News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
March was a critical month for the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world. While the virus started to spread rapidly across different countries, China, Spain and Italy portrayed a sombre future for those that left the virus unchecked. And that seemed to be the case for Brazil. As […]
COVID-19 is currently spreading at an alarming rate. Despite showing signs of slowing down, the total number of infected individuals stands at around 13 million as of late July 2020, which is astounding compared to previous instances of the coronavirus, including SARS and MERS. In light of this, a strategy […]
A couple of years ago I found a letter from the Red Cross dated 1997, responding to an enquiry from my mother. They had received her file on her missing brother who was killed during the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995 and confirmed they would undertake an investigation to find his […]
COVID-19 attacks the human body, but it is largely the body politic that defends us against it. While we wait for vaccines and treatments, we depend on health systems, governments, and the actions of others to detect the virus, control its spread, and break the chain of infection. But our […]
The devastating toll of the coronavirus pandemic has ignited a debate about the intersection of public health and national security. Once recognised as global leaders in pandemic preparedness, the United States and the United Kingdom have struggled to integrate policy responses to COVID-19 into existing security frameworks and to allocate resources accordingly. Indeed, public health spending in both countries pales in comparison to spending on counter-terrorism, even though more America lives have […]
In announcing the merger of the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Boris Johnson has not created a centaur, with the hindquarters of a development agency and the head of a diplomatic service, but a puggle: an entirely new animal. Merging two departments does […]
As a civil servant working in the state of Kerala, India, for the past seven years, I have been on the foreground while the state has dealt with various challenges – from severe flooding in 2018 and 2019 to the outbreak of Nipah virus in 2018. However, dealing with a […]
In the past term, through the magic of video conferencing, students in the MPP module of Applied Behavioural Public Policy have explored a variety of ways in which behavioural science has been used in public policy to influence people – from getting them to pay their taxes on time, to […]