Professor of Conflict Studies, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom.
Disasters. 2021 Dec;45 Suppl 1:S26-S47. doi: 10.1111/disa.12527. Epub 2021 Dec 7.
The Covid-19 crises in the United Kingdom and the United States show how democracies may struggle to confront disasters that are increasingly impinging on the Global North. This paper highlights the extent to which disasters are now 'coming home' to Western democracies and it looks at some of the principal reasons why democracy has not been especially protective, at least in the case of the UK and the US. These include: reconceptualising disaster as a good thing (via 'herd immunity'); the influence of neoliberalism; and the limitations in the circulation of information. A key pandemic-related danger is the conclusion that democracy itself is discredited. Disasters, though, call for a reinvigoration of democracy, not a knee-jerk invocation of autocratic 'emergency' rule. A fundamental problem in the UK and US is that these countries were not democratic enough. The paper underlines the risk of a move towards a disaster-producing system that is self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting.
英国和美国的新冠疫情危机表明，民主国家在应对日益影响到北半球国家的灾难时可能会感到力不从心。本文强调了灾难现在“回归”西方民主国家的程度，并探讨了民主国家在面对这场灾难时为何没有特别采取保护措施的一些主要原因，至少在英国和美国的案例中是如此。这些原因包括：将灾难重新概念化为一件好事（通过“群体免疫”）；新自由主义的影响；以及信息流通的局限性。与大流行相关的一个主要危险是，人们认为民主本身已经失去信誉。然而，灾难需要的是重振民主，而不是不假思索地援引专制的“紧急”统治。英国和美国的一个根本问题是，这两个国家还不够民主。本文强调了向一个自我强化而非自我纠错的灾难产生系统转变的风险。
