Writing IR after COVID-19: Reassessing Political Possibilities, Good Faith, and Policy-Relevant Scholarship on Climate Change Mitigation and Nuclear Disarmament

To address the COVID-19 pandemic, states around the world adopted a range of unprecedented and far-reaching policy measures, which had for a long time been presented as impossible. In this article, we argue that such actions suggest not only present but also past political possibilities and that these possibilities have been overlooked or denied by policymakers and scholars alike. We focus on two existential challenges about which pledges for transformative actions have been continuously made throughout the previous decades: climate change and the danger from nuclear weapons. We document the gap between pledges and accomplishments in these two realms and show how claims of impossibility to act do not hold up. Adopting a minimal standard of good faith as seeking to keep one's promises, we argue that the lack of adequate action renders the assumption that policymakers are acting in good faith problematic. We then diagnose a Panglossian double failure of the policy-relevant international relations scholarship: a failure to provide policymakers with the necessary tools to address the root causes of these existential problems and enable them to learn from past experiences and a failure to hold policymakers accountable. We propose three modifications to the scholarship to avoid repeating such failures and conclude with a dual call for political courage and scholarly responsibility.