The Road Ahead

Examining a post COVID-19 world order and humanity’s shared future

- Charles Onunaiju

The vulnerability of people across all nations in the face of the rampaging COVID-19 not only challenges the traditional conception of national security, but also highlights imperatives related to the vision of a community with a shared future for humanity. The outline of such a future was glaringly put on the global agenda with the advent of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It envisages the convergence of human interests and aspirations across national boundaries, without seeking to undermine the existing structure of the contemporary international system, while making sovereign states as its core unit of engagement. However, this vision of a community with a shared future for humanity recognizes the importance of strategic network of critical and hard infrastructures that would underwrite it.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has squarely put into context the notion of our common humanity contained in the vision of building a community with a shared future for all humankind. At the First Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in May 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping described infrastructure connectivity, which is at the core of the Belt and Road Initiative, as the foundation of development through international cooperation and urged the promotion of land, maritime, air and cyberspace connectivity, connecting the networks of highways, railways, and seaports. In addition, Xi urged improvement of trans-regional logistics networks, and coordination in policies, rules, and standards so as to provide institutional safeguards for connectivity.

The outbreak of COVID-19 and its rapid spread worldwide has fundamentally challenged humanity’s imagination to rise above the particularisms of nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, and even levels of development exclusivity, and move toward the inclusiveness of common humanity.