The Coronavirus Crisis and Its Teachings

COVID provoked a multi-dimensional crisis that overwhelmed existing concepts of social resilience that focus on a singular crisis. This volume proposes an alternative.

In The Coronavirus Crisis and Its Teachings: Steps towards Multi-Resilience Roland Benedikter and Karim Fathi first describe the pluri-dimensional characteristics of the Coronavirus crisis. Then they draw the pillars for a more "multi-resilient" Post-Corona world including socio-political recommendations on how to generate it. The Coronavirus crisis has proven to be a bundle crisis consisting of multiple, interconnected crisis dimensions.

Before Corona, most concepts of a "resilient society" implied a rather isolated focus on only one crisis at a time. Future preparedness in the 21st century will require a multi- and transdisciplinary risk-management concept that the authors call "multi-resilience". "Multi-resilience" means to systematically enhance the universal resilience competencies of societies, such as collective intelligence or overall responsiveness, making them appliable to pluri-dimensional crisis contexts. If the Coronavirus crisis in retrospect will have contributed to implementing multi-resilience, then it will ultimately have contributed to progress.

This volume includes a Foreword by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and an Afterword by Manfred B. Steger.