Chapters authored
The State and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Missed Opportunities for Social and Economic Progress
The unique feature of the problem field studied is linked to the fact that during the COVID-19 pandemic representatives of almost all societies witnessed failures of the state. These failures included lockdowns and social distancing in the first stage of the pandemic as well as the fast growth of the number of infected and lethal cases in the second stage. This chapter shows that waves of the pandemic which followed each other accompanied by the inability of the countries to prevent them aggravated the problems of economic growth and social instability. The chapter proves that the coronavirus pandemic unveiled the state’s failures both in economic and social policies. The deepening societal crisis caused by citizens’ impoverishment, unemployment growth and absence of a clear perspective of when the pandemic would end and the new post-COVID reality would take shape, made theorists and practitioners return to the phenomenon of the modern state which seemed unexplored by the early 2020s. The author proposed a theoretical basis for prioritizing the functions of the state, which assumes that two of the three groups of state functions related to the distribution of resources and economic stabilization mutually determine each other, albeit with a certain amount of contradictions.
Part of the book: Resilience and Realities