It is a mistake, in our opinion, to think of national security without considering human security, the latter a product of a state’s capacity to provide its population with the essential elements of well-being such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, and freedom-from-want. The concept, however, is generalizable to other actors (notably China) and other regions. Our particular interest is in the post-Soviet space and how inequalities in the provision of social welfare services (such as healthcare) lead to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by aggressor states (notably Russia in our case) through malign influence campaigns (Buckley, Clem, and Herron 2019). Our Minerva research focuses on this state capacity-legitimacy-stability linkage and the geopolitical dynamic between/among states. Failure in this regard, which unfortunately is an option, will likely manifest ultimately in a growing lack of confidence among citizens in their governments, which in turn portends an erosion of legitimacy and, if left unchecked, may lead to political and geopolitical instability. However, we emphasize the third aspect of state capacity that is more relevant to the subject at hand: the ability to deliver services that provide well-being and how the populace perceives that delivery.
In its broadest sense, state capacity refers to the ability of a government to control its territory and extract the means for survival from the population.
In other words: the downside is almost universally a failure of state capacity. Beyond the devastating and widely discussed humanitarian and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the current global crisis also exposes the dangers inherent in governmental shortcomings to provide for their citizens’ welfare adequately.
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