The world’s global events – including pandemics, climate change and natural disasters – have far-reaching impacts across different places and can shape economic, social and political developments in both local and international contexts. These global events also have important implications for the future of humanity, and we must understand how they are changing our world.
Increasingly, major global events are politics, where they are as much about how they are organised as they are about what is being presented. Moreover, the way in which these events are organised and financed has a profound impact on their success or failure. These processes are highly complex and must be understood in order to defeat catastrophism and to establish a new way of managing these events.
This article explores a specific aspect of this complexity: the ways in which the organisation and staging of global events can generate new opportunities for cooperation between countries. This requires a new concept of event organising, which is not based on the promotion of a particular nation or brand but on the creation of a shared space and the construction of a common reality in which the participants can interact.
We have learned from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic that the effects of Big Events on human health are not deterministic, and it is necessary to understand how pre-existing societal conditions and changing “pathways” variables can affect the outcome. In addition, we have developed hypotheses as to the way in which these variables might be measured, and how they can help us better prepare for future events that might have similar consequences to those of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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