Taming Pandemics in International Relations

This article introduces three historical situations where governments, or more accurately, specific leaders in office, shaped the international context in dealing with a transboundary crisis—and were in turn crucially affected in their reign by this crisis. The question at stake is: under what conditions did leaders (and their governments) engage in international cooperation to deal with the transboundary crisis at hand, and how did this cooperation impact the development of the crisis? An informed argument is made for combining crisis management research—in particular a model operationalizing conditions for transboundary cooperation—with an applied history perspective to shed light on the current obstacles to international cooperation in Covid-19 times.