Post-crisis landscapes

Although the main vector of the pandemic is the health crisis itself, its effects are a set of interdependent crises, ranging from the political to the economic and also global in scope. Although it remains to be seen what permanent consequences, both in the short and long term, these concurrent crises will have, we can already identify some of the geopolitical risks that world leaders face, and whose effects will determine the international landscape in which they will find themselves, once we leave the epidemic crisis behind.

Of course, regional scenarios that are already in a critical situation, such as the Sahel and much of the Middle East, will be exacerbated by the opportunities that chaos and fear provide for opportunists, even in situations of humanitarian disaster: In 2019, the Californian Think-Tank James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies published a detailed report that showed the plausibility in which elements of Islamic terrorism could use infected people to deliberately spread viral diseases, thus opening the door for CODVID-19 to be used as a weapon.

On a less nihilistic level, it can be expected that the emergence of the pandemic in conflict areas will be exploited by local players to profit from interrupting humanitarian aid supplies, limiting peace operations and derailing peace agreement initiatives, taking advantage of a social context marked by mistrust of political elites, meaning the consequent difficulty in persuading the population to follow draconian public health directives, similar to those adopted in Asia and the West.

Likewise -as it is suspected that it has been the case in China in relation to the Uyghur Muslim minority, at the beginning of the pandemic- the disease offers an ideal smokescreen to cover the repression of dissidents and political adversaries, and presents an ideal scenario for undertaking asymmetric war actions abroad. Some Gulf countries, having drawn the relevant conclusions, are already taking preventive action to mitigate this latter type of risk. Therefore, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have provided assistance to Iran, whose inhabitants are caught between the pandemic and the economic sanctions, creating such a degree of unrest and discontent that the risk of a security crisis is quite evident, to the extent that Khamenei has chosen to involve the Army in the efforts of the National Committee to fight against the coronavirus, entrusting the Chief of Defence Staff, General Baguer, with comprehensive powers at a time when much of the theocratic hierarchy has succumbed to the virus.

Other areas, where conflicts are marked by the involvement of multiple international players with overlapping interests, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic. Possibly the most damaging case is Libya, whose complex armed conflict has been going on for years without a health system worthy of the name, as the civil war prompted an exodus of health workers.

With a similarly complex scenario, north-western Syria, especially the enclave of Idlib, is particularly vulnerable to the exploitation of pandemic psychosis by the warring parties, given the systematic destruction of hospitals and the overflow of health care facilities. It has been part of military tactics in which population displacements play a major role in the fighting, without the prevailing violence allowing for effective delivery of humanitarian aid. 

Nor does Gaza have enough doctors and health workers to respond to the overloading of its precarious health system, reduced to a minimum after the prolonged blockade, which turns this narrow strip of territory into a veritable pressure cooker that allows the Muslim Brotherhood, through Hamas, to condition the geopolitics of the region from other capitals, such as Ankara and Cairo.

Another conflict aggravated by the virtual absence of a health system is Yemen, where some 25 million people are already dependent on humanitarian aid whose provision has been drastically limited by the restrictions on movement imposed as a result of the epidemic outbreak. The intersection of war, pandemic and locust infestation affecting the country's crops is the prelude to a catastrophe that will reach even more dire proportions. 

The common element in all these cases is that the very contagious nature of the pandemic severely weakens the capacity of international institutions to deal with conflict-affected areas, coupled with the disruption of humanitarian supply chains. In parallel, international mediation efforts are stalled, while local organisations have suspended or postponed diplomatic initiatives such as the peace talks in Afghanistan or the EU-G5 Sahel summit, and the establishment of a UN mission to support Sudan's political transition is delayed. These gaps create opportunities for jihadist groups to resort, as they have been doing, to “exploiting the chaos”, launching new offensives against the governments most affected by the pandemic in Africa and the Middle East, following the pattern already tried by Daesh in Syria and Libya. Paradoxically, other Islamist factions, which today have a considerable territorial presence, such as Al-Shabaab in Somalia, may see their power compromised if the population under their control rebels against their expected inability to effectively manage the social ravages of the epidemic outbreak. 

The forced retreat of the major powers to deal with the consequences of the pandemic on their own territories is bringing to the fore a tendency of “every man for himself”, which in some cases is revealing clearly divisive, if not authoritarian, political leanings, as in the case of Hungary. It is to be expected, therefore, that decisions taken by nation states to address these simultaneous crises will profoundly alter the international power balances. In the case of North Africa, this endangers the courageous but modest advances towards more just and open societies that began with the Arab revolutions.