Strategic and Reflective Report: PLAAS 2021-2022

Abstract

This biennial report offers an account of PLAAS during a time of challenge and transition. If 2020 was the Year of the Pandemic, then 2021-2022 ushered in the Years of the New (ab)Normal. In 2020, attention was almost exclusively focused on dealing with the threat of the SARS-Covid-19 virus and on grappling with the impacts of the often inappropriate, heavy-handed and authoritarian nature of the regulatory response to it. In other words, the goal was to survive and to make sense of the swiftly changing social reality unfolding around us, hoping that, someday, normalcy would return. But as the virus mutated through successive waves, it became more and more clear that there would be no return to the pre-pandemic world. Neither would there be much “building back better” – the formulation used for the hope that the challenge of responding to the virus could liberate energies to create a fairer, more democratic, more inclusive society. Instead, the pandemic seemed to inaugurate a new phase in world history – one in which the optimistic dreams of inclusive growth, international co-operation and solidarity captured in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gave way to the unstable, unpredictable and cynical realities of the “polycrisis” – a world of multipolar geopolitical competition, state capture, and permanent emergency.