Crafting an Asian Future in the Post-COVID-19 Asia

Not too long ago, the world was busy crafting a global future with unmitigated globalization and the relentless march of Industry 4.0. A black swan event then happened. An outbreak of COVID-19 coronavirus surged worldwide and resulted in a global pandemic that devastated economies, eliminated the weak/infirmed/elderly/young, and then targeted the general population. It destroyed small and medium-sized enterprises and hastened the demise of sunset industries, resulting in record numbers of bankruptcies. Instead of succumbing to the despair of a worldwide cataclysmic event, a group of Asian scholars from multiple disciplines got together. This group of scholars put their different specializations to use and adopted an on-site, viewpoint perspective of how the pandemic affected their lives and also the lives of the communities in their studies to contribute to this volume.

The volume is interdisciplinary by nature and a product of exceptional contributions from a multidisciplinary panel of scholars, ranging from anthropologists, sociologists, historians to economists. The interdisciplinary approach employed here allows one to look at and understand subject matter critically - COVID-19 and its recovery - not just through diverse analytical frameworks but also through broader, historical variations as well as technologies studies. There is no existing literature equivalent to this subject matter given the ongoing pandemic as it unfolds simultaneously across regions and even continents while exerting differential impacts on various sectors such as agriculture, religion, technology, etc. With the advantage of its interdisciplinary approaches examined in differing geographical locations in Asia, the volume makes a scholarly contribution to analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and the coping mechanisms adopted by humankind in various capacities to mitigate it.