*Originally published in 2020. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a substantive crisis for world politics and an epistemological crisis for international relations theory, particularly the dominant tradition of international realism. Realism – stripped to its minimalist, modernist, structural essentials in the form of what Max Weber called an ideal type – implies that states are exclusively important in world politics. Other actors may exist, but they represent little beyond noise or an error in the equation. States guide their behavior by national interest defined in terms of power – particularly military power. These are the structural requirements for survival in an anarchic, hostile world and the epistemological foundations of the national security state. Realism claims that states can either follow the rules, become failed states, or cease to exist (cf. Orsi et.al. 2018, Donnelly 2009).

There have been many challenges to this view of the world, including ours, which we have called post-realism (Beer and Hariman, 1998, 1996). In our opinion, international relations theory, no matter how intuitively compelling its truth claims, is a form of rhetoric: it is a discourse used both to account for and to influence political decisions. But the traditional realist view of world politics is one narrative, and only one narrative, of international reality.  An evolutionary epistemology must recognize that there always exist other knowledge processes (Beer and Hariman, 2020).  Beyond realism, there are relevant global actors other than states. Though realism has not recognized them as essential, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, corporations, and even individual leaders have long inhabited the broader, pluralistic international relations literature. Further, though the desire for power is certainly an important motivation, states and other actors are also guided by other identities, interests, and values, by social and cultural practices that themselves can contribute to a softer side of international power.

Beyond such entities, COVID-19 brings non-human actors forcefully into the foreground; we see clearly there are important natural actors in world politics. These actors do not respect the traditional realist rules of the road. The coronavirus does not recognize that the primary actors are states, navigating by the lodestar of national interests defined in terms of power. Nor does it respect the distinction between the domestic and international spheres. The virus quickly spread across the globe through all levels and sectors of society from nursing homes to aircraft carriers. The pandemic has truly left no place to hide, though sheltering in place has been one attempt to do so.

Realists might object that non-human actors are not actors but forces, forces of nature. Thucydides, for example, discusses the plague and its effects on Athenian power and society in this contextual manner (Strassler, 1996: 118–121). Similarly, today the pandemic appears as a bio-storm, an unexpected natural disaster that will have to be factored into subsequent planning. Theoretically non-human actors are merely the material background to calculations of interest and power; they are not what realist theory is about. This blind spot in realist theory, however, is precisely the point of our post-realist argument.

Realists might argue that we may have moved away from anthropocentrism only to fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. Non-human actors like diseases are not international agents – unlike humans, they do not think or feel; they don’t have intention or volition, they are incapable of rational choice. But, interestingly, the realist conception of the state-as-person is also curiously non-human. The realist state does not think or feel either. It may be a human construct, but it is not a human being except metaphorically or mythically (Beer, 2013; Beer and De Landtsheer, 2004). It is a semi-humanoid power robot following, if it is to survive in the anarchic international society of its fellows, its power-maximizing algorithm. Indeed, this conception of the state is what gives realism its parsimony and elegance. Occam’s razor cuts away everything else. The virus, however, could be an actor in the same form, following the same evolutionary power-maximizing function that realism ascribes to the state. If the realist state is an agent, the virus is at least its cousin.

Perhaps it is not surprising that realism now is benefitting from a revival of sorts: first, as a response to the conditions of global complexity and precarity that preceded and contributed to the COVID-19 crisis, and now to the crisis itself (Meersheimer, 2019; Gewen, 2020a, 2020b). Benefiting from nostalgia for the Cold War – something many have experienced occasionally in the last two decades of regional wars, failed states, refugee crises, illiberal democracies, and other breakdowns – realism is offered as the only viable alternative for managing the complexity of an interconnected world that cannot be sustained by liberal ideology alone. Thus, in response to complexity, one can recur to a familiar model of nation-state interaction, optimizing and balancing power, indifference to political regimes, top-down management of regional and global economies, and containment of Chinese expansion. This is an adaptive realism, one that recognizes global economic interdependency; it also recurs to a theoretical framework where the primary virtue, and vice, is simplicity. On both empirical and theoretical grounds, we find it difficult to believe that realist analysis by itself can recognize what is needed to address the problems that will define and test the societies of the 21st century. The question remains, the stakes are high, how can that challenge be met?

Challenge and Response

Post-realism begins with realism and indeed incorporates insights from the archeology of major realist thinkers like Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and many, many more that have made realism the dominant model of international relations. We ourselves accept the realist insight that the systemic structure of world politics is partly conflictual, a result of interstate competition. And the attack of COVID 19 has had an important effect on state actors, stimulating an array of competitive state actions. States have used the crisis to advance their strategic interests as they see them. The relative position of all states has been affected, some for the worse. For example, the American administration’s attention has been diverted by the many domestic problems arising from its late and heavily politicized response to the pandemic. US naval capabilities have been degraded as COVID-19 invaded military vessels like the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which have become incubators of the disease.

The collapse of oil prices, resulting partly from pandemic lockdowns, has also seriously weakened US adversaries like Russia and Iran. But other states have seized the moment aggressively. China has continued to challenge US domination: Chinese military activity has accelerated in the South China Sea. China has proceeded further with the militarization of artificial islands built on reefs and advanced its shipping and fishing interests. It has worked to extend its soft power by deploying medical equipment and staff as far as Italy.

States have also actively engaged in propaganda and disinformation about the origins of the virus. US and Chinese advocates have accused the other of enhancing hard power, producing the coronavirus through militarized bioweapons programs. Social media interventions have employed soft power resources to leverage differential pandemic effects on ethnic and social groups, promoting internal divisions and influencing regime support. 

Parallel to its impact on competitive external state strategic interests, the coronavirus has affected internal domestic political regimes. The virus has wrested from them at least partial control. It has weakened all political elites, though not always in equal measure. All dimensions of domestic power—political, economic, social, cultural, scientific, technological—have been affected.

The virus, like a state, is also a competitive actor. It has disturbed the existing international world order and is establishing a new order—isolation, quarantine, death. The virus has also disrupted epistemic habits, an example of catastrophic epistemology (Beer and Hariman, 2020). During extreme crises, discontinuity dominates, linearity dissolves. Prediction becomes both essential and impossible, and previously validated models are revealed to be far from the realities they purport to describe. Short term pragmatic crisis management can not touch the structural conditions that created the disaster; both scientific expertise and magical thinking are amplified. Dispassionate assessment founders in storm surges of collective anxiety. Disease effects appear to be paradoxical as some states are harmed more than others with similar conditions or fewer protective measures (Beech e al. 2020). Catastrophic epistemology thus crashes head-on into the realist theory of world politics.

Post-realism suggests that the pandemic crisis thus offers an opening for change, but one that is brief and limited. The social conditions of (im)possibility surround us. Some technologies, in medicine and communications for example, have taken remarkable leaps forward. Public discourse has also become remarkably pitched toward identifying underlying social, economic, and political problems: unlike anything many people have seen in their lifetimes. Thus, one condition for change is being fulfilled. At the same time, a high probability eventual outcome is very little change, minimal disruption in other dimensions – i.e., a long-term sclerotic catastrophe. But why is that so? What are the assumptions, conventions, and habits that will prove to be debilitating, keeping discourse as mere discourse or merely compensatory symbolization rather than a form of action?

The short answer is that there are powerful motives for restoring control and order – social, economic, psychological, and political. These motives operate at every level of association – local, national, and international. Everything from ordinary desires for normalcy to the dominant interests driving neoliberal capitalism converge on closing the window of opportunity for anything more than marginal adjustments on behalf of risk management. Against this background, realism offers an enormously appealing rhetoric of stability and rationality on behalf of a known world (Rudd, 2020). Old stories are the best stories. Other ways of thinking appear to be marginal or risky luxuries, no longer safe or affordable, while the complexities and contradictions exposed by the crisis can be reduced to a simple world view. Why fear another natural disaster when reassured that the world really is regular and predictable?

Against false assurance, post-realism welcomes attempts to reconfigure analysis on........

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