Details of Research Outputs

More than twenty years after Ulrich Beck introduced the theory of “world risk society” into academic discourse, we are eventually witnessing the palpable realisation of world risk society with COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic is the first truly global illness and risk that expresses the profound level of globalisation our world has already attained. As a global epidemic risk, the pandemic compels us to confront the reality of our interdependence as well as our common destiny in the global world more than ever. It is hence the “cosmopolitan moment” of “world risk society”—the full recognition of the new existential condition for all, the moment Beck anticipates for other global risks, like climate change, financial turmoil and terrorism. World risk society marks a new beginning of the twenty-first century, in which the world population are living in imagined communities of global risk and fate.