In the BA International Studies, we are developing five broad themes where we want to devote more attention both through and alongside the programme: International Order and Disorder; Systems of Belief and Religion; Social Justice and Human Rights; Technology and Society; Environment and Society. This last one – referring to climate change, natural resources, water and food, and public health - is now of supreme relevance.

President Biden wasted no time to roll out a $2 trillion ‘Green New Deal’-like set of initiatives to kick-start the US economy in a sustainable direction, including eliminating coal, gas, and oil as electricity-generating sources by 2035, and moving to electrical vehicles in the coming decade. Less ambitious (and with the typical Brussels-style clunky website) but along the same lines has been the EU’s own ‘Green Deal’, aiming to make the continent climate neutral by 2050 and investing €100bn in the transition towards a greener economy. They both represent significant attempts to reinforce the power of the state (or ‘state-ness’, in the case of the EU) as the guiding authority for socio-economic change.

In contrast, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has launched ‘The Great Reset’. Using the diverse and often divergent national responses to the pandemic as its raison d’etre, the Reset looks to promote improved long-term (market-orientated) coordination beyond the short-term quick-fixes that are the standard response. Ranging from pursuing a ‘yes we can’-type mindset (where have we heard that before?) to changing how we measure important stuff (no more GDP-focused growth stats!), the WEF is aiming to bolster the UN’s ailing Sustainable Development Goals through purposeful encouragement of social entrepreneurship and innovation. The Forum’s Future of Nature and Business report from 2020 focused on the damaging effects of environmental decline – beyond the tipping point of possible regeneration – for economies and livelihoods. Yet the focus inevitably remains on market solutions, with the Future report highlighting “the need for business to mainstream nature risk in corporate enterprise risk management.”

Both sets of post-pandemic responses have their critics. Biden and the EU have received push-back from those opposed to economic disruption in staple industries such as auto manufacturing and mining, making their chances of success hanging in the balance. The WEF is for some conspiratorial sceptics the archetypal undemocratic ‘new world order’ shadow government, shaping our everyday lives whether we like it or not. But both these state-led and market-led responses are at least thinking and operating on a scale where some level of improvement in long-term social futures is at least imaginable. Political movements that reject them are either wanting to maintain things as they are or looking to capitalize on the general lack of trust in authority in general. Whether its the forces of change or those of reaction that win out, there is no doubt that the upcoming political battles are going to test the levels of tolerance and cohesion in both democratic and undemocratic societies alike.

This is an important period for understanding what is at stake and what could be and should be possible. Both state and market ‘solutions’ are going to be tested by transnational problems that don’t respect borders. Because its vital to move with the times, we are introducing the new International Studies ‘minor equivalent’ – Ecology, Migration and Tolerance: Dimensions of International Cooperation – to explore and assess this post-pandemic political, economic, and social landscape that we are soon going to encounter. We have high hopes that this set of courses will add an extra dimension to our curriculum, and intend to build on it in the future to maintain the cutting-edge outlook of the International Studies programme.