Conflict, Penn on the World after COVID-19 Violent Conflict after COVID-19

Penn on the World after COVID-19 is a joint project of Penn Global and Perry World House. We've asked some of Penn's leading faculty, fellows, and scholars to imagine what the global pandemic will leave in its wake.

Alex Weisiger is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the causes of war and peace.

COVID-19 has already killed three times the number of people who died in war in 2019. It is thus no surprise that violent conflict—like so many other once-urgent issues—has been muted in policy conversations.

Yet violence continues to lurk in the background, and the world after COVID-19 will surely carry with them significant risks of increased violence. Although many have predicted increased great power competition and perhaps conflagration between the United States and China, in the immediate term COVID-19 is more likely to lead to violence in the developing world. Unfortunately, too few are focused on it.

Despite the talk of a new Cold War or risks of a hot war, tensions between the United States and China—which have both attempted to paper over their own COVID-19 failures by drawing attention to the deficiencies of the other—are unlikely to lead to violence in the near term. While concerns have been raised about China’s actions in contested zones in the South China Sea, the Chinese continue to believe their bargaining power will only grow with time. Incentives to take advantage of the crisis in the near term to achieve gains in contested regions are likely offset by the risks of miscalculation and the potentially catastrophic costs of great power war.

Instead, COVID-19 will—In the long term—likely entrench and exacerbate the Sino-American hostility, undermining the kinds of economic and personal exchanges that are important in the long run for managing disagreements and limiting conflict. Similar dynamics apply in interactions between countries like Iran or North Korea and their enemies, which likely see little to gain from starting a shooting war now but show no serious signs of rapprochement with their enemies.

The implications of COVID-19 for civil conflict in the developing world have received less attention, but are arguably more significant. The hope in early days that the pandemic might at least promote pacification—with ceasefires announced in countries ranging from Colombia to Yemen to the Philippines—proved unfounded, as fighting quickly resumed. War turns out to be a persistent pre-existing condition.

Just as COVID-19 exacerbates such conditions in humans, it will likely to do the same in countries. Economic shocks—from reductions in trade, the loss of remittances, reduction in tourism, decreased demand for commodities, or other sources—create aggrieved political and economic losers. Leaders will be tempted to respond to failures to control the virus and its effects by scapegoating marginal groups in society, aggravating existing political grievances, which motivate both rebellion by the dissatisfied and preemptive repression by autocrats and their governments. 

At the same time, political disruptions will create opportunities for both repression and rebellion. More capable leaders will be tempted to take advantage of an unusually propitious moment for centralizing power: the demands of the crisis will provide a domestic justification for restrictions on the civic sphere. At the same time, diminished international costs of autocratization—at a time when a European state like Hungary has cast off the remaining vestiges of democracy with no serious consequence—will remove another major reason for restraint.

With such windows of opportunity, autocrats from Hungary to Hong Kong will be tempted to undertake preemptive repression against domestic opponents to solidify their hold on power. Other, less capable leaders will find that the crisis deprives them of key tools of domestic control at precisely the time that protests become more likely. In these countries, new rebellions may emerge, and existing rebel groups will be emboldened.

At some point, the pandemic will end. However, in the world after COVID-19, the mourning will not end. Powerful states may regret the lost opportunities for salvaging better working relations with one another. Meanwhile, less powerful states are, as at many points in history, likely to mourn those who have died in new and worsened civil wars.

The views expressed in Penn on the World after COVID-19 posts are solely the author’s and not those of Penn, Penn Global or Perry World House.