Introduction

The global COVID-19 pandemic presents multiple challenges for international and everyday security, exacerbating existing security tensions while also producing new security concerns. COVID-19 has produced new realities and modes of being and living as the world experiences the varying and uneven effects of the pandemic and efforts to mitigate it. In some ways, it also represents a new epoch as we increasingly speak of a “pre-” or “postpandemic” world, where time is divided into the world before the pandemic, and what a “return to normal” means or might look like. This chapter considers questions of security in the pandemic age through critical approaches to security. Generally, a critical approach to security questions many of the assumptions found in traditional schools such as realism and liberalism. Critical security studies broadly encompass a wide range of schools of thought and ontological and epistemological concerns. The “capital C” Critical Security Studies (CSS) of the Aberystwyth School embraces wider perceptions of security beyond the state, making human security and emancipation a central focus, while other (“small c”) critical and poststructuralist security approaches focus on identity, securitization, and the referent object of security, language, discourse, and what constitutes “reality”— themes of major significance in an era of “posttruth” politics.

This chapter will explore the ways in which critical security approaches can analyze and make sense of what we mean by “security” in the pandemic era, and how the pandemic has become a “threat multiplier.” Understanding the impact of the pandemic on global security from a range of critical perspectives means addressing human security, biopolitics, language, image, and power. In some cases, the pandemic has solidified existing power relations and given rise to new ones, but it has also prompted debate about how we can or whether we should seek a different type of “security.” Critical security approaches will be used to analyze the global pandemic in terms of how we understand hierarchical relations, identity, bodies, and the relationship between truth and knowledge—who benefits and who is excluded.

The global nature of the pandemic permits an opportunity to take an overview of multiple constraints from an international crisis that affects virtually all states and individuals, albeit differently. This differentiation is a central concern of this chapter because, despite the widespread rhetoric that the pandemic means “we are all in this together,” some have faced greater insecurity than others.