Eppur si muove: Realism in the age of pandemic

Abstract

The IMEMO forecast provides, as always, an invaluable Russian perspective on global affairs for Western scholars. Previous iterations have highlighted the clear and widening difference between mainstream Russian International Relations (IR) scholarship and comparable Western analysis of the same issues. One of the most useful aspects of the forecast and response hosted by New Perspectives is that it generates a scholarly and mutually respectful engagement with these differences in a way that rarely happens elsewhere and which has now been made still more difficult by the current pandemic. The current forecast is, inevitably, different from its predecessors because of the global health emergency. Yet what is striking here is not the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has overturned previous assumptions, but the extent to which it has not. The most acute challenges to security and to political and economic stability which are so clearly laid out in the forecast are not the traditional threats considered in realist scholarship, they are issues that realism has traditionally discounted. Nevertheless, the forecast holds tightly to the realist approach that has shaped its assessments in the past. This is profoundly problematic for the assessment of the world in the immediate and medium term because realism does not provide a framework for making sense of the problems now confronting individuals, communities and states.