Economic globalization never proceeded in a smooth steady trajectory. The current international economy, organized around liberal principles, faces potential problems unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Two popular theoretical approaches offer varying reasons for the survivability of the contemporary order. One stresses the benefits associated with participating in liberal international orders, claiming such arrangements are essentially self-sustaining. The rival view emphasizes the uneven distribution of gains, emphasizing the role of leadership, especially for dampening crises. To examine the support for each argument, I examine the evolution of international monetary arrangements. International monetary orders lie at the heart of liberal international economies; no prior liberal monetary order has proven self-sustaining. Liberal international monetary sub-orders depend upon leadership as much as cooperation for their survival-leaders exert efforts to shape followers' actions so long as the leader draws sufficient benefits to make such efforts worthwhile. The economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic provides the latest illustration of this point, though these arguments also suggest experiences across issue-areas will vary.

Do global health institutions keep up with globalization forces? We contend that they seriously lag behind. While medical knowledge becomes more and more refined in showing how diseases spread globally, the political order meant to address this problem is barely global. It is global in terms of the promises it makes in declarations and even legally binding instruments (institutional foreground). But many entrenched political practices of interaction do not keep these promises (institutional background). We explain this with the dominance of a traditional diplomatic 'feel of the game' in which often narrowly defined national interests, positioning battles among states, and a subordination of global health under considerations of international security and economics prevail. Based on this diagnosis, we discuss three scenarios for the further evolution of the global health order: (1) the persistence of current institutions, (2) revisions of the institutional foreground and persistence of the background, and (3) a qualitative break that makes amendments to both. While the COVID-19 crisis provides openings for the third and, even more so, the second one, the current upheavals in the liberal constellation of orders makes the first scenario the most likely one.

Since the Second World War, globalization has been underpinned by a liberal international order, a rules-based system structured around the principles of economic interdependence, democracy, human rights and multilateralism. However, the relationship between international mobility and the liberal international order (LIO) is contested. In the article, I disaggregate 'international mobility' into three regimes: the travel regime, the voluntary (labour) migration regime, and the refugee regime-each governed by distinct norms and operating procedures. I outline the characteristics of the LIO that pertain to international mobility and provide evidence to demonstrate that none of the three dimensions of international mobility-travel, migration, and asylum-reflects these characteristics. Given the LIO principles enumerated above, the exclusion of international mobility from the LIO is surprising. I survey the scholarship on the LIO and international mobility and argue that the exclusion of international mobility from the LIO rests on benefits provided to core states by the status quo ante governing international mobility. That is, the status quo ante permits countries of destination to determine the level and type of cross-border mobility. Thus, international mobility continues to be underpinned by the play of state preferences rather than the principles of the LIO. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to shape these norms and operating procedures in ways that reinforce the status quo.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/ia/iiaa229.].

Deliberations over the COVID-19 pandemic's long-term effects on the global balance of power have spurred a large and rancorous debate, including speculation about a shift in the definition of national security and prescriptions about where it should focus. That argument will no doubt continue. But we argue that one consequence is already evident: the United States has spent the last seventy years portraying itself as a security provider in all key domains-for many an intrinsic component of its status as a global leader. One reasonable broad conclusion from the US struggle with COVID-19 is that it has further forfeited its broad leadership position on the basis of its behaviour. Yet that, although possibly true, would only portray one element of the story. The more profound insight exposed by COVID-19 is of a new reality: in a world where both naturogenic and anthropogenic threats pose immense national security challenges, decades of mistaken assumptions and policy choices have created a new environment, one where the United States has been redefined as a security consumer, at least in terms of international public health issues associated with the spread of deadly infectious diseases.

COVID-19 is the most invasive global crisis in the postwar era, jeopardizing all dimensions of human activity. By theorizing COVID-19 as a public bad, I shed light on one of the great debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries regarding the relationship between the United States and liberal international order (LIO). Conceptualizing the pandemic as a public bad, I analyze its consequences for US hegemony. Unlike other international public bads and many of the most important public goods that make up the LIO, the COVID-19 public bad not only has some degree of rivalry but can be made partially excludable, transforming it into more of a club good. Domestically, I demonstrate how the failure to effectively manage the COVID-19 public bad has compromised America's ability to secure the health of its citizens and the domestic economy, the very foundations for its international leadership. These failures jeopardize US provision of other global public goods. Internationally, I show how the US has already used the crisis strategically to reinforce its opposition to free international movement while abandoning the primary international institution tasked with fighting the public bad, the World Health Organization (WHO). While the only area where the United States has exercised leadership is in the monetary sphere, I argue this feat is more consequential for maintaining hegemony. However, even monetary hegemony could be at risk if the pandemic continues to be mismanaged.

The COVID-19 pandemic affects all countries, but how governments respond is dictated by politics. Amid this, the World Health Organization (WHO) has tried to coordinate advice to states and offer ongoing management of the outbreak. Given the political drivers of COVID-19, we argue this is an important moment to advance International Relations knowledge as a necessary and distinctive method for inclusion in the WHO repertoire of knowledge inputs for epidemic control. Historical efforts to assert technical expertise over politics is redundant and outdated: the WHO has always been politicized by member states. We suggest WHO needs to embrace the politics and engage foreign policy and diplomatic expertise. We suggest practical examples of the entry points where International Relations methods can inform public health decision-making and technical policy coordination. We write this as a primer for those working in response to COVID-19 in WHO, multilateral organizations, donor financing departments, governments and international non-governmental organizations, to embrace political analysis rather than shy away from it. Coordinated political cooperation is vital to overcome COVID-19.

This article studies a conflict over two competing norms in which the actors demonstrated incompatible positions not through arguments, but through actions. During the SARS crisis, China and the World Health Organization (WHO) entered a norm conflict over the precedence of sovereignty or global health security. Both resorted to behavioural, not discursive contestation: while the WHO practically but not rhetorically challenged the sovereignty norm by acting according to the norm of global health security, China-without openly acknowledging it-contravened the basic principles of global health security by acting according to the overlapping sovereignty norm. Why and with what consequences do actors choose to contest norms through actions rather than words? The article accounts for the resort to behavioural contestation by pointing to the strategic advantages it offers for furthering a contentious norm understanding without facing the social costs of making it explicit. It furthermore highlights that behavioural contestation may feed back into and change the odds of discursive contestation as its practical effects provide rhetorical resources to (de-)legitimate one or the other position. The propositions are illustrated in the interactions of China and the WHO during the SARS crisis and the subsequent norm development. This article forms part of the special section of the May 2019 issue of on 'The dynamics of dissent', guest-edited by Anette Stimmer and Lea Wisken.

The World Health Organization (WHO) occupies a central place in the system of global health governance and plays a key role in the control of epidemics and pandemics. The 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa, however, saw widespread and sustained criticism of its performance, leading many to call for its reform and even replacement. This article moves on from initial analyses of the WHO's 'failure', to argue that the crisis has led to a shift in its authority as a global governor. It argues that the WHO's traditional basis of authority was largely expert and delegated; that it provided technical advice and normative guidance, and that its authority was 'on loan' from member states, who exerted considerable influence over the WHO. Its actions during the West African Ebola outbreak remained consistent with this, but it was unable to cope with what the outbreak required. The criticisms both of the WHO and the wider system of global health governance, however, have opened up a space where the balance of authority is shifting to one based more heavily on capacity-the ability to act in a crisis. If such a shift is realized, it will create different expectations of the WHO which, if they are not fulfilled, may lead to trust in the organisation declining and its legitimacy being compromised.

This article presents two approaches that have dominated International Relations in their approach to the international politics of health. The statist approach, which is primarily security-focused, seeks to link health initiatives to a foreign or defence policy remit. The globalist approach, in contrast, seeks to advance health not because of its intrinsic security value but because it advances the well-being and rights of individuals. This article charts the evolution of these approaches and demonstrates why both have the potential to shape our understanding of the evolving global health agenda. It examines how the statist and globalist perspectives have helped shape contemporary initiatives in global health governance and suggests that there is evidence of an emerging convergence between the two perspectives. This convergence is particularly clear in the articulation of a number of UN initiatives in this area - especially the One World, One Health Strategic Framework and the Oslo Ministerial Declaration (2007) which inspired the first UN General Assembly resolution on global health and foreign policy in 2009 and the UN Secretary-General's note "Global health and foreign policy: strategic opportunities and challenges". What remains to be seen is whether this convergence will deliver on securing states' interest long enough to promote the interests of the individuals who require global efforts to deliver local health improvements.

The Seventh Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the first international treaty to outlaw an entire class of weapons, was held in Geneva in December 2011. On 7 December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the highest-ranking US government official to address a BWC meeting. Secretary Clinton told the assembled delegation that ‘we view the risk of bioweapons attack as both a serious national security challenge and a foreign policy priority’. At the same time, she warned that a large-scale disease outbreak ‘could cripple an already fragile global economy’. Secretary Clinton's speech reflected a new understanding that the range of biological threats to international security has expanded from state-sponsored biological warfare programmes to include biological terrorism, dual-use research and naturally occurring infectious diseases such as pandemics. Recognizing these changes, President Barack Obama released a new national strategy for countering biological threats in 2009. This strategy represents a shift in thinking away from the George W. Bush administration's focus on biodefence, which emphasized preparing for and responding to biological weapon attacks, to the concept of biosecurity, which includes measures to prevent, prepare for and respond to naturally occurring and man-made biological threats. The Obama administration's biosecurity strategy seeks to reduce the global risk of naturally occurring and deliberate disease outbreaks through prevention, international cooperation, and maximizing synergies between health and security. The biosecurity strategy is closely aligned with the Obama administration's broader approach to foreign policy, which emphasizes the pragmatic use of smart power, multilateralism and engagement to further the national interest. This article describes the Obama administration's biosecurity strategy; highlights elements of continuity and change from the policies of the Bush administration; discusses how it fits into Obama's broader foreign policy agenda; and analyses critical issues that will have to be addressed in order to implement the strategy successfully.