Introduction
For an event expected by so many, the COVID-19 pandemic was shockingly stunning. Since the first 2000s, studies had warned of the increased chance of a disease going global. However, neither states nor citizens had internalised the threat.
As the virus unfolds around the world, closing down borders and supply chains, crashing oil costs and grounding aircraft, it gave the impression to change everything – or nothing, counting on the analysis.
To many, the pandemic wasn’t a geopolitical ‘game-changer because it would just accelerate previously existing trends.
However, a global and pervasive occurrence was reaching to produce a ‘new normal’: a world profoundly different from before.
The reality will, of course, have components of both. This has got to do with the nature of crises in general, which
on the one hand, they are invariably embedded in (and usually the result of) a precise context that continues to be constant, however on the opposite is so tumultuous that they produce prospects for change by exposing previously unremarked vulnerabilities and strengths, re-arranging priorities and making urgencies.
What happened when developed countries were distracted with Covid-19?
- Colombia: Armed teams together with the Revolutionary soldiers of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) were consolidating influence and territorial management in vast swaths of the country.
- A national lockdown has tightened the grip of each team and, in some places, creating them additional susceptible to violence. 2019 saw thirty-six massacres (i.e., killings with three or other victims), the highest number since 2014.
- Nonetheless, by the period 2020, that record had been passed and enclosed many mass killings of young people at social gatherings, at least one of that appeared to involve the social control of lockdown restrictions.
- Meanwhile, the pandemic has slowed the implementation of the 2016 peace accord, swinging on hold several grassroots projects aimed toward boosting rural economies and improving public services. As conflict (and the virus) surges nationwide, Venezuela’s border has also become a hotspot for clashes.
- Myanmar: The conflict between Myanmar’s military (known because of the Tatmadaw) and the Arakan Army, an armed cluster created up preponderantly of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, has intense since early 2019, with other regular clashes, the preparation of heavier military strength, and increased casualties.
- Against this background, the government has illegal mobile net services within the conflict zone since June 2019, at least in part to reduce native residents’ ability to report human rights abuses and civilian casualties.
- The ban has had a significant impact on the standard of living, interrupting digital payments, money remittances, and market information for farmers, however also hampering the affected area’s response to COVID-19.
GeoPolitics effect on South East Asia
The pandemic has sent the world economy into the first simultaneous recession since the 1930s. It has, arguably, altered the course of the economic process and, therefore, the long movement of individuals, skills and services, and even products.
Travel restrictions are a significant example, and that they might not be reversed any time shortly.
Changes to global supply chains may have already been underway to some extent due to the U.S.-China trade war; however, the push to diversify production is being propelled by the pandemic.
Resource nationalism and vaccine nationalism can affect not only the physical recovery of Southeast Asia and the world but also will doubtless verify the long-term alignment of regional politics.
Misjudging the pandemic can be fatal. State, as an example, underestimated the severity of the matter at the outset and delayed its responses.
A misplaced denial resulted in it currently paying severely and can doubtless end in paying even longer-term economic and social prices.
From a trajectory of a financial process that may bring it nearer to the league of the world’s largest economies, Indonesia, for the first time in twenty years, fell into a recession in 2020.
