetical and that he and the president were on good terms. He described two direct meetings in March with the president and Dr. Deborah Birx, another task force member, to recommend social distancing. He noted that the President accepted the recommendation and announced fifteen days of social distancing. At a later meeting when Fauci told the president that it was not enough, Trump extended it to thirty days. Thus, Fauci attempted to retain his own credibility by emphasizing his honesty, defending the President’s actions without discussing the specifics of the delayed response, and reassuring the American public that he was on the job with influence. While Trump blustered to his base about reopening the country by Easter and having churches full, his actions actually followed the experts’ recommendations. 

Without the president’s visceral reaction to Fauci’s CNN appearance and the published timelines, this drama is unnecessary. The politicization of the crisis briefings and Trump’s desire to maintain a base absent campaign rallies and to boost his declining polling numbers contributed to removing focus on what was important at the briefing: keeping the American people informed about the pandemic and what they need to continue doing to protect themselves. While we in the United States do not have detailed information regarding the political machinations behind other countries’ pandemic responses, it is doubtful that any other country has to balance public health messages with political correctness as defined by a president. 

The Challenges of Federalism and Individual Rights

Furthermore, unlike what has happened in other countries, a presidential national emergency declaration did not include a national stay-at-home order. Federalism, through the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, gives the states “police power” in emergency situations. The theory is that governors are better suited to determine the best approach to such crises. The amendment originates in the founders’ fears of too strong of a central government after having shed the shackles of King George and Parliament. A system of checks and balances keeps no single person or branch of government from having absolute authority. Thus, stay-at-home orders were issued by state governors and mayors, who have their own public health experts at their sides. While President Trump cannot issue a national order, he can use his daily briefings to encourage all governors to issue such orders: but he hasn’t thus far. Instead, he gave cover to like-minded governors to continue business as normal and simultaneously spared himself the blame of any consequences. In this situation, he supported federalism. 

The White House task force provides guidance for public health officials at all levels, and that guidance should follow Seeger’s suggestions for collaboration and coordination of all affected agencies for full effectiveness. But, there is a lack of coordination—many days even between Trump’s statements and those of the experts at the daily briefings, let alone across the states. The state-by-state approach took weeks to implement and as of this writing there are still holdouts, all with Republican governors and mostly with low-density populations. Some larger cities within the states have such orders. Governors are encouraging voluntary social distancing and adoption of other suggested safety procedures, often with an emphasis on personal responsibility to solve the crisis. Governors without orders and those who were late with theirs often used individual liberties and protecting business as their arguments. Florida and Texas, for example, did not close beaches until after spring break crowds left. Again, this is a mixed message to young people who perceived themselves as not in danger but who are often carriers.   

The Department of Homeland Security provided guidance to local entities on how to determine what constitutes “essential” businesses or activities; however, state orders interpreted these differently, with some labeling gun shops and any business that sells guns or ammunition as essential. In many states, religious gatherings were not banned, but some were initially limited to no more than fifty with social distancing. Religious leaders in several states defied such orders, and the result has been community spread of COVID-19 in some states. One state that resisted what Governor Kristi L. Noem called a “herd mentality” is South Dakota. Noem defied the restrictions and expressed a belief that individuals, not government, need to decide matters including religious practice, work, and play. On April 13, the media reported that South Dakota is the site of one of the largest virus clusters in the country; three hundred workers at a pork packing plant, which is now closed—a closure which is threatening meat supplies in the country—tested positive for COVID-19. Over six hundred are now part of the cluster. Even with urging from local authorities and health officials, Governor Noem continued to resist a state-wide order and instead had a news briefing to tout the benefits of a yet-to-be-proven treatment drug championed repeatedly by President Trump. The issue of the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine is a classic example of the clash between political and medical narratives. In seeking a quick solution to a growing problem, the president ignored the cautions of medical experts who said that early studies of the above drugs are flawed and that there are serious side effects, including cardiac risks, to use. Trump even falsely claimed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval; by citing the FDA, Trump attempted to give technical legitimacy to his argument.  Now, federal prisons are reported to be stockpiling the drug, which is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The stockpile potentially could create shortages for individuals with those conditions. Would more direction from the federal level have prevented 300 new cases or cases from church community spreads? Possibly it would have provided political cover for the South Dakota governor and others from Red states to follow the experts rather than subtly encouraging arguments to the base that Trump also needs. The combination of politics and federalism is proving to be fatal and not in a metaphoric way. 

The federal system not only creates problems via competing narratives when states have different rules, but it is also a source of confusion as to where the power lies to reopen the country. In major metropolitan areas that encompass more than one state, such as on the east coast or in a city such as Kansas City (which is in the two states of Kansas and Missouri and five counties), differing policies don’t account for travel across borders. In Kansas City, mayors and officials from the five counties gathered together with approved social distancing to announce stay-at-home orders in light of a lack of such direction from the two states. The State of Kansas followed a few days later with a state order, but Missouri took another six days to do the same. On April 13, President Trump declared that he has “ultimate authority” to override states and open the country to business when his soon-to-be-announced expert council on reopening the economy says it is ready, even while also saying he will listen to the health experts. While Trump was making such claims, governors from California, Washington, and Oregon—where the virus first hit and governors acted quickly—announced a compact to help them phase in reopening. Also on April 13, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who also has daily briefings televised nationally, announced that six states formed a compact to coordinate reopening. Those states—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Delaware—have over half of the United States’ confirmed cases and over 60 percent of the total deaths. Governors across the country challenged Trump’s claim of ultimate authority. Given the importance of source credibility, competing claims of authority to reopen the country create confusion for the public and require the media to seek out constitutional experts to help clarify the situation—and they have. This creates another level of clash between the public and technical spheres. Trump backed down on his total authority and “authorized” governors to make the decision on reopening that constitutionally was their authority. Trump announced his council to reopen and gave guidelines for doing so the day after the clash with the governors, suggesting that May or even earlier reopenings were up to governors with his recommendations. Because of the growing frustration with stay-at-home measures, growing jobless numbers, and mixed messages about when it is safe to return to “normal”, protests at state capitols demanding governors to reopen the states are taking place with several more scheduled in the next few days. Trump is even seen by some in the media to be encouraging the protestors, with tweets such as “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!” and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

How Does It All End?

As of April 17, 2020, confirmed U.S. cases total 686,431 and deaths stand at 35,578, up almost twelve thousand in three days and the highest in the world. Italy and France extended their shelter-in-place orders, China is seeing resurgence in cases, and Russia faces a shortage of hospital beds. Many states are still two or three weeks away from their peak. Even though President Trump backed off of his claims of unlimited constitutional power, he made veiled threats to Democratic governors in a tweet referencing the movie “Mutiny on the Bounty”. He said, “A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain.” In the movie, the captain IS the villain. Competing narratives thus will continue, but for the most part, the steady hands of national and state public health officials are being heeded by the majority of Americans even amidst protests. Most governors will fight back on any order to open prematurely. 

What the pandemic demonstrates is that the technical sphere can overcome conflicting messages and agendas from the public sphere when personal lives are at stake. Unfortunately, what it has also shown is a fractured political landscape and a leader who wants to be considered a wartime president but who can’t guide the country along a common path and provide encouragement and empathy. He instead shows little concern in his formal pronouncements about the suffering of those with the virus and families who have lost loved ones. He seems more concerned about the Americans who have suffered losses in the stock market than those who have lost low-wage jobs and don’t have health insurance. He is stressing reopening the country when the virus has not yet peaked in many locations. He is more concerned with boosting perceptions of his competence via campaign-like videos presented during briefings that are supposed to update the American people on the crisis. How Trump handles the next two to three months of the crisis may largely determine the outcome at the polls in November. The most recent Gallup poll shows a six-point drop in Trump’s approval rating since mid-March. Despite all of the confusion, the American people are doing what they always do—finding solutions without the government as they sew and distribute masks to overcome shortages, make donations to food banks whose lines have doubled, start clinical trials on vaccines and treatment drugs, open hotels to homeless persons, and find ways every day to help friends, neighbors, and family get through. 

The WEF Nexus as a Framework 

To assess interactions among the three resources controlling the structure and function of human communities and natural ecosystems—water, energy and food—it is helpful to think of them as a nexus. System sustainability depends on maximizing resilience in the interactions among the resources comprising the three-legged stool of the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, but it is challenged by the reality of declining resources and increased demand associated with changing human demographics, land use, and climate change. Public health is a reflection of WEF stability and economics similarly is a reflection of the extent to which nexus sustainability and resilience is controlled. 

A WEF nexus model is useful for both assessing national sustainability under existing conditions and gauging societal and ecosystem response resilience to resource availability and consumption under a variety of other scenarios. Tracking annual demand for each WEF component of the nexus as a percent of resource availability can help predict the the tipping point of resource depletion beyond which a resource is no longer sustainable; the three-legged stool becomes wobbly or tips over if changes in the other WEF components are not made to counteract the negative impacts.

Nexus models must recognize that multiple biomes—geographical areas of comparable physical environment and climate with distinct plants and animals adapted to that set of conditions—exist within a given nation, and each provides specific services to the WEF nexus reflecting regional climate, elevation, geology, and hydrology. Individual biomes are easily recognized (desert, montane, rainforest, etc.) and widely distributed globally.

Urban areas are dependent on water, energy, and food supplied from the surrounding biome; there is thus an increasing urban-rural disconnect that can have profound effects on nexus resilience to meet long-term trends and catastrophic events. To increase cities’ resilience, the concept of the “urban biome” was coined to recognize that cities have common structures and functions that transcend the natural biome where they are located. Studies have stressed the importance of developing a specifically urban WEF nexus that can buffer the oft-seen urban-rural disconnect observed during long-term change and catastrophic events. More resilient urban biomes would have increased self-reliance in the production and recycling of water, energy, and food. 

Nexus Response to Long-Term Change

Some long-term factors, like climate change and increasing demand for declining resources, disproportionately affect the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and arid regions of South America. Increasing aridity from climate change in MENA has resulted in the expansion of the Sahara desert and frequent droughts, while loss of Andean glaciers is having profound impacts in Bolivia and Peru. In both regions, rapidly increasing populations and urbanization and expanding agriculture are escalating demands on the WEF nexus. 

In MENA, there is great disparity in the status of the different components of the WEF nexus; some see total collapse, while an over-dependence on energy has burgeoned in an attempt to stabilize them. Somalia, Yemen and Syria are recent examples of the WEF nexus exceeding its tipping point, leading to collapse and chaos. For all three nations, depletion of water resources from excessive irrigation and climate change has resulted in the collapse of agriculture and emigration of rural populations to urban centers, leading to social unrest and national economic and political collapse. 

While other nations in the region may not have reached the tipping point, they face serious problems; Jordan has limited water and energy resources and faces rapidly increasing demands from refugee influx and failing agriculture. Saudi Arabia has averted WEF collapse from over-exploitation of water resources by prohibiting water-intensive agriculture and switching to energy-intensive desalinization to meet all domestic needs. Fortunately, the economy is robust enough to support near-total food importation and energy-intensive water procurement, but reliance on one leg of the WEF stool to support a nation is not sustainable. Moreover, it is dependent on economic conditions—the ultimate driver of the nexus.

Climate change has been the major disrupter of the WEF nexus in Latin America. Droughts have reduced the water supply for Sao Paulo, Brazil, and water dynamics in both Peru and Bolivia have driven the countries to the tipping point for the collapse of the nexus. Both Lima and La Paz are dependent on Andean glaciers for their water supply, which are receding rapidly in response to climate change and will likely disappear in the near future. La Paz has reached a water crisis, and there is a major urban-rural disconnect; as glacial supplies decline, urban basic requirements accelerate and rural populations demand more water for expanding agricultural production in crops like quinoa. The social unrest that has resulted in La Paz appears to have been a major factor in the recent replacement of the Bolivian national government. 

The WEF nexus is also facing instability in the small island developing states (SIDS) within the Caribbean basin. Initial results suggest that many SIDS are approaching the tipping point for one or more of the WEF spokes due to lack of agricultural capacity, imported energy, and overly depleted water resources. In addition to facing climate change, the economies of many nations are shifting to tourism as the panacea for sustainability. This is the first tangible example of how a concerted effort to alter the economy, can either push island WEF resources over the tipping point or provide support to develop best management practices that maintain or enhance resources. 

Response to Catastrophic Weather Events

Understanding of the responses of the WEF nexus to both catastrophic weather events and the current COVID-19 pandemic is in its infancy. Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico and several SIDS in the eastern Caribbean in September of 2017, is an optimal case study in the recovery times of societies after catastrophic weather events. 

Although incomplete, most information on the impact of Maria on the WEF nexus comes from Puerto Rico. Food production was devastated, water supplies were threatened from watershed deforestation during the storm and associated sedimentation of reservoirs, and power production capacity was reduced. The storm expanded the urban-rural disconnect to a breaking point as infrastructure, including roads and the power grid, was destroyed throughout the island. The response to the disaster focused on urban areas as it was impossible to access most rural areas. It took over one and a half years to restore electric power to the island. Puerto Rico imported over 80 percent of its food supply before the storm, and it has been striving to increase local production since. 

Water resources too have been slow to recover. In 2015 and 2016, prior to Maria, the island experienced a major drought that seriously reduced total mountain reservoir capacity. The storm disrupted both the potable and sewage networks, resulting in cross contamination and forcing segments of the population to use untested, sub-standard water supplies. Recovery has been hampered by another major drought in 2019 and 2020 and inadequate funding to repair aging infrastructure.  

The impact on public health from the crumpled WEF nexus is still being evaluated. One clear message from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is that it is  critical to decentralize the infrastructure of the nexus components, incorporate nature-based solutions to fill gaps, and maximize the resiliency of traditionally-engineered infrastructure.

Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The current exponential spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that has caused over 133,000 reported deaths globally since January, provides a unique opportunity to examine the response of the nexus to a major disruption in health, which has direct ties to  water, energy, and food. 

While the impact of WEF stability on public health has been documented for years, there is little data concerning the impact of public health on critical resources. Current efforts to combat the coronavirus have widened urban-rural disconnects globally by focusing almost totally on urban impacts, while down playing potential rural impacts because of low population density. 

Water, energy, and food resources appear to be intact currently, but nexus stability is threatened by the link between COVID-19 mitigation responses and potential negative economic impacts. Some are advocating a shift from societal protection if the economy begins to show major disruption leading to recession. To our knowledge, this is the first time health and economy have been directly linked without consideration of the WEF nexus. Current disruptions to the WEF nexus are related to supply-chain economics and lack of sufficient infrastructure; but, as COVID-19 expands throughout rural areas, agricultural production will suffer from a virus-related reduction in the workforce.  

This article was written as part of the Addressing Global Crisis Project (AGC), which is run by the University of Central Florida’s Office of Global Perspectives & International Initiatives (GPII). AGC examines how governments, individually and collectively, deal with pandemics, natural disasters, ecological challenges, and climate change. AGC is organized around five primary pillars: (1) delivery of services and infrastructure; (2) water-energy-food security; (2) governance and politics; (4) economic development; and, (5) national security. Through its global network, AGC facilitates expert discussion and features articles, publications and online content.

Egypt’s Diplomacy in War, Peace and Transition. By Nabil Fahmy, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2020, 377 pp.

“The past two generations in the Arab world [are] handing over the Middle East to future generations in a far worse state than it was when they took charge of it. The least we could do was to share our experiences for others to learn from.”  

Thus former Egyptian Ambassador and Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy begins his new book Egypt’s Diplomacy in War, Peace and Transition.  

Indeed, when Fahmy started his diplomatic career in 1974 the Arab world was still fairly united, Egypt was at the zenith of its international influence, and the hopes attached to secular nationalist modernizing states had not yet collapsed. Today, the Arab world is in various conditions of collapse and disarray, Egypt’s regional leadership is in eclipse, and the once promising and modernizing states of the region have been challenged by Islamists, youth uprisings, and their own authoritarianism and bureaucratic decay.  

Yet, this makes Fahmy’s contribution all the more urgent and timely. He presents major transformative events in Egyptian foreign policy in their broad context, but also walks the reader through the meetings and personal encounters that often make up the inner workings of history. Fahmy also draws on the career of his illustrious father, former Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy, and hence gives the book a longer historical reach than the author’s own career.

The book is written in an engaging style—part memoir, part historical and political analysis—and is divided into four parts. The first focuses on Fahmy’s own personal trajectory. The second examines Egypt’s Foreign Policy. The third looks at Egypt’s domestic upheavals in the past decade, and the fourth presents a vision for a more stable and cooperative Middle East.

In the substantial second part of the book, Fahmy positions Egypt in the region’s main geopolitical developments.  He examines the 1967 war and the end of Arab nationalism, the 1973 war and the complex path of peace with Israel, the attacks of 9/11 followed by the United States invasion of Iraq and the eruption of the War on Terror. Throughout, Fahmy charts the role Egypt and its diplomats endeavored to play, promoting the principles of centrism, moderation, and modernity in a region that was growing increasingly divided and radicalized by religious extremism and sectarianism.  

Fahmy also devotes substantial chapters to key issues, such as Egypt’s sustained efforts to negotiate a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, relations with the returning regional powers of Turkey and Iran, and the complex relationship with the United States. Throughout, he emphasizes that Egypt has no choice but to be true to its identity as a large centrist power, with enduring interests in regional stability and cooperation, and a complementary set of relations with the world’s great powers: the United States as a main partner, and Russia and China as emerging powers with much to offer in certain sectors.

What the reader might wish Fahmy could have elaborated on is why Egypt has lost so much regional and international sway from the heydays of the 1960s and 1970s, and how it can regain its role.  If money is power, in recent years Egypt has lost out to the rich Arab states of the Gulf. Fahmy could have discussed more how Egypt will be able to chart an independarabent foreign policy all the while continuing to be economically beholden to its rich Gulf economic partners and benefactors. 

Importantly, Fahmy discusses Egyptian soft power, both past and present. The book reminds readers that the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution, rhetoric, and defiance cast a long soft-power shadow throughout the Arab world in the 1960s. Meanwhile, Fahmy explains that the youth uprising in Egypt in 2011 cast a long shadow throughout the region and led to youth revolts in many other Arab countries.  It is easy then to postulate that had the Muslim Brotherhood (first) and then the Egyptian Military (second) not suppressed the youth uprising in Egypt, a democratic transition in Egypt would have put Egypt once again in the position of being a soft power leader of the Arab world.  

“Egypt has been in an extended state of transition . . . since 1952, not 2011.”  This is how Fahmy begins the third part of the book, on Egypt’s domestic ups and downs, and particularly the troubled period since 2011. He was in Egypt when the revolution broke out, and gives a fascinating and detailed account of developments that he saw firsthand among various government and opposition figures during that time of upheaval, and an assessment of the difficult year of Muslim Brotherhood rule.

He was a minister of foreign affairs in the first post-Mohamed Morsy administration and explains how he tried to recalibrate and diversify Egypt’s foreign policy.  However, this section on Egypt’s domestic upheavals, rich with detail and passion, ends without positing the key question of why Egypt has not been able to transition to a more representative state in the past seven decades, let alone the past seven years.  

In the fourth and final part, Fahmy calls for a more proactive Arab diplomacy, with a renewed role for Egypt, in working to de-escalate conflict and bring stability and regional cooperation to the Middle East. He accurately asserts that unless four of the main players—Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran—can de-escalate from their shared conflicts and move forward toward understanding and cooperation, there is little hope for a stable region.  

Egypt’s Diplomacy is a must-read book for anyone interested in the Middle East’s modern history and the important but challenging role that Egypt has played in various junctures. It is a book rich with important detail, engaging anecdotes, as well as broad insights and observations. As such, it is a significant addition to the still small library of Arab officials and leaders reflecting on their successes and failures for the benefit of coming generations.   

Mustafa Amin—dubbed the “father of modern Arab journalism”—is widely considered one of the greatest newspapermen of the twentieth century. A renowned journalist, columnist, and author, he is also remembered as a longtime agitator for the way he transformed journalism and pushed for free speech in Egypt and the Arab World. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Amin also created a media empire by establishing and boldly building up his own publishing house. 

Twenty years after his death in 1997, his wife Isis Tantawi donated over five thousand books from his private library to the American University in Cairo. Beyond the wealth of articles and published work, the collection includes a treasure trove of draft articles, publications, and personal letters, among them an Associated Press telegraph inviting Amin to a luncheon with AP executives. From Amin’s personal archives at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library, there are original documents, including a copy of his will, diaries, drafts of books and television soap operas, and personal correspondence with many icons of that era such as the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. 

His works bear witness to his versatility covering the turmoil and drastic changes of the twentieth century—from the Cold War to the pangs of Arab nationalism and the era of decolonization, from feminism to regional and global politics, as well as philanthropy. Despite Amin’s almost fanatic followership in Egypt and the Arab World, he was a highly controversial figure. He advocated Western-style democracy and free press and was an outspoken liberal at a time when Egypt had more Soviet leanings. 

Amin and his twin brother, Ali, found their calling in the home of their great uncle, Saad Zaghloul, a revolutionary political leader who fought against the British. At the precocious age of 14, they launched a series of student papers and magazines at school. “I released a magazine in school and the principal punished me,” wrote Amin. By the time he graduated from the American University in Cairo in 1934, he was already penning a magazine column.   

His writings quickly garnered him not only a large readership, but also caught the eye of those in power. In 1944, for example, Amin published a diary-style magazine article titled “Thirty Years A Journalist” recounting memorable incidents in the last thirty years of his life. In one entry of this archival piece, Amin discussed his “ongoing war” against Mustafa El-Nahhas, the prime minister of Egypt at the time. Amin even quoted famed Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum warning the prime minister of a popular backlash against the government if he were to arrest Amin over his writings. Egyptians, she said, would “curse the government if they are deprived of reading his articles!” 

However, the Amin brothers’ greatest contribution was to the field of journalism. When they left a magazine job to start the Saturday weekly paper Al-Akhbar Al-Youm, it was their first time experimenting with the idea of free press. Their main goal was to establish journalism as a respected profession in the Arab World and set the benchmark that other Arab publishers quickly adopted. For example, the Amin brothers insisted on employing only professional and qualified staff and paid them appropriate salaries. 

The AUC archives reveal the name of one of the Amin brothers’ biggest inspirations in journalism: Mohamed Al-Tabii—dubbed the “Prince of Journalism”—who was a leading Egyptian political writer and journalist in Egypt and the Arab World as well as the editor of a cultural-turned-political magazine called Rosa Al-Yusuf. Amin and his twin brother were Al-Tabii’s students when they worked at the magazine and then followed him to Akher Saa magazine, which they acquired almost two decades later.

Throughout, they idealized free enterprise and speech, which became entrenched principles in their style of journalism. In an interview found in the archives with student journalist Mostafa Kamal Ahmed, Amin said that he believed the reason behind the success of Al-Akhbar Al-Youm was its pursuit of its mission regardless of popular opinion. This was the mantra Amin followed as he went on to establish a daily and acquire two weeklies and  a youth magazine—even when Nasser nationalized the press in the 1960s. It was an arduous task that took a toll on him; in one journal entry dated in 1945, he writes, “My sleep hours have decreased. I have become old in my youth”.

Amin was first jailed briefly in 1939 for criticizing King Farouk. However, he is most known for his altercations with Abdel Nasser in the 1950s for which he was jailed twice, then again in 1965 for nine years on charges of espionage. Amin was arrested while having lunch in Alexandria with U.S. CIA agent Bruce Odell. Despite being handed a life sentence, president Anwar Sadat released him in 1974 for health reasons.

The archives don’t touch upon Amin’s life or works in jail—which were later published in a book titled Year One Jail in which he alleged mistreatment—or even his life afterward. The archives tackle Amin’s early life, which uncover his often-overlooked side. For instance, there are articles that reveal mutual respect between Amin and Abdel Nasser, even after Amin was jailed in the 1950s. Amin mentions his admiration of Abdel Nasser’s “genius”. His support and active involvement in the anti-colonial movement put Amin in a bind: while he seemed a public enemy to Nasser, many of his works praised and analyzed the 1952 coup—with one article calling Abdel Nasser’s car the commanding center for the “revolution”.

Mustafa Amin was a touchstone for a generation of journalists who valued a freer and more truthful school of journalism. His influence on public life is not any less impactful as he popularized anEgyptian Valentine’s Day, which falls on November 4, and advocated celebrating Mother’s Day. He led several appeals in his papers to help those in need. The human impact of his life and work reverberate to this day.

Lisa Anderson, 69, president of the American University in Cairo (AUC) from 2011–2016 and its provost in the three preceding years, is an expert on Libyan affairs and higher education in the United States and the Middle East. She authored Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century in 2003 and The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1820-1980 in 1986. 

Anderson is now senior lecturer and dean emerita at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she served as dean for a decade before coming to AUC. She also chaired Columbia’s political science department and directed its Middle East Institute.  

Anderson discusses the ongoing power struggles in Libya and their implications in the country and beyond. As peace negotiations sputter, the changing trajectory of the conflict has serious consequences for North Africa as a region.

Cairo Review Assistant Editor Sydney Wise recently spoke with Anderson about this North African crisis.

Sydney Wise: What spillover effects from the conflict in Libya are felt by the North African states? 

Dr. Lisa Anderson: Well, I actually think there’s an enormous amount of anxiety, probably all the way across North Africa. Because the borders of Libya—particularly the southern borders— are for all intents and purposes completely unpoliced. 

This means that anything that’s happening in Libya could be contagious and affect the Sahara, southern Egypt, Algeria, and the Sahel. So I think there’s a real concern that, if this kind of ongoing violence continues, it’s pretty likely to metastasize elsewhere in the region. And obviously, nobody wants that. 

Sydney Wise: So, does sharing a border with Libya make a state more vulnerable? 

Dr. Lisa Anderson: I think that’s certainly how the border states themselves feel. Egypt, for example, is putting more resources into policing the Libyan border than they’d like to be doing. 

It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that Libya has been a bit of a trial for the border states for decades. Long before the uprising against longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, there was a sense that he and his government were, “excessively independent-minded”… Let’s put it that way. 

So, border states couldn’t really trust him, and they couldn’t really trust that he was policing the borders himself. I think borders are a particular concern because today, borders in general are far, far more permeable borders for things like weapons than they were in Gaddafi’s era.  But there was a reasonable concern even then that the Gaddafi government was unpredictable. It was hard to know what was likely to happen. So Libya’s neighbors had to spend more financial resources, time and attention, military assets, and so forth on those borders than they would’ve liked. 

Sydney Wise: How else are the North African states responding to these challenges, besides just policing the borders? 

Dr. Lisa Anderson: I wouldn’t say that all the North African states are reacting the same way. The Moroccans, for example, don’t have a great deal of involvement in the day-to-day activities in Libya. But it’s certainly true that everyone—the Egyptians, and to a lesser extent the Algerians and Tunisians—have joined other countries in the region in trying to manipulate the developments on the ground within Libya. 

So what we see is a lot of proxy wars, utilizing the Libyan conflict for regional purposes. This has exacerbated the conflict and made it almost impossible to solve, because all the local combatants in Libya think they will have an essentially endless supply of arms and money and support from outside the country. 

That mischief does not come from within Libya, the immediate bordering countries, nor even the North African countries, but from countries a little bit further afield. That’s a bit puzzling because these outside powers don’t have the same kind of security concerns that the bordering countries have. 

Sydney Wise: How do non-state groups in the region play into this scenario? 

Dr. Lisa Anderson: I think that the presence of non-state groups is one of the reasons why, for example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been very active in backing the [Khalifa Belqasim] Haftar group within Libya. The UAE is concerned that non-state actors associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and some of the Muslim movements in the country or the region have been involved in Libya, and Haftar has promised to be a sort of a bulwark against such groups. 

So in some measure, you can see an effort on the part of state actors to inhibit, discourage, and defeat non-state actors, and Libya is a proving ground for that. States are backing Haftar because they believe that he would be a conventional state actor, were he to gain control of the country—unlikely to use Libyan resources to support non-state actors elsewhere in the region. 

So I think that’s part of states’ strategic thinking about Libya; this is a place where non-state actors, particularly Islamist movements, can be controlled, if not defeated. Whether that’s an accurate assessment or not is a different question. 

Sydney Wise: Is enough media attention paid to the role of those non-state groups in the conflict? 

Dr. Lisa Anderson: At this point, most of those groups have been splintered or dispersed. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had a big presence, and for a while controlled a fair amount of territory in the middle of the country. Everyone banded together to defeat them and they just shattered.

Now, the concern for obvious reasons is that those shards go elsewhere in the country, or elsewhere in the region, and re-develop as cells in other places. But at the moment, there was a lot of attention on non-state actors like ISIS in Libya. 

At this point, it’s not clear that there is an organized group of Islamists. There is clearly some support for what one might call “old guard Islamists,” you know, affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the city of Misrata. That is one of the reasons why Turkey is involved there, because the Turkish government still hopes to revive that Muslim Brotherhood Islamist trend.

However, the landscape—in the region as a whole, and in Libya particularly—has gotten very complicated. As each of these groups raise their profile, they are subsequently decapitated and then end up in alliances of convenience.  Even Haftar is working with Salafi groups. This suggests that, over the long run, he’s not going to be as rigorous about his opposition to non-state actors or Islamist groups as he had originally claimed. On the other hand, the Salafis tend to be well understood and tolerated by Gulf countries. 

The landscape within the non-state actor Islamist trend has gotten very confused. One of the things that’s difficult, for both analysts and strategists, is trying to untangle those knotted relationships.

The COVID-19 storm will eventually pass. But, if any early lessons are to be learnt from the pandemic, it is that African citizens with disposable resources such as income, time, and knowledge must work with their governments to reset the relationships with the most vulnerable in their communities and together combat the virus’ spread and any future diseases.

The social and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will be far-reaching. Thus, the consequences of the current measures to stop the spread and to flatten the curve are to limit the pressure on Africa’s healthcare system in rural and urban areas. These measures will have disproportionate effects on our society. Physical distancing puts pressure on the socioeconomic arrangements of markets and informal traders. It thus potentially puts able citizens between the virus and hunger. African governments and citizens have been sensitive to these specificities. In Togo, the government—through novissi, meaning “solidarity” in local dialect—enabled digital cash transfers as a safety net mechanism. Food distribution in Uganda and Ghana, for example, is designed to limit exposure to the virus by replacing women’s commute to the market. 

This pandemic is redefining local economies, but it also gives us an opportunity to rethink a community’s journey to access services. The journey from informal to formal economies need not be just about transforming the market into a mall. Physical distancing and lockdown measures demonstrate that food supplies and affordability are vital to stop the spread of the virus. With Africa’s $65 billion food import and 60 percent of the African population engaged in agriculture, redirecting these resources for internal production and safe distribution channels will provide an internal mechanism to strengthen the delayed African Continental Free Trade Area.

As the number of COVID-19 cases continues to rise in Africa, at stake is how we care for the most vulnerable; they represent the strongest links between the African economies. Though they do not have a social safety net, they work to ensure that offices, malls and markets are clean. They trade goods and services indispensable for the commute of civil servants and other office-bearers stuck in their private or public means of transportation. Furthermore, informal markets maintain a food supply value chain between rural and urban areas.

Thus, when Africa beats the virus, it must ensure the intactness of a newly established foundation which considers thinking about vulnerable communities an essential approach to economic transformation.

Social distancing—maintaining physical distance between people to prevent the spread of disease—can happen at some scale, but Africa’s fight must be won through prevention. It is a required measure facing several factors limiting its implementation, such as constrained access to clean water, inability to earn a living while staying at home, or lack of liquidity to stock up on food and other supplies. 

Three areas require our attention to ensure that structural reforms strengthen what we have while preventing a COVID-19 catastrophe in 2020. It is possible to hold the spread of COVID-19 at bay when all Africans in Africa and abroad do what is in their power to adhere to policies designed to slow the spread of the virus and limit the need to test the mantle of our healthcare systems.

The market woman, urban slums, and the pandemic response

Every dawn, women throughout the continent prepare to trade in commodities that will fill homes across cities and villages. African women represent the cornerstone of the socioeconomic organizations within our communities as they play a vital role in connecting farmers across the countries with buyers.

But the work they do is challenged, at times, by our inability to support informal traders along higher value chains. Relatedly, and also a constant feature of our environments, are urban slums, which house people who provide their skills to businesses across many African cities and who, under current circumstances, struggle to have a decent home, access to running water, and basic sanitation.

The lack of access to adequate electricity and the Internet—often luxuries which in times of restrictive measures affect their daily trade—will put pressure on individuals’ abilities to sustain their livelihoods.

With the current response to the pandemic focusing on physical restriction, millions of Africans will not have access to their daily opportunities to secure resources for themselves and their families. In some countries, the informal economy accounts for up to 90 percent of jobs, yet workers—from market women to street hawkers—remain the most vulnerable to shocks, as they lack any form of state-supported social protection.

As a result, COVID-19’s tendency to spread through social interaction removes a pillar of the informal worker’s business model.

But, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Here, we have an opportunity to redesign our policies to provide a framework for nonsalaried workers.

It will be a game changer when we address how communities with disposable resources come together now and for the foreseeable future to create and maintain value chains for the informal sector.

Informal traders such as market women can continue to trade through more hygienic sourcing and delivery mechanisms. The market as we know it needs to change its infrastructure to protect entrepreneurs. We all benefit from the goods and services offered by the informal economy. We know that open markets with live animals such as guinea fowls, chickens, grass cutters, and others are commonplace in most of our cities. These markets will continue to flourish as demand exists. Creating better market conditions to stock and trade may provide some limitation in the animal-to-human transmission.

Furthermore, sourcing, distributing, and preserving need a collective reflection as well as the determination to apply policies and regulations already in place. The market needs to be modernized without being transformed into a shopping mall. In most cases, informal sector entrepreneurs do not seek charity, but opportunities to sustain their communities’ livelihoods in normal times as well as during endogenous and exogenous shocks.

A Tomorrow Better Prepared

The window of opportunity is closing not only for containing the virus, but also for us to pause and act so that tomorrow finds us farther away from pandemics or better prepared to face them—not if, but when, they occur. The measures imposed might not be sufficient to adequately curb the spread of the virus as testing capacity is still limited on the continent. When that window closes, our specificities that have allowed us to limp forward within the informal sector will not stand the test of the virus. While we recognize the urgency to act, we anticipate that action has to be balanced with the urgency to devise policies that put the majority of Africans at the center of the policymaking and delivery mechanism. 

All countries have to act fast and find solutions that protect human life from the virus. While life in African markets and urban slums does not necessarily allow for stockpiling essential goods, let alone working remotely, we should remember that measures to keep people apart (social distancing) worked in the fight against Ebola in West Africa and recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We had a warning sign six years ago, but did not accelerate the pace of the required reforms to ensure that better employment limits people’s interactions with African health systems as they have the means to invest in their mental and physical health.

The recent Ebola outbreak in the DRC and the 2014 outbreak in West Africa gave urban dwellers a false sense of immunity to deadly viruses. Now, we are all at risk regardless of our position in society, and COVID-19 further exposes the existing vulnerabilities in our urban areas, which are hit hardest based on existing data. 

The current strategy of social distancing supposes that health systems have to be used for those that need them the most. A string of usual suspects, from malaria to Lassa fever and HIV, have made the existing structures congested and inadequate even when the curve is flattened. Therefore, an overhaul of health systems is the silver lining at the end of the pandemic. Without health reform, the policies that will follow will be built on the same crumbling foundations that we have been accustomed to. 

Our governance model should allow us to determine what kind of work future generations will inherit. COVID-19 confines communities in areas that were already inadequate. The issue of slum-dwellers provides us with a framework for an overhaul of urban planning, without which strategies to contain pandemics—such as COVID-19, which require social distancing, lockdowns and other measures that restrict the opportunity to earn daily subsistence—may fail.

In South Africa, 2.5 million people earn their income from the informal sector, and each African country has its own fair share of contributors to the informal sector. We need a system that prevents all Africans from preventable diseases. This on its own, without improving living and working conditions for the majority, is impossible.  

Building a cashless Africa infrastructure

Most countries today have built an infrastructure through mobile applications and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes, which do not require data for transactions to happen. According to the Groupe Speciale Mobile (GSMA), which represents global mobile operators, 17.5 million new active accounts were created in 2018 and in thirteen African countries and over a third of adults are active mobile money users. However, the existing infrastructure does not go beyond the first mile of giving access to simple transactions and serving as a loan and savings platform. Well-intentioned policies such as “cashless Africa” lack the infrastructure to make most citizens embrace the transition to fully digitized services; some services delivered by the market women remain cash transactions. Yet, we know that bank notes are a contributing factor to the spread of the virus, so a push for the transition to a cashless society needs to be accelerated. In that push, the model needs to put the majority—women—at the center of the design. In times of crises or sudden shocks, the infrastructure to deliver goods and services to urban slums and other communities needs to be built as the first mile, essentially to start with the majority in mind.

The transition to a cashless society needs to carry along those who could be the most vulnerable during a pandemic, and by this we mean using the technology to offer an incentive to increase the willingness to pay for healthcare.

An insurance scheme designed for the most vulnerable while ensuring quality access to healthcare is a requisite step on the back of the existing infrastructure. It provides a pathway for informal workers to be treated when needed and cover their loss of income. In other words, digital financial services used to record transactions and determine the loan amount can also be used to provide a source of income when the informal trade is stopped due to circumstances beyond our control. What we need is a system that adapts to the needs of the less fortunate in the community, because they are our strongest link in the communities. Making sure that basic health services are made available to all provides us with a surveillance mechanism which helps identify existing health issues such as Ebola, Lassa fever, and other viruses that erode daily progress made by women and others striving for progress.

But the real innovation lies in the role that the African digital economies’ leaders must play to move the health agenda from a disease conversation to a data narrative. That narrative helped Asian countries leap forward in their strategic response to the coronavirus. Health is no longer in the ambit of ministries of health only. Speed and accuracy as well as access to accurate data are keys to reversing the speed at which COVID-19 runs. China and South Korea proved that technology could play a significant role. Google provides citizens and governments with data on our movements for effective decision making on health response. African economies are becoming digital by their citizens’ adoption of mobile technologies; digital economies in Africa must consider health an integral part of their strategy.  

Harnessing the existing infrastructure for greater resilience

COVID-19 exposed the limits of a system built on a unique center of production for the world. In African economies, the process of industrialization is a sure pathway to lift millions of Africans out of their daily subsistence mode to jobs along the value chains of our agricultural resources. It means that the informal infrastructure cannot just be done away with, but complemented by new jobs in sectors where demand will come from the African continental Free Trade Area. The market woman has a role to play in this model too, as she is part of the value chain. 

In almost every African city, there are weekly, if not daily, collections of taxes from workers in the informal sector. What we propose here is to use the already-existing infrastructure to record businesses in the informal sector, bringing them into the formal economy. What this could provide is an opportunity to give them social protection, which may be different from those formerly employed in other sectors. Such a scheme must be gender-sensitive in order to be effective. Women make up 74 percent of the informal sector in African countries, and the majority of them lack access to social protection and remain highly vulnerable to shocks. Once they retire, they must rely on family support—it is going to be a learning process for African countries. 

The African continent has the fastest urban growth in the world; this presents new challenges that could further exacerbate the continent’s ability to respond to crises in an effective manner.

As the world, eventually, limps out of the pandemic, the big humanitarian and financial squeeze requires implementation of a global solidarity mechanism. Drawing from women-led traditional mechanisms where each contributes to a common pot, we can ensure that resources are pooled and managed not just for emergencies. This pandemic must make us move from crisis management to planning and execution. And for this, we need resources: either through an insurance scheme like the one currently being developed by African Risk Capacity in the wake of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa or a global solidarity fund. Digital financial services mean that everyone can contribute according to their means. Solidarity is the strongest pillar during this pandemic—the ability to stand together regardless of race, gender, or religion. The COVID-19 coronavirus itself does not distinguish humanity along those lines.

Global solidarity funds, which arose in the wake of the response to COVID-19 by the World Health Organization, and locally in South Africa and Senegal to support their countries, need to move beyond national interests for a pan-African response. These funds need to become a permanent feature of continental efforts to prepare Africa for shocks while continuously strengthening the foundation. It is the way we redesign our infrastructure for the majority that will determine our life in Africa as well as our positioning in the world post COVID-19. Ebola was a wake-up call, COVID-19 is a pandemic that came to remind us that prevention is the best cure.

COVID-19 is a scar on the memory of all current generations. The measures to limit its spread are privileges that many cannot afford. Yet, if we agree that we are in this together at the end of it, we cannot act as if this pandemic was devoid of consequences for the majority of Africans in the informal sector.

Tomorrow must find us farther away from viruses, because prevention and surveillance will become routine at all levels of society. African governments are responding and so must the minority of privileged citizens so that when the next virus spreads, we can safely implement measures that make us speak of inequities and inequalities as conditions that ended with the 2019 coronavirus.

 

Following Egypt’s January 25 uprising in 2011, Ethiopia started building a huge dam, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), upriver. The concrete volume of the dam is 10.5 million m3, making it the largest dam—per volume—in Africa. It is located on the Blue Nile, 700 kilometers northwest of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, and about twenty kilometers from the Ethiopia–Sudan border. It is worth noting that the Blue Nile accounts for more than half of the average annual flow of Nile water to Egypt.

Ethiopia claims that the sole purpose of building the dam is to generate energy necessary for its economy. The dam represents an important connection between water security and energy generation. In general, building a dam for energy generation should not be a problem because the water that will run the turbines will continue flowing to downstream countries, in this case to Egypt and Sudan. However, the construction of this gigantic dam, which has a 74-billion-cubic-meter reservoir that can theoretically store as much water as the total annual share of Egypt and Sudan combined, is a completely different story.

Hoping for a better life and access to electricity, the Ethiopian people funded the GERD with their limited resources in the hopes that it might generate a projected power capacity of at least 6,000 megawatts. Different experts, such as San Diego State University professor of mechanical engineering Asfaw Beyene, have agreed that the GERD is oversized, and that it will not be able to generate the amount of energy that has been publicly announced, or even half of it. In addition, most of the generated hydropower is slated for export, leaving the poor Ethiopians in darkness. It is clear that politics in this case trump legitimate engineering and human principles in favor of storing water and controlling the Blue Nile.

The GERD will store water in an area of 1,800 square kilometers—larger than the size of London—resulting in enormous evaporation and seepage losses in addition to possible upstream usage. These billions of cubic meters in losses will be cut from Egypt and Sudan’s water share. The potential reduction in the Nile water flowing to Egypt comes at a time when the country is significantly dropping below the water poverty line and approaching the absolute scarcity limit. The water poverty line is reached when the available freshwater share per person is 1,000 cubic meters of water every year. Egypt is approaching the 500-cubic-meter mark per person (per year). An additional water shortage caused by the GERD will enlarge the existing gap between the water supply and current demand.

Clearly, Egypt’s key concern regarding the GERD is safeguarding the lives of more than 100 million Egyptians and sustaining the country’s water supply, especially since Egypt depends on the river for 97 percent of its water needs, with the remaining three percent supplied by light rainfall on the northern coast and in the Sinai Peninsula and by non-renewable groundwater.

Indeed, the risk of water shortage caused by the GERD will directly affect food production and security in Egypt. Moreover, reducing the flow of water to Egypt will dramatically affect the resilience of the Egyptian Aswan High Dam, which stores water to be used by Egypt and Sudan during draughts. This in turn will also negatively affect the amount of electricity generated from the Egyptian dam. In addition to the technical and economic impacts of the dam on Egypt, the GERD will have serious environmental consequences such as higher soil salinity, less groundwater recharge, and more seawater intrusion.

Therefore, reaching an agreement between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt on the filling and long-term operation of the dam before Ethiopia starts filling GERD is a serious issue for Egypt. A reduction of water availability by only one billion cubic meters at Aswan (a value that is much lower than most GERD filling and operation prediction scenarios) will result in an agricultural production loss of $430 million and of almost 294,000 feddans in agricultural land, as well as an increase in agricultural imports by 2.2 percent. Moreover, 290,000 families will lose their income, which will increase the possibility of migration and displacement of people to neighboring countries, create more instability and potentially exacerbate the threat of terrorism, from which the region is already suffering.

The Fight over Resources
The GERD project is an alarming example of competition over water, energy, and food resources in the Nile Basin. Ethiopia’s use of the dam to generate energy while Sudan and Egypt wait for their share of water to produce energy and food could become a grave issue, especially as populations inhabiting basin countries increase dramatically and their water, energy, and food demands rapidly grow.

In order to secure these three resources for the entire basin, there is a need to understand the reality regarding their availability. Indeed, there is a misconception that Egypt is getting the biggest share of the Nile water compared to the other Nile Basin countries. As a matter of fact, the river water reaching Egypt amounts to about 0.8 percent of the rainfall of the eleven Nile Basin countries. This means there is more than 99 percent of water resources that Egypt cannot access.

The key to resolving the current conflict is for Nile Basin countries to collaborate in making use of the 1,660 billion cubic meters of annual rainfall in the Nile Basin or even the 7,000 billion cubic meters of annual rain that falls specifically in the eleven Nile Basin countries. This can be used in generating energy and producing food rather than affecting the main source of water in Egypt, which only utilizes 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water a year, representing only three percent of the total rainfall over the basin. There is a need to think in a more cooperative and participatory way, where all Nile Basin countries collaborate in harvesting rainwater rather than disturb the only lifeline for Egyptians. This is what we call benefit-sharing and a win-win solution.

In fact, Egypt has a long history of supporting Nile Basin countries in water management projects on the upper reaches of the river. Egypt has never objected to the development of the Nile Basin nor does it object to the construction of dams that do not cause significant harm to Egyptians. On the contrary, Egypt has supported the construction of dams in different Nile Basin countries for either hydropower or rainfall-harvesting purposes. For example, Egypt supports South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Congo, and Tanzania’s pursuits to build new dams and implement water development projects.

Starting in 1949, Egypt signed an agreement and provided £1 million to support the construction of Owen Falls dam in Uganda. The dam helped provide hydropower for development and regulate the flow of water downstream toward the southern regions of Uganda. Recently, the Egyptian company Arab Contractors in a joint venture with Elsewedy Electric Company announced that it had started work on the 2,100-megawatt Stiegler’s Gorge hydroelectric dam in Tanzania. This project is endorsed and supported by the Egyptian government. Moreover, Egypt conducted the feasibility studies for a multi-purpose dam in South Sudan.

This spirit of collaboration should extend to agriculture and food production projects. There is much fertile land and enough rainfall in the basin to produce energy and food for everyone. Energy is not only restricted to hydropower; solar energy in the basin is underutilized, especially when considering that the basin includes areas that are among the highest in solar radiation on earth. A political vision which considers all countries along the Nile as one unit that shares knowledge and resources is key to having sufficient water, energy, and food for all Nile Basin countries.

A Technological Solution for Water Scarcity
Aside from the GERD, current water scarcity and food production in Egypt, like in most Middle Eastern countries, are serious challenges that are directly linked to population growth and the overuse of water. To produce one kilogram of wheat requires about 800 liters of water, and on average, fifteen thousand liters of water are needed to produce one kilogram of beef, an amount of water which is almost the volume of one-and-a-half concrete mixer trucks. These numbers differ from one country to another and depend mainly on production techniques and the technologies used. The moral of these figures is that more than two-thirds of the world’s freshwater is used for agriculture, such as in Egypt, where about 80 percent of the freshwater is used for agriculture irrigation. In order for Egypt and the entire Middle East to deal with water scarcity, researchers are focusing on fostering and applying the concept of “producing more with less,” or to use another expression, “more crop per drop,” which means producing more food using less water.

Our research team at the American University in Cairo (AUC) is working to understand the interrelationship between water and food to minimize the water footprint of our foods. Realizing the importance of research efforts geared toward solving the irrigation water problem more than tackling drinking or industrial water, the Center for Applied Research on the Environment and Sustainability (CARES) at AUC established the “WEF nexus lab” five years ago. It aims to contribute to water, energy, and food security not only in Egypt, but also in the Middle East and Africa.

The focus of the CARES’ WEF (Water-Energy-Food) nexus model is to use solar energy to power desalination, which is expensive due to its high-energy consumption, and then use the desalinated water to produce food in an environmentally friendly manner. The adopted desalination technique, Forward Osmosis, has low energy consumption which allows the complete use of solar energy for the desalination process. The desalinated water is then used to produce crops and fish from the same unit of water. Fish waste then serves as nutrients for the crops, which help produce 100 percent organic food.

In addition, the desalination reject brine (which is a harmful byproduct for the environment) was successfully tested and proven to produce algae and is currently being tested to produce artemia, or brine shrimp. If the testing of the artemia proves successful, it will close our “nexus” loop since it would be used as feed for the fish. The very success of this research depends on developing a closed loop in which the sun and seawater are harvested to produce fish and crops without disposing of any waste into the environment, and in which the fish are then fed.

CARES is now collaborating with several national and international partners and is working toward commercializing its WEF model and bringing it into application. Nothing can replace Nile water for Egypt, but more research and innovation similar to the work carried out by CARES is urgently needed to enhance water use efficiency and develop new technologies for desalination and wastewater treatment. Such innovations could be part of the solution to face the increasing population and associated water demand in Egypt and the entire Middle East, especially when such solutions are based on local resources such as the sun, seawater, and sand.

On March 17, the Esna Lock allowed the last cruise ship to continue down the Nile on its voyage from Aswan to Luxor. As the passageway locked behind the 57-cabin ship Le Fayan, it was the first glimpse into the imminent closures in Egypt and around the world in attempts to halt the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. 

Just hours earlier, the Egyptian government had announced that domestic and international flights would stop operating from Cairo International Airport within 48 hours, transforming what was meant to be a relaxing three-night vacation into a nightmare for tourists in Upper Egypt. Suddenly, flight prices quadrupled, options to get out of the country dwindled, and airlines cancelled booked tickets. As the next two days passed, the situation deteriorated by the minute until only four tourists were walking through the Luxor Temple. 

The scene was repeated elsewhere on the voyage from Aswan to Luxor as the ship made pit-stops at the usual sites: the Philae Temple, Kom Ombo, Valley of the Kings, and Karnak, which are usually crawling with tourists, stood almost empty; there were more cats leisurely strolling through the corridors than people. 

Magnificent temples dating as far back as 2055 BC ordinarily move onlookers to stop and reflect on the feats of humanity. The vibrant colors of hieroglyphics depicting successions of dynasties and epic battles are symbolic of what makes humans so unique—our resilience and perseverance. Yet, in the backdrop of these massive stone temple walls loomed a pandemic sweeping the globe and directly challenging this steadfast notion of human invincibility.  

The flood of tourists to Aswan and Luxor first began to fall to a trickle when 45 passengers aboard a Nile cruise tested positive for COVID-19 on March 7. However, cruise ships continued to sail. But, by the time Le Fayan docked at the Kom Ombo temple in Aswan on March 16, it was the only boat in the bay.

“I have not seen it this empty…ever. Even after 2011, it was not this bad, this is a really sad moment,” explained a Luxor-native tour guide who has worked in the field for decades, and prefers to go by Ahmed. 

“I was booked until May. After Coronavirus hit the whole world, all the bookings were canceled.”

Within a day of the announcement of flight suspensions, a general atmosphere of anxiety descended on not only tourists who hastily continued to finish their sightseeing before leaving the country, but also on those working at the sites. Vendors and shopkeepers watched their livelihoods, in khaki shorts clutching alabaster vases and Egyptian relics, leave on the last commercial airlines available. 

Ahmed confirmed a dreary reality two weeks after the last tourist flights left the country. “It is affecting everyone: the shopkeepers, the drivers, those working on the cruise ships, the hotels. They are relying on that and we get paid when we work. Right now, we are not working so we do not get paid.”

During the two-day trip, it seemed Ahmed was friends with everyone he came in contact with. He embraced the spices seller in Luxor, the crocodile keeper in the Nubian village, and the oil shop owner in Aswan like they were family. The network of workers that have become friends over the years made it clear how far reaching the impact the virus would have on workers in small cities. Eerily vacant temples and outdoor markets that resembled ghost towns signaled the impending isolation about to hit Cairo.

Tourism Bounced Back, and Then … 

Tourism is the backbone of economies in smaller cities in Egypt. “In Luxor and Aswan they all rely on the tourism industry; [these cities] have no other industries. We are talking about a few million people who are affected by the coronavirus. The people who are affected really badly are those working in the tourism industry,” Ahmed says.

By the end of March, a bustling capital city home to 20 million people came to a near-standstill as the Egyptian government imposed restrictions on mobility, mirroring measures taken around the world. 

While Egypt falls on the lower end of reported cases, the potential danger to a dense concentration of people residing in Cairo could prove catastrophic in the case of a large outbreak. As of the evening of April 9, there are 1,699 confirmed cases and 118 deaths in Egypt from COVID-19.

The first round of restrictions included banning large public gatherings, suspending football matches and sports of all kinds, and prohibiting mosque prayers, including those on Friday. The call to prayer now encourages Muslims to observe at home. On March 15, schools and universities closed, and on March 25 Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly imposed a nation-wide two-week curfew from 7 PM to 6 AM. Violators of the curfew face hefty penalties ranging from an EGP 4,000 fine to imprisonment. On April 9, the curfew was extended to last at least until April 23. 

In the 21st century, Egypt’s tourism industry has experienced rollercoaster-like fluctuations, but was finally returning to peak levels of prosperity.  In 2010, Egypt attracted 14 million tourists, earning revenues of $12.5 billion according to the World Tourism Organization. The 2011 Egyptian uprising that resulted in the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak left political and social unrest in its wake; in 2013, numbers in both revenue and tourists dropped dramatically with fewer than 8 million tourists and revenues of half their peak numbers. Over the past three years, however, there has been a steady return of visitors; Egypt welcomed 13.6 million tourists in 2019.  

Tourism is crucial for the Egyptian economy. The International Monetary Fund reported that this industry “contributes close to 12 percent of Egypt’s GDP, 10 percent of employment, and almost 4 percent of GDP in terms of receipts, as of 2019.”  

COVID-19 struck at a period of growing prosperity in the tourism industry. In fact, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) announced that Egypt earned a record breaking $13.03 billion in 2019 from tourism.

The CBE announced, “The total revenues of the tourism sector increased to 13.03 billion dollars in 2019 compared to 11.6 billion dollars in 2018, and 12.5 billion dollars in 2010 which was the peak year in terms of tourist flows.”

“In 2018 and 2019, tourism was excellent in Egypt, we were working so hard…it was amazing,” says Mona Wagdy, director of the travel office at the American University in Cairo.

And 2020 looked to be a record-breaking year for Egypt’s tourism industry.

Hany El-Desouki, general manager of a travel agency who has worked in the industry for 19 years, said that 2020 would have been an excellent year, adding that “Egypt was supposed to welcome more than two million tourists in March and April.”

When all tourists began leaving Egypt amid global airport closures and governments recalling their citizens from overseas, the incomes of many workers departed with them.  

With each site visited on the route from Aswan to Luxor, the air of uncertainty morphed into hints of desperation. Small-shop vendors took understandably aggressive approaches, staff on the cruise ship didn’t even bother to look busy, and a sense of dread about what tomorrow will look like felt as contagious as the virus.          

Finding Opportunity in Crisis

But El-Desouki sees this tumultuous time as having hidden potential opportunities: more time to reassess, look out for one another, and prepare for next season. “Starting from the first week of the crisis, Egyptians began to stand by each other, especially with those who are working for daily wages. Now, a lot of Egyptian charity organizations are receiving [a lot of] donations and requests to provide monthly income for those families [who will be most affected].”

In fact, large corporations and individuals are stepping in across Egypt. Orange Egypt, the mobile network operator company, has donated EGP 5 million to aid those families whose income is affected by new curfew laws. 

And on an official front, the Financial Regulatory Authority has donated EGP 250 million to support vulnerable groups in addition to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s EGP 100 billion plan to fight the coronavirus while addressing the economic needs of the population. Some EGP 50 million of these funds will be allocated to the tourism sector, which official figures say employs 900,000 workers.

Additionally, in a recent announcement on April 7, El-Sisi revealed a new government plan to allocate EGP 500 to “day laborers and others in irregular mode of employment for three months”, the daily Youm7 reported. 

Eslam Mohammed, whose family runs a chain of hotels in Hurghada, explained that unlike other hotels in the area, they are still paying their employees. “It is about humanity,” Mohammed explains. 

Their business employs over 500 people. “If they didn’t get the money, how could they live? We have to give them money because they work here and this crisis is not their fault.”

Everyone the Cairo Review spoke to who worked in the tourism industry explained that the country is going through unprecedented circumstances; all aspects of daily life are subject to interruption, and change is the new constant. 

The Human Impact of COVID-19

“There are going to be global patterns that change as a result of this crisis. People’s distance will be a requirement. Airlines may change to have less crowded flights; maybe frequencies of flight arrivals and departures will be distanced,” explains Amr Badr, who has served as the managing director of Abercrombie and Kent in Egypt, a large international travel company, for almost 20 years.

Badr noted that while people have often adverse responses to change, it is inevitable after large-scale crises. As with security restrictions seen post 9/11, systematic change will result from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Badr also thinks that this is the time that companies need to show solidarity and support their employees. “The positive side is that we have more time to train people. Some hotels are deciding to do renovations and maintenance. My employees are preparing for tomorrow. Family and friends are bonding together and life is more simple; we are all equals in this.”   

However, opportunities to find meaningful employment as temporary alternatives may not necessarily be equal, or available.

For Ahmed, who has been a travel guide for 30 years and is an expert on ancient Egypt, the situation is very different. “I cannot work on anything else. I am an Egyptologist, I am a guide.” 

Wagdy says this is a time of clarity and a wake-up call. “There is a lot coming out of this on the personal level, on a friendship level. People need to be aware that things can change overnight. Family comes first, children come first. Uniting together and talking together during the busy days of work, we sometimes drop the most important relationships in our lives.”

When disembarking the cruise ship in Luxor to make the last available flight to Cairo, a serviceman on the cruise ship named Alaa stopped us and said, “if you need a place to stay or need anything, I live in the Old Market; you can find me there.” 

This small gesture of hospitality and goodwill, in a time of great uncertainty for everyone, stands as a reminder of what really makes human beings unique. Not just perseverance, but kindness. And, despite the COVID-19 scare, Egypt still has plenty of that.

In the past two weeks, residents in the United States have been barricaded inside their homes by COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that surfaced in the fall of 2019.

Although COVID-19 was first discovered in China, its global spread has been swift, as travelers and trade have carried the virus between and within countries. To insulate themselves from contagion, individuals and businesses across the globe have implemented measures designed to limit human-to-human contact.

In the United States, the result has been a shift to an economy largely housed online. Fitness studios like YogaWorks are livestreaming classes over YouTube, doctors’ offices are offering video consultations, and schools and universities are holding lectures over Zoom.

Though the shift to this “e-economy” has certainly elicited a craving for human interaction among consumers, it has also given them an unprecedented ability to procure services virtually. For some, this is a flexibility that would prove useful if continued post-COVID-19. When the e-economy is thought of in this way, it’s easy to ask: why haven’t businesses gone online sooner?

Yet, while the March 2020 shift to online is a testament to American adaptation, ingenuity, and technology, its narrative is selective. Though some businesses have been able to survive virtually—thanks to employees who have begun to work from home (WFH)—essential businesses continue to require physical employee presence, and non-essential businesses that are unable to operate under a WFH system have enacted widespread layoffs. The narrative of the e-economy also excludes those who are struggling with balancing WFH with sick relatives, or with children untethered from their usual support systems of schools and daycares.

White-Collar Work 

It is true that the percentage of the U.S. workforce that completes some or all of its work at home has seen an increase before the corona crisis—from 22 percent in 2016 to almost 25 percent in 2017. “Generally people view working from home as a way to provide greater autonomy and flexibility,” says Paula Caligiuri, who specializes in organizational psychology and international business. “There’s already been kind of a movement towards that anyhow,” she continues.

But, the WFH movement during this time was mainly a white-collar phenomenon. In 2017, 51 percent of WFH Americans were in management, business, and financial operations occupations. A further 38 percent had “professional and related” jobs, like legal, accounting, and data processing positions.

In these sectors, many businesses were already equipped with technology to facilitate online work; Google Drive is a mainstay for housing data in many workplaces, and several universities offered online course options before the outbreak of COVID-19. Additionally, video-chat software like Skype and Zoom has enabled employees who worked remotely before the COVID-19 crisis to create and join meetings from their living rooms.

Because of this pre-existing infrastructure, many workplaces were able to shift their operations completely online with more ease than their blue-collar counterparts. Thus, “White-collar workers are going to suffer much less than blue-collar workers as a result of [coronavirus restrictions],” Barry Bluestone, founding dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University explains.

“We’ve done that at Northeastern University for years, so for many of our faculty it wasn’t much of a transition,” Bluestone acknowledges. “We were already teaching a number of courses online, because we have students not just in Boston but around the world in some of our courses.”

A Bleak Reality

In many other professions, WFH is not an option; manufacturing, construction, hospitality, food service, emergency response, retail, and many healthcare jobs—and that’s just part of the list—all require human presence. WFH employees in farming, construction, maintenance, and transportation only made up 2–7 percent of the broader WFH population each in 2017.

Though some gains have been made in distancing human-to-human interaction in the service sector—e.g., delivering food and retail goods instead of allowing customers to come to the store—humans are still needed to drive cars, make food, and pack boxes. In these circumstances, no technology exists to take the human out of the equation. We don’t yet have fully autonomous cars, and though robots have been used to pack boxes at Amazon, they’re not commonplace.

Workers without the ability to go online face a catch 22; they’re characterized as either “nonessential”, and face layoffs as their businesses close, or “essential”, and must go to work and face a pandemic or stay home and face similar unemployment. Some essential workers, like employees at Amazon and Instacart, have tried to mitigate the danger by going on strike as a means to obtain hazard pay and personal protective equipment.

On March 19, the U.S. Department of Labor reported 281,000 new unemployment claims in that week, mostly in the service, transportation, and warehousing industries—a 30 percent increase from the week before. In this context, James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, predicted to Bloomberg that the national unemployment rate could reach 30 percent in the second quarter. For contrast, the rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for February of 2020 was 3.5 percent.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if 90 percent or more of manufacturing employees are now on layoff. The other 10 percent are in urgent industries, trying to make masks and ventilators,” predicts Bluestone.

Oh, the Humanity!

Even within the population that has shifted its work operations to home, huge variations exist. Individuals with children are trying to find time to work between attending to their needs—who, now that schools have gone online, may be looking for other outlets into which to direct their energy. Parents have found themselves promoted, and now occupy the additional roles of teacher, chef, and daycare worker.

Vox writer Cheryl Wischhover points out that parents face different obstacles depending on the age of their children—toddlers and young children require constant care, while teenagers yearn for freedom and resent being sequestered with their families. “My two teen boys are resentful that they have to stay inside, and they miss their friends and activities. My 11th-grader’s SAT, which he’d been studying for for months, was canceled,” Wischhover writes—adding anxiety over an uncertain future into the mix.

Parents of children with disabilities find themselves at an even more complicated juncture. In this case, parents absorb the responsibilities of a whole team of special education workers that a child may require; one child may need “a vision therapist, speech therapist, occupational therapist, learning behavioral therapist and various teachers in the classroom, adaptive special education, and special subjects,” as one eighth-grader referenced in a recent article for The Washington Post does.

The nonprofit CARE and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) recently published a study, “Global Rapid Gender Analysis for COVID-19”, that argues that the bulk of this “unpaid care work”—which includes caring for sick family members as well as children completing online schooling—is absorbed by women. In fact, women execute three times as much care work as men do. This disparity replicates itself in the health professions, where female responders “face a double care-giving burden—one at work, and one at home.”

Women are also increasingly vulnerable to domestic violence, as they are in some cases quarantined with their abusers. “Individuals, particularly women, are essentially trapped with their abuser with no physical respite from the abusive relationship,” CARE and the IRC write in their report on gender and COVID-19. The organizations report that 35 percent of women globally face domestic violence under non-coronavirus conditions—a number which is compounded during crisis like health pandemics by economic stress and increased anxiety in addition to the quarantine conditions of COVID-19. Domestic abuse—or “intimate terrorism”, as it is sometimes called—is also projected onto children; one Texas children’s hospital reports an increase in child abuse cases from eight per month to six per week. For individuals who wrestle with abuse, WFH is a nightmare scenario—commuting to work may be a welcome respite.

Meanwhile, single Americans who live alone are truly learning the meaning of “isolation”. Humans crave interaction; in fact, various studies have demonstrated that loneliness poses tangible health risks. In the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Debra Umberson and Jennifer Karas Montez warn of loneliness-related ailments ranging from heart attacks to high blood pressure.

This may be another reason that the WFH movement had not completely taken over before COVID-19. Part of WFH movement’s success is that, under normal conditions, it allows employees to retain the ability to create social connections separate from their work. As Melanie Pinola writes for the New York Times, it is not uncommon for WFH employees to steal slivers of time between meetings for grocery shopping, coffee runs, or yoga class. It’s not technologically feasible right now for the service sector to go completely online—i.e., for drive-throughs to be manned by robots or supermarkets to restrict their services to drone delivery. But, the human need for interaction could be one factor that restricts us from getting there.

“During your breaks, unchain yourself from your desk and take a walk and talk to another human being, such as a grocery clerk, a crossing guard, or a waiter (if you go out for lunch),” Pinola urges employees making the transition to WFH.

Humans are accustomed to a life that allows them to socialize as consumers; as modes of consumer interaction are restricted by COVID-19, we already see this stress on a smaller scale. In an interview with WBUR 90.9, former Surgeon General Vivek Murphy, even warns of a “social recession”, which he defines as “an increase in loneliness and the health consequences thereof as people become more and more isolated from each other.”

“How to Stay Sane in Quarantine”

To combat the psychological drawbacks of the pandemic-induced dearth of face-to-face interaction, WFH employees have been advised to replicate office conditions in their homes. The wellness sections of almost every major publication have been working overtime to coach new WFH employees on their transition. “Have set wake-up times, ‘office hours,’ free time, meal times, and exercise times. Take a shower and get fully dressed in the morning. The more we can stick to a routine, the better off we will be mentally and physically,” Stephanie Sarkis counsels for Forbes. The title of her article—“How to Stay Sane in Quarantine”—makes the necessity of structure clear.

Getting “dolled up” is even a mainstay of “How to Have a Successful Virtual Happy Hour”. In the article, by Anna Goldfarb for the New York Times, a reader says that getting dressed (as opposed to staying in your wine-stained pajama-turned-work pants) “gave her a sense of normalcy.”

Psychology and business expert Caligiuri agrees that routines are useful in minimizing complexity; they “free up some bandwidth cognitively and emotionally.” So, in high-stress situations like this one, “it’s highly recommended that individuals get into habits very quickly, treating their home space—whatever piece of the kitchen table they’re working from—as going into the office and setting up a routine for themselves as if they were at work,” she says.

Now that the United States has some muscle memory for what a predominantly e-economy would look like, some modes of working, learning, and interacting online might be retained post-COVID-19, Bluestone and Caligiuri agree. But, “there will always be a place for face-to-face interaction,” Caligiuri speculates. “My sense is that we’ll never be at the same capacity of people commuting into a place called a ‘company’, an ‘organization’, an ‘office’—a physical location. I don’t think it will go back fully to that, but I don’t think it will stay as extreme as it is right now.”

At the time of this writing, the number of people infected with COVID-19 worldwide has passed one and a half million. The number of dead is nearing 100,000, and both of these numbers are increasing daily. The global economy has essentially gone into hibernation as countries lock down their populations in an attempt to slow the spread, and currently there is no end in sight for the global crisis.

COVID-19 was transmitted from animals to humans (most likely by way of bats) in Wuhan, China, according to a Scripps Research Institute study titled “COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin” and published March 17. But, the circumstances that enabled the global spread of the virus can be broken down into natural and distinctly unnatural components: a worsening climate crisis and human encroachment on the wilds, both of which bring humanity into contact with viral pathogens that is too close for comfort.

Calling the COVID-19 outbreak a once-in-a-lifetime event would be an understatement. Occurring 102 years after the Spanish Flu wreaked havoc across the globe, it is once-in-a-century.

But, can we expect global pandemics to remain at that frequency of occurrence?

Human Behavior as a Vector

Epidemiologists refer to agents that carry and transmit infectious pathogens to other living organisms as “vectors”. In the case of COVID-19, humans are vectors that, thanks to international air travel, the global economy, and the largely inadequate (though greatly varied) responses of governments, have transmitted the disease through movement.

“Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” United Nations (UN) Environmental Programme director Inger Andersen told The Guardian recently—not only by way of humanity’s insatiable appetite for travel, but via habitat loss and human encroachment.. In fact, the 2001 study “Risk factors for human disease emergence” showed that 75 percent of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife. Anderson agrees, noting that “Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbor diseases that can jump to humans.”

In this context, Professor Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London reflected, in the same article, that, “The emergence and spread of COVID-19 was not only predictable, it was predicted [in the sense that] there would be another viral emergence from wildlife that would be a public health threat.”

Indeed, certain red flags have warned us of an impending crisis like COVID-19 for years. The outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002-2003, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014 each provided warnings to global governments that went unheeded in the years preceding COVID-19. The warning was this: worsening habitat destruction from development, deforestation, the climate crisis, and for-profit animal exploitation inevitably lead to humans becoming infected with “zoonoses”, or diseases transmitted from animals they would have otherwise never come into contact with.

COVID-19 is simply the next round of disease driven by deleterious human actions against the Earth.  Cunningham went so far as to say we “probably got a bit lucky” with COVID-19, given that the fatality rate for Ebola was 50 percent and the Nipah virus had a fatality rate between 60 and 75 percent. He, like many scientists, believes that there will be more pandemics in the future unless we change our behavior, including our bringing of vast numbers of wild animals into markets where they have direct contact with one another and with humans.

“With people in large numbers in the market and in intimate contact with the body fluids of these animals, you have an ideal mixing bowl for [disease] emergence,” Cunningham said. “If you wanted a scenario to maximise the chances of [transmission], I couldn’t think of a much better way of doing it.”

Science writer David Quammen sounded the alarm in his 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, in which he called for governments and health sectors to prepare for incoming pandemics. “Beware of a new virus, maybe a coronavirus, emerging from a wild animal, maybe a bat. Those were the warnings I put into Spillover,” Quammen told Orion Magazine. His concise tips on what to expect and what needs to be done are worth repeating:

This is why Andersen said that the proper thing to do now must be to stop the loss of habitat and biodiversity loss from the ongoing expansion of human population and the economy.

She cited the wildfires that ravaged Brazil and Australia during the last year as examples of human action setting the stage for pandemics, linking the fires in the Amazon directly to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s tactics of working in the interests of the ranching and agribusiness sectors— made necessary, of course, by increasing global temperatures from the climate crisis that are factoring in to the loss of habitat.

Just as Quammen warned, Andersen says that it is precisely this continued erosion of space for wildlife that has brought us too close to the animals and plants that harbor deadly diseases that can make the jump to humans, as happened with COVID-19.

Even the World Bank has echoed these sentiments. “The origin and pathway of the coronavirus pandemic shouldn’t surprise us,” environmental specialist Daniel Mira-Salama wrote in a World Bank blog recently. “The SARS epidemic in 2003 jumped to humans from civet cats, sold in markets as pets and as a delicacy. MERS was transmitted to humans from camels in 2012. Avian influenza, Nipah virus, Ebola, HIV… all of these and many other Emerging Infectious Diseases (EIDs) originated in animals and were transmitted to humans.”

Cunningham described the current global pandemic as “a clear warning shot”, and added, “It’s almost always a human behavior that causes [pandemics] and there will be more in the future unless we change.”

But even now, many countries are continuing to weigh protecting their economies against the full-scale measures that need to be taken to actually contain the spread of the coronavirus.

By way of example, the United States has set itself up to become the basket-case of the COVID-19; even White House models show that 2.2 million Americans could have died if nothing were done, and up to 240,000 even despite the measures that have been put in place..

While the United States is taking measures to contain the virus now, it was only after months of ignoring the true scope of the threat, giving the virus time to deeply infiltrate communities across the country. Wide-scale testing still lags, and while states like Washington State have implemented lockdowns and are seeing some success in slowing the spread, states like Florida have reacted softly by comparison.

Hence, without uniformly serious response nationally, it appears inevitable that the virus will continue to spread rapidly, just as we saw in Europe early on.

Climate as a Vector

Alongside human encroachment of wildlife habitat, the other most important factor at play in how we have set ourselves up for the inevitability of pandemics is the accelerating climate crisis.

The climate crisis presents a two-pronged threat of future pandemics: by way of shifting temperatures and rainfall patterns that allow diseases and their vectors to move into regions that previously did not support their existence, and by accelerated rates of thawing that release already-incubated diseases from frozen material.

Diseases and pathogens frozen deep within Arctic permafrost are already being released as global warming forces permafrost to thaw. In August 2016, a young boy died and 20 others were hospitalized in Siberia after being exposed to anthrax released from thawing permafrost. The source was an infected reindeer carcass that had been frozen 75 years earlier, which thawed during the summer heat wave of 2016. The anthrax was released into the water and soil where other reindeer—part of the Siberian diet—grazed, thereby exposing the human population.

Scientists fear that thawing permafrost is like opening a Pandora’s Box of diseases. “Permafrost is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark,” evolutionary biologist Jean-Michel Claverie with Aix-Marseille University in France told the BBC in May 2017. “Pathogenic viruses that can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the past.”

Thawing permafrost, shifting temperature and rainfall patterns, and human encroachment on wildlife habitats have coalesced not only to create prime conditions for COVID-19, but have virtually guaranteed greater frequency and increased lethality of future global pandemics if radical changes are not made in humans’ current relationship to the planet.

A 2011 study published in the journal Global Health Action warned, “As a consequence of permafrost melting, the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and 19th centuries may come back, especially near the cemeteries where the victims of these infections were buried.”

A NASA study from 2005 proved it was possible to revive bacteria that had been frozen for 32,000 years, and in 2007 scientists revived bacteria from Antarctica that had been frozen for eight million years.

While not all bacteria can survive a lengthy deep-freeze, many can, and those we know of bring cause for alarm, not even speaking of those we have yet to learn about.

Another endeavor, this one from 2014, managed to revive two viruses that had been in the deep freeze of permafrost in Siberia for 30,000 years. They became infectious shortly thereafter.

Claverie stated that there is a distinct probability that microbes carrying pathogens could be revived, as studies have shown, and told the BBC, “It could be bacteria that are curable with antibiotics, or resistant bacteria, or a virus. If the pathogen hasn’t been in contact with humans for a long time, then our immune system would not be prepared. So yes, that could be dangerous.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are three main ways of looking at links between infectious diseases and the climate crisis.

First, we can examine past associations between climate variability and the occurrence of infectious disease, such as dramatic increases of malaria alongside extreme weather events; for example, climate-intensified monsoons in India have brought higher rainfall and humidity, sparking dramatic malaria outbreaks.

Similarly, we can examine these early indicators of increased disease vulnerability—including temperature extremes and extreme weather events—in isolation as they continue to emerge.

By using evidence from these two studies, it is possible to create a predictive model that estimates the burden of future infectious diseases alongside projected climate scenarios. Some models show an (obviously expected) increase of malaria globally as overall temperatures continue to warm and humidity and extreme rainfall events increase.

“The malaria modeling shows that small temperature increases can greatly affect transmission potential,” the WHO stated. “Globally, temperature increases of 2-3 degrees Celcius would increase the number of people who, in climatic terms, are at risk of malaria by around 3-5 percent, i.e. several hundred million. Further, the seasonal duration of malaria would increase in many currently endemic areas.”

Other examples abound. In 2012, the United States saw the worst outbreak of the West Nile virus in the country’s history, in which 19 people in the greater Dallas, Texas, area died due to the multiplication of infected insects in warmer-than-average summer temperatures.

The danger of warming lies in its ability to amplify both infectivity and replication of viruses, researchers have found. Robert Haley, director of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and co-author of a major study on the 2012 West Nile virus outbreak, told the media, “If everything else stays the same, you could predict that a warmer climate makes things worse.”

“The warmer the planet gets, the more pathogens and vectors from the tropics and subtropics are going to move into the temperate zones,” Daniel Brooks, an evolutionary biologist with the University of Nebraska, told The Washington Post in November of 2015. “Countries such as the United States tend to have a false sense of security, but vectors and pathogens don’t understand international boundaries. You can’t just put up a fence to keep them out.”

In short, diseases that used to be largely confined to the equatorial region are spreading northwards and southwards into regions previously uninhabitable to them—and the populations of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of humans are waiting as prime hosts.

In another example, a 2013 study showed clearly that unusually warm winters consistently tend to be followed by earlier and more intense flu seasons the following year; yet another study from this year warned that dramatic and rapid swings in weather patterns are also a contributor towards worsening flu epidemics. This should give us great pause, given that 19 of the 20 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since the year 2000, and the last six years have been the six warmest ever recorded.

Meanwhile, ocean temperatures are also increasing at unprecedented rates, wildfires and droughts of increasing severity and frequency are erasing forests around the globe, and the frozen areas of Earth are thawing and melting at ever-accelerating rates. Extreme weather events are occurring more frequently; Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas in 2017, and dumped so much rain that the water actually depressed the Earth’s crust by two centimeters in that region.

Discussing these phenomena in the context of the West Nile virus, Brooks said that “biology is notoriously nonlinear and full of thresholds beyond which all hell breaks loose, at least for a while”—what now feels like a prophetic warning about COVID-19. “Think of a heart attack as an analogy. You can feel pretty good right up the point that you die.”

Even without pathogens, life on a climate-disrupted planet is going to be increasingly challenging, as food and water shortages, increasing military conflicts, and massive displacements of humanity driven by rising sea levels, droughts, and extreme weather events continue to pick up pace.

Moreover, the economic machinery of the planet continues to deforest, mine, burn, and encroach upon habitats that are carrying pathogens which, though unknown, could even be even more disastrous than COVID-19.

“I think we can say that things are going to change, and that we expect the risk to increase,” Christine Johnson, director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics at the University of California, Davis’ School of Veterinary Medicine was quoted in an E&E News article this March. “But we can’t say with any certainty which diseases, in which locations and at which time.”

From this ongoing, unchecked process of climate change, the stage was set for COVID-19—and it remains set for more, and likely far worse, pandemics in the future.

As of April 4, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed well over one million global cases of the novel coronavirus—COVID-19. The real number of cases, of course, is likely far higher. As this pandemic continues to claim lives, dominate media coverage, and damage economies, many observers are trying to understand the patterns of this contagion to better understand what to expect and how to evaluate their country’s effectiveness in combating the pathogen. This is particularly true in the United States, where despite difficult access to COVID-19 testing, confirmed cases now number well over two hundred and fifty thousand and appear to be quickly outpacing the number of cases seen in other countries. 

A common defense for the skyrocketing numbers in the United States is population size. In other words, given the sheer size of the U.S. population, estimated by the World Bank to sit near 330 million, we should expect far more cases to arise than in a country like Italy, with a population around sixty million. Proponents of this defense will be less concerned with the exponential increase in American cases due to the expectation that it is simply natural. 

There is no doubt that this intuition makes sense on its surface. It is both natural and logical to control for population size by dividing the number of known cases of infection by the size of the population, or even creating a count of cases per one hundred thousand people, in order to assess the overall impact of a disease on a country. Such practices are typical for comparative studies and are particularly valuable after an epidemic runs its course. However, it makes very little sense to do this in the early stages of an epidemic for several reasons. Most important is the fact that viral transmissions are not concerned with  the size of the overall population, but rather by immediate access to a population that is susceptible to infection.

What does this actually mean for a novel virus like COVID-19? While there are a range of epidemiological models to consider, a common starting point is the expectation of a logistic curve, or an s-curve, as illustrated in the figures below. The line represents the total cumulative cases over time, starting with exponential growth. In other words, the growth rate in the number of cases will be constant over some unit of time, for example, doubling each week. This is what most observers have been paying close attention to: the number of days it takes for COVID-19 infections in a country to double. And because of the limited number of tests, these numbers are ultimately underreported.

Ph.D astrophysicist and senior contributor at Forbes Ethan Siegal’s recent article puts the hazards of exponential growth in stark perspective. Siegal notes, “Exponential growth is so powerful not because it’s necessarily fast, but because it’s relentless,” and “Without introducing a factor to suppress it…is an infectious disease doctor’s nightmare, particularly as more time goes on.” Liz Specht, associate director of science & technology at The Good Food Institute and one of the earlier commentators on COVID-19’s possible trajectory in the United States, used basic statistics to demonstrate how the U.S. healthcare system could become overburdened very quickly. A shortage of hospital beds (the United States has approximately 2.8 per one thousand people) and depleting stockpiles of protective equipment like masks can exacerbate an already difficult and evolving public health crisis.

This is already being seen in multiple respects. Governors have lamented their inability to buy additional supplies. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, for example, specifically described a case in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency outbid them for crucial equipment at the last minute. Even testing for the virus has been difficult, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) originally distributing an unreliable test and the Trump administration more generally showing very little commitment to increasing access to testing. The lack of domestic capacity was put on full display when South Korea, which in contrast proved to be very capable of mass testing, agreed to Trump’s request to provide support for American test kits.

But beyond concerns of burdening the capacity of health infrastructure in the short term, there is the larger concern of “How bad will it get?”. Particularly concerning is that a new pathogen like COVID-19 has wherever it goes found a population with no prior exposure, which means no immunity. Why is no immunity a problem? No immunity is a problem because every individual offers the virus the potential for a new infection. Each new day will see more people get exposed to the virus, a fraction of those exposures will lead to new infections, and those new cases will then follow suit. Some percentage of those infections will then require hospitalization, and a fraction of those will succumb to the disease. Unsurprisingly, accurate numbers are quite difficult to obtain in real-time, but the CDC’s March 18, 2020 report (covering the period from February12–March 16) reported that at least 12 percent of known cases in the United States required hospitalization.

Explaining Infection Rates

So how does the United States compare to other countries? The answer to this question is best explained through an illustration of how unchecked epidemics are assumed to operate. For the sake of this discussion, we can consider some common starting points in the field of epidemiology and infectious disease. First, assume a first or primary episode of infection starts in two countries at the same time. Second, this case, and those that follow, will typically lead to two other infections. Third, we will assume this will occur within one week. Next, we will assume the rate of infection starts to slow when the vulnerable population is reduced. In other words, the rate slows when more people get infected, limiting the number of potential “new” hosts for the virus.

This is an example of a classic SIR model of epidemiology, which is built on the proportion of a population that is susceptible, infected, or recovered or /removed. As the numbers of infected, recovered (assuming acquired immunity), and removed (through death) increase, the number of susceptible individuals decreases. The people that an infected person exposes themselves to will become less likely to be infected. The pathogen begins to find it difficult to infect new people. 

For the purposes of this illustration, we will assume the infection rate drops from two times  to 1.5 times when the percentage of the population that has been infected hits 20 percent (or the susceptible population hits 80 percent). During this period, each infection will result in an average of 1.5 new infections. The rate further drops to 1.25 times when the virus has infected 30 percent of the population, one  when it hits 40 percent, 0.5 when it hits 50 percent, and 0.25 when it hits 60 percent.

In our example, Country A (population one million) and Country B (population ten million) see their first case of a novel virus in the same week. As the epidemic advances, and as members of the population either recover (with acquired immunity) or pass away, the proportion of the population that is vulnerable dwindles. As a result, the pathogen has a more difficult time finding new people to infect. Rather than each infected individual infecting two new people on average, this rate continues to drop as the vulnerable population decreases. Eventually, the case numbers hit an inflection point, where the rate of increase in infections begins to slow down and, eventually, plateau. At this point, the outbreak effectively ends. This is what herd immunity, a process in which enough people get infected and develop immunity, effectively limiting the number of potential options for the virus, is all about. 

The cumulative number of infections in this exercise appears as follows. The curves appear very similar, though Country B has disproportionately more cases due to its larger population. However, closer inspection of the earlier weeks reveals that irrespective of population size, the case numbers actually remain identical.

Whether you are Country A with one million people or Country B with ten million people, the epidemic begins in each country with one case. If we assume the cases originally double in each week, the progression of total cases would start out similarly. One case in the first week, two cases the second week, four cases the third, and so on. Importantly, this progression in absolute numbers does not change based on what the total overall population is—the pathogen still has plenty of potential options to choose from as the entire population is not all exposed at once. It must work its way through it, infection by infection. Regardless of the overall population size, the virus has little difficulty finding susceptible carriers early in the outbreak.

When We Should Start Considering Population Size

However, the total size of the population eventually does matter. We will start to see differences arise when the virus begins to have more difficulty in finding vulnerable targets in Country A (the smaller population). But this takes time, as illustrated in the below figure.

Returning to the concept of exponential growth from each country’s first case in Week 1 and doubling new cases each week, both would see over 131,000 cumulative cases in Week 17. At this point, 13 percent of Country A has been infected, but only 1.3 percent of Country B has been infected. Given these parameters, by Week 18, 20 percent of Country A’s total population will become infected. With the vulnerable population shrinking, new cases ultimately begin to slow.

Country A has now hit its inflection point, where the number of new cases stops accelerating and begins to expand in smaller numbers. Only at this point will we start to expect differences in total cases. With Country B’s original vulnerable population of ten million, the 131,000 cases in Week 17 still leave over 98 percent of Country B’s population vulnerable to infection. While Country A’s new infections quickly begin to decline, Country B’s new cases will continue to double each week until it hits its own inflection point, the 20 percent mark that it will not reach until Week 22. 

The result? Country B will ultimately have ten times as many cases as Country A. The epidemic will last three months longer in Country B. Country B’s worst week will arrive when it has nearly one million new infections, almost the entire population of Country A. But for the first seventeen weeks, they would have had the same number of cases.

The United States and Italy

Italy has unfortunately established itself as the grimmest example of COVID-19’s toll. Consequently, it is unsurprising that many would look to Italy for both lessons and comparison. Unfortunately, the United States does not stack up well. The figure reports cumulative case totals for each country by reporting date. Cases appear in green for Italy and blue for the United States. As with the figures above, we see a small number of initial cases slowly transform into a clear exponential increase. While Italy’s case numbers were originally greatly outpacing those of the United States, the latter’s slope continues to grow taller, its numbers approaching those of Italy’s.

However, the lag witnessed here is specifically due to an important difference from the example of the hypotheticals provided above. The outbreak began later in the United States, with the best guess being eleven days later. The red dotted line takes this into account. Whereas before, the United States appeared to have the unfortunate distinction of quickly catching up to Italy, the reality is that the United States has long been ahead of Italy’s pace. And again, this is not due to differences in total population.

Trying to Generalize

If the United State’s numbers look bad this quickly, it is not because it is a country of over three hundred million people. The only exception to this would be comparisons to extremely small polities in which thousands or tens of thousands of cases would have already exhausted the vulnerable population. 

The implication of basic models such as this would be that people who are infected in the United States tend to infect other people at a higher rate than what is being seen in other countries. However, this could be due to a variety of issues in the real world. The assumption “all else being equal” that is ubiquitous in basic models, for example, rarely applies. There are differences in hygiene and lifestyle. There are also variations in the number of people that infected individuals expose themselves to. Add to that low government response and the possibilities are endless. Total population size, however, is not a logical explanation for COVID-19 cases in the United States.

It is also likely that progression did not occur only from a single primary case. Instead, dozens—or perhaps even hundreds—of infected individuals likely returned to the United States from abroad, quickly establishing numerous independent clusters across the country. In other words, there is no single “patient zero” in the United States, but many primary infections for independent clusters. But the same is likely true for places like Italy, and even this itself could be seen as the product of slow reaction to the epidemic.

Though in our illustrative example above it is useful to simplify things by assuming a rate of infection doubling each week, this will depend on conditions that ultimately vary in the real world. Perhaps the most easily measurable is population density, as infections in densely populated areas could see more encounters with susceptible people. But while places like New York City are densely populated, the United States as a whole is not. In fact, data from the World Bank shows that its population per square kilometer is less than half that of Italy. In short, national statistics do not work in favor of explaining the U.S. infection rate in terms of national population.

It is also worth pointing out that the parameters in the illustrative example presented here are actually quite conservative. Recall that this approach saw a 20 percent reduction in the vulnerable population begin to quickly slow the spread of new cases, and the outbreak ended after 60 percent of the population was infected. Barring intervention, a team of epidemiological modelers from Imperial College’s COVID-19 response team actually expected this to be far higher, with perhaps over 80 percent of the population facing infection. In short, without interventions such as social distancing, it will be easier for COVID-19 to cause new infections than the hypothetical pathogen reported here.

Further, this exercise reflected two very small populations. The World Bank, for instance, reports that there are at least ninety countries with a population size of at least ten million. Italy and the United States, for example, are well beyond this. The practical implication of this is that it should take longer to see a gap in infections to arise between the two places. Our example again is biased toward an earlier gap between the two countries, and their inflection points would be hit far sooner than in a larger country like the United States.

All else being equal, the tale of the tape may be as follows:

Milestone	Country A (pop: 1 million)	Country B (pop: 10 million)
First case	Week 1	Week 1
10,000 Cases	Week 14	Week 14
100,000 Cases	Week 17	Week 17
500,000 Cases	Week 21	Week 19
1 Million Cases	Never	Week 20
5 Million Cases	Never	Week 25
Total Cases	595,455	5,766,911
Epidemic Ends	Week 31	Week 46

Looking Forward

It is important to note that this exercise largely assumes non- or limited-intervention strategies by governments. And this was indeed the case very early on for several countries, including the United States. Still, while many countries were relatively slow to respond, we have seen sweeping reactive policies ranging from stay at home orders across several U.S. states to nationwide lockdowns in countries like India. South Africa has jailed people who have broken stay at home orders, while Rwanda has reportedly seen such violations result in offenders being killed by the security services.

The effectiveness of such strategies remains to be seen, but the general expectation is that such actions can help slow the rate of transmission. Slowing infections in the short term has the benefit of “flattening the curve,” or reducing the number of cases to a point that it does not overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure. But this also lengthens the amount of time it will take to reduce the susceptible population to a point where the virus has difficulty finding new carriers. This takes time, and it will certainly take far more time than what would be represented by President Trump’s desire to “reopen” the United States in early April. If his suggestions are followed, whatever gains that will have been made in slowing COVID-19’s progression will be quickly unraveled. 

As Dr. Antony Fauci stated on ABC News’ program This Week With George Stephanopoulos, “For me, the dynamics and the history of outbreaks is you are never where you think you are…if you think you’re in-line with the outbreak, you’re already three weeks behind. So you’ve got to be almost overreacting a bit to keep up with it.”

This article was written as part of the Addressing Global Crisis Program (AGC), which is run by the University of Central Florida’s Office of Global Perspectives & International Initiatives (GPII). AGC examines how governments, individually and collectively, deal with pandemics, natural disasters, ecological challenges, and climate change. AGC is organized around five primary pillars: (1) delivery of services and infrastructure; (2) water-energy-food security; (2) governance and politics; (4) economic development; and (5) national security. Through its global network, AGC facilitates expert discussion and features articles, publications and online content.

The Cairo review crew have over the past nine years very much enjoyed printing 36 issues covering local regional and world events as seen from the Middle East perspective.

From the reporters, fact-checkers, designers, editors and artists who work on every issue, we have put great effort and great pride in what we do. The Cairo Review has been more than just a publication but an actual recounting of historical events.

Today we are living in one of the most profound experiences in recent history. As the world faces the immediate challenge of the novel COVID-19 virus, it will also have to address the far reaching social, political, economic, humanitarian and security implications long after the threat of this pandemic subsides.

In a bid to ensure the safety and good health of our staff and the staff at our printing presses, our distributors, and employees at the bookstores we deal with, we have decided that issue 37 will be online only.

We hope to return to a normal printing schedule by the summer and to continue to offer you the best analysis, expert authored pieces and insights into our world.

In the meantime, we are committed to covering the COVID-19 crisis and its impact across the world. We are happy to announce the launch of a new section of our website to host all the essays and reports we produce in special coverage of the global response to the coronavirus.

We are also happy to announce that this endeavor will be in collaboration with the University of Central Florida Office of Global Perspectives & International Initiatives (GPII). As the world adapts to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, the Cairo Review and GPII will work to produce timely and thoughtful analysis on a diverse range of issues related to this ongoing challenge.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay home and stay healthy.

The Cairo Review Team

The recently U.S.-proposed anti-Iran Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA) andthe European-led missions to secure navigation in the Persian Gulf have forced a rethinking of the possibility of developing a viable regional security architecture for the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) and a reexamining of the obstacles that historically hindered its creation. The U.S. and European initiatives reveal that they are still constrained by the old conviction that international solutions can solve the “security deficit” that has plagued the region for decades. The history of the region tells us that this approach did not work out as expected, but in fact deepened security deficits instead of solving them.

First, the approach was used to serve the political interests of the United States and European countries and not those of the region. The recently proposed schemes are built on the same Western posturing, as they are designed to protect American and European interests and contain the direct threats to their national security emanating from increasing insecurity and ongoing conflict in the region.

The terrorism of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), illegal migration, and insecurities in the main maritime chokepoints are a few examples of those threats. Second, these proposals are built on a traditional security outlook of the region that overlooks the changes in the security environment caused by the Arab Spring, which now requires new mindsets.

When one analyzes security developments in the region, one finds weak cooperation and interdependence between Arab countries, and this makes the task for American and European leaders all the more difficult. According to Barry Buzan, the leading scholar on the English school of international security,security interdependence, or the security complex, is a prerequisite for any regional security arrangement to exist and function. It means “a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their national securities cannot realistically be considered apart from one another”. The history of security interactions among the countries in the MENA region is one of enmity and mistrust, which leads primarily to the failure or dysfunction of any regional security scheme proposed by external powers or developed by the Arab countries themselves, and secondarily to the absence of Arab agreement on a shared matrix of security responses to threats to their collective security.

In this context, the first section of this essay briefly analyzes the history of security in the Arab region to identify obstaclesto developing a regional security scheme. The second section attempts to reexamine what has changed in the security outlook of the MENA region in the post-Arab Spring period and what drivers there are for developing a new regional security architecture. The third section discusses a security arrangement that can help resolve the security deficit in the Arab region.

What Has Worked in the Arab Context?
There are five approaches that have been adopted in various regions in the world to achieve regional security. In the first approach, regional security is guaranteed and ensured by a hegemonic state that uses its hard and soft powers to impose stability and prevent any other country from threatening it. In practice, this approach maintained security in South Asia and in North America for a period of time.

In the second approach, small and medium countries form coalitions and alliances to balance the power of revisionist countries in their region. Practices among Western European countries during World War I and World War II followed this approach.

The third approach is based on cooperation and integration to achieve collective security. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is an example of the partial application of this approach.

In the fourth approach, security is achieved via the creation of a pluralistic security community in which the members do not create any formal institutions, but instead agree on a set of rules that ensure stability in the region, for example refraining from using military power, settling conflicts using peaceful means, and disarmament. History reveals that the success of this approach requires countries to share similar political and economic systems and have high levels of interdependence so as to eventually build institutions to implement the agreed norms and rules.

The fifth approach requires countries to agree to create a regional organization responsible for the multilateral collective management of security in the region. NATO is an example of this type of organization with security as its primary function.

It is important to emphasize that adopting any of these approaches in a specific geographic region in the world requires the existence of shared perceptions among those countries, including consensus on what qualifies as being a threat and what types of collective tools are accepted and adopted. The various regional arrangements in these five approaches lead to sustainable frameworks of collective security among their members that are different from security cooperation and ad hoc military or security coalitions among countries to counter an enemy.

The security interactions among Arab countries since the establishment of the League of Arab States in 1945 tell us that some of these approaches were applicable but did not deliver the collective conception of Arab security that evolved after the end of the Ottoman control of the Middle East. That conception had considered Western colonial powers and Israel in particular as the main threats, and the main collective Arab security policy was calling for unity against these enemy entities.

In line with this conception of Arab security, Arab countries adopted a collective defense pact in 1950 within the framework of the League of Arab States. The pact in essence corresponded with the third approach mentioned above. The resolutions of the ministerial council of the League of Arab States from 1945–2006 reveal that this pact was used specifically to counter Israel, which was framed in those resolutions as the “enemy country” that threatened Arab security. Accordingly, that pact was invoked in the cases of Israeli offenses against Arab countries, such as Israeli offensive operations on Jordan’s river in 1964.

 But the effectiveness of this security scheme was contested by an alternative approach to regional security adopted by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia during the 1960s. The Saudi approach considered the Muslim World, not the Arab World, as the focal point of any regional security arrangement and aligned the country with the U.S. security agenda in the region. Furthermore, the Europeans and the Americans historically proposed many security arrangements to serve their security agenda in the region instead and overlooked the security function of the League of Arab States. Thus, those proposals did not last long and were rejected by many Arab countries. For instance, the 1955 Baghdad Pact that aimed to contain the Soviet Union was joined by Iraq, Iran, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan, but was rejected by Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.

Most of these regional and external attempts to create a collective security architecture in the region adopted the very narrow definition of security that focused on the military and political dimensions and on the “enemy state” as the main source of any threat. This Cold War concept of security was in line with the prevailing security perceptions among the Arab ruling elites, who used it to frame national security in its political and military dimensions as the priority and to justify considering strengthening military and security relations with great powers as the sure option to maintain national security and counter any regional threats to their territorial security.

 These patterns of security interactions created three realities in the region that are responsible for hindering any effort to develop a working collective security scheme. The first is the discontinuity and, in some cases, absence of common perceptions among Arab countries of the threats to their collective security, which in turn has weekend the security complex in the region. The old concept of collective security discussed above is getting weaker and is not shaping the security policies of Arab countries. For example, the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 was not perceived by other Arab countries as a threat to their national security; instead of collectively adopting measures against Israel, the discourse of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries demonized Hezbollah and considered it the main threat to their security.

The second reality is the narrow concept of security that continues to shape Arab foreign security policies, leading to increasing militarization to counter any attack from an enemy country. However, developments in the region broadened the concept of security beyond the militaristic to include economic and social dimensions. In 1990, the source of enmity was another Arab country in the case of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Later, new enemies in the form of violent non-state actors, such al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, emerged.

The third reality is the rising rivalry among Arab countries, leading to diminishing trust in any pan-Arab security arrangements. In many cases, this is driven by the increasing independence of the Arab state that is alienating its security interests from those of other Arab countries and linking them to the security agenda of the United States and European countries. This unfolded, for instance, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when Arab countries preferred to align themselves with any non-Arab arrangement proposed by the United States or any other country. This, in turn, weakened the region’s security complex. 

The Post-Arab Spring Period?
The Arab Spring was a decisive event that continues to reshape the security outlook of the region and redefine what regional security in this part of the world means. On one hand, it is shifting the perceptions of security threats among Arab countries. On the other hand, it is making ensuring territorial national security the priority for Arab countries, and, as a result, their support for and participation in any collective security arrangement is subject to the extent to which it serves their national security. These shifts are better explained by examining three crucial questions on the creation and function of any collective security arrangements:

What is being threatened?

 In the post-Arab Spring period, the survival of the nation state remains the priority for several Arab countries. This is especially true since one of the consequences of the Arab Spring has been the emergence of armed conflicts weakening the state structure, as in Libya after the NATO-led operation in 2011, in Yemen since 2015, and in Syria since 2011. The increasing emphasis on state survival in the official discourse of many Arab leaders during this period has not been confined to political and security dimensions as it used to be. Instead, it encompasses humanitarian, societal, and economic dimensions as long as they strengthen the capacity of state institutions.

It is important to note that this development coincided with the rising power, influence, and legitimacy of violent non-state actors in some countries versus that of the national governments, to the extent that those actors’ survival became important to the survival of the Arab state itself. For instance, in Lebanon Hezbollah maintains the independence of its military structure and at the same time participates in the Lebanese political system, creating a hybrid entity that enjoys being “part of the state structure” and a “state within the state” at the same time. This model of violent non-state actors could be replicated in other Arab countries suffering from weak central governments such as Libya and Yemen.

Who is threatening security?

The Arab perceptions that used to frame Israel as an enemy in the region are changing. Since the 1973 war, it took some Arab countries more than three decades to review their perceptions of Israel as “the enemy” and then begin receiving Israeli officials, normalizing their relationships even though Israel’s enmity has not officially ended and Tel Aviv has not yet recognized the existence of an independent Palestinian state. Exchanges between Israeli officials and Arab states who have not signed a peace treaty have increased in recent years. For example, the Israeli minister of foreign affairs visited the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in June 2019 to discuss Iran’s policies in the region.

Regional actors including Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Ethiopia and international actors such as the United States, European countries, Russia, China, and to an extent, India, are also influencing the security environment in the region. Arab countries do not share a common security perception toward any of these actors; thus it is difficult to categorize any of them in the friend or enemy status. This extends to Arab stances toward the MESA proposed by the Trump administration, which aims to contain Iran. Egypt, for example, announced its withdrawal from the MESA talks in April 2019 because, as explained by an anonymous Saudi official, “it doubted the seriousness of the initiative, had yet to see a formal blueprint laying it out, and because of the danger that the plan would increase tensions with Iran.” Other Arab countries participating in the MESA talks include Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other GCC countries.

Furthermore, it is hard to reach an agreement among the majority of Arab countries on whether any of those actors are strengthening the security of the region or weakening it. For instance, although Egypt has supported the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia that is taking part in the war in Yemen since March 2015, it considers the Houthi group as a faction of Yemeni society, unlike the Saudis, who consider it a terrorist organization. Egypt also considers the Grand Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia as a threat to its national security, but Saudi Arabia does not share the same point of view.

In addition, the enemy that threatens national or regional security is not just another state capable of acting offensively, but also violent non-state actors (VNSAs), who are playing crucial roles in the continuation of many armed conflicts in the region as reported by the Heidelberg Institute.Even though many of these VNSAs have rationales and interests, they often act as agents for non-Arab regional and international powers interfering in the region. That partially explains why some Arab countries designate VNSAs such as ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Free Syrian Army as terrorist organizations while others do not.

In the ten years since the Arab Spring, there has been a growing list of security issues that must be addressed collectively by Arab countries in order to achieve security in the region. This list includes the armed conflicts in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine; the increasing legitimacy and role of VNSAs (radical and extreme religious groups, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations); maritime terrorism and piracy; the increasingly interventionist policies of Turkey, Iran, and global powers in many Arab countries; the weakening of the unified nation state; uneven development; the marginalization of youth and women; and technological threats.

Although it is easy to compile this list, it is hard to say that there is a common perception among Arab countries regarding the priority of each security issue on the list. The exception is when Arab states are located in the same geographic area and share histories of amicable relationships and common interests. For instance, the Levant Arab countries are more concerned with the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, the Palestinian issue, and the VNSAs active in that part of the region, while those located in the Arab Maghreb are more concerned, for example, with the conflict in Libya and the terrorist organizations active in the Sahel region. Similar differences can be found among Arab countries located in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Eastern Africa.

Who shapes regional security perceptions?

The Arab Spring exposed the structural weaknesses of the Arab region and the absence of an Arab hegemonic power that can alone master the creation of a collective regional security policy. It also exacerbated the rivalry among the countries in the region to be the leading state that defines the security agenda of the region. It is becoming obvious that the strongest countries in terms of military and economic capabilities that adopt an influential discourse supported by other countries in the region are securitizing actors that define the regional security agenda that serves both their national security and political interests. Consequently, the security agenda of the region, if there is any, could be shaped to strengthen the political internal and external legitimacy of the more powerful countries, and this in turn leads to its politicization. Even though security cannot be understood apart from politics, the latter remains one of the former’s dimensions. But in the MENA region, the politicization of security perceptions contributes to the further weakening of the security complex in the region.

And, if we are to borrow from securitization theory, the Arab region in the post-Arab Spring period has witnessed over-securitization and de-securitization of a number of issues. This is particularly true following the new power structures in some countries, such as Egypt after the fall of Mubarak’s regime, Saudi Arabia after the death of King Abdullah, and Qatar after the ousting of King Hamad. For example, terrorism in Egypt during the Muslim Brotherhood rule in 2012–2013 was considered by then-President Mohamed Morsi as a political issue that could be managed via dialogue and political concessions. But since 2014, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has considered terrorism as the main threat to national security and is consequently countering it using military, economic, and social measures.

These newly developed national security perceptions among Arab countries have also extended to their foreign policies, limiting the possibilities of developing a common set of regional security perceptions. Egypt’s 2015 proposal of forming a new rapid counterterrorism force is an example in this regard. The proposal was within the framework of the League of Arab States, but it failed to materialize due to Saudi concerns about who would lead these forces. Although Saudi Arabia contributed to the Arab chiefs of staff’s discussions of the proposal and to the drafting of these forces’ protocols, it called for postponing the discussion of that draft. In parallel, Saudi Arabia led the creation of the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition in December 2015.

A Proposed Solution to the Arab “Security Deficit”
I argue that providing a realistic solution to the security deficit in the Arab region requires considering the new security outlook of the region uncovered by the Arab Spring. The recently proposed MESA and other projects are institutionalizing the role of external powers, either the Europeans or the United States, and answering the security needs of those actors rather than answering those of the region. MENA countries need a regionally developed security arrangement that reflects their complexities and can both counter the aforementioned list of threats and protect the interests of Arab countries.

Based on that argument, and referring to the five aforementioned approaches, I propose solving the security deficit in the Arab region with a security arrangement that combines both the pluralistic security community approach and the creation of a regional security organization approach. This proposed arrangement recognizes the absence and discontinuity of common security perceptions and the weakening security complex. It also considers creating common perceptions and strengthening that complex as its main two priorities.

What is required here is the establishment of a new regional forum for dialogue and deliberation that has an institutional aspect in order to ensure its sustainability; this could be called the Arab Forum for Security Policies (AFSP).  Then come the questions of membership and leadership. As these are very crucial questions, I suggest a core group of countries that enjoy a degree of amity and trust, have a shared perception of threats, and have experience working collectively. These countries include Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia.

The AFSP would meet annually in order to offer regionalsolutions to regionalsecurity issues. The outcome of the yearly dialogue would be a document of guiding policies that included both bilateral and multilateral cooperation, utilized a variety of tools not confined to military measures, and accepted the reality of the numerous securitizing actors in the Arab region.

To have the AFSP function effectively, it should avoid two issues that have proved to be drivers of dysfunction in any arrangement in the Arab context. First, the dialogue among member countries should not be built around the enemy country mentality. As mentioned earlier, there is no Arab agreement on categorizing any of the regional or international powers with interests in the region in the friend or enemy status; some Arabs perceive them as both friends and enemies (frenemies). Instead, the forum should consider that the threats to the national security of its members and to their collective security do not emanate from one single enemy country and focus on the list of threat issues mentioned earlier. The priority of the threats and issues can be defined through voting. Second, the main goal of the forum should not involve offering or developing a comprehensive security agenda or obliging countries to enter into long-term commitments, but should rather be to build common perceptions among the member countries regarding each security issue on the agreed list of priority threats.

It cannot be overstated that the Arab region in the post-Arab Spring period urgently requires a regional solution to, instead of a deepening of, the security deficit from which it suffers. The proposed AFSP aims to strengthen the regional security complex among a group of Arab countries as a first step prior to building arrangements that encompass both Arab and non-Arab states.

In other words, the AFSP attempts to remedy one of the obstacles that historically hindered the success of any regional security arrangement. The AFSP concept is not a call for isolating Arabs, but one for all regional and international actors interested in securing MENA to consider the new security outlook taking form and to help the countries of the region find the courage to take the lead in solving their security issues.