This book addresses the question of what Singapore's COVID-19 pandemic response in the first year can tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of the Singapore model and what its prospects might be in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous post-pandemic world. As a concise, holistic, and critical documentation of the first year of COVID-19 in Singapore, the multi-disciplinary chapters in this book provide a broad-ranging analysis of an internationally admired model of governance severely tested by a global pandemic crisis whose end is still not in sight.
The book focuses specifically on the interconnections among Singapore’s political economy, public health policies, immigration policies, and the elite and pragmatic system of state authoritarianism that, especially since the 1980s, has been at the heart of managing the tensions and contradictions of a nation-state that is also a global city, an important node in a network of goods, services, investments, wealth, people, ideas, and images, all moving rapidly. The chapters critically employ topics and concepts such as neoliberal globalization, authoritarian populism, moral panic, social stigmatization, heterotopia, spatial segregation, and others to make sense of a thoroughly complex situation.