COVID-19 will have lasting effects on almost all facets of life, and security research is no different. Yet, for people who dedicated their lives to studying the effects of violence, there is something familiar about the widespread (but unevenly distributed) precarity brought on by the pandemic. In a special edition of Deep Dive, we’ll look at the latest thinking by leading qualitative security researchers on what the study of conflict can teach us about understanding the effect of COVID-19.

Political scientists Kanisha Bond, Milli Lake, and Sarah Parkinson wrote about four core lessons from their work that have more widespread applicability in the COVID-19 era. The first focuses on the way the effects of the virus are distributed. Despite the rhetoric that COVID-19 has leveled playing fields, hitting people equally across society, in reality, vulnerable people are just that — vulnerable. Just like in armed conflicts, the pandemic hits people who were under pressure before the crisis harder than it does others. Therefore, researchers studying the effects of the pandemic have to consider their work with the same questions the best conflict researchers use: How will my work challenge or reproduce the power structures and societal cleavages that I am studying?

The second lesson is that studying social phenomena, especially in person, is a fraught endeavor. You may grow your knowledge about violence by incentivizing people to share their stories of conflict with you but, in a conflict setting, the sharing of stories itself is often dangerous. Similarly, in a pandemic, it is easy to imagine research that worsens conditions for those being studied even as it helps researchers in their search for knowledge. Is in-person fieldwork viable in a world where communicable disease is a massive concern nearly everywhere? And conversely, is remote fieldwork a suitable replacement for speaking to people face-to-face, given how many governments have used the pandemic to clamp down on digital freedom and privacy? Questions of safety will be of huge concern to researchers of all kinds going forward.

Third, Bond et al. write that social scientists need to learn to take a deep breath before jumping into new research on the effects of COVID-19. There is a tendency among social scientists to want to be the first to do a type of fieldwork or to do the most extreme form of fieldwork. The profession is competitive and there is a lot of pressure to take risks. Yet those risks, in addition to being dangerous, often don’t produce the best scholarship. The pandemic is taking a toll on everyone and expecting top work from people scrambling for child care or worried about the future of their university is unrealistic. Instead, work under that kind of pressure can produce faulty data and, as a result, unconvincing conclusions.

Finally, conflict researchers understand intimately the necessity for individual empathy when investigating large crises. War and disease affect different people in different ways, and to paint peoples’ COVID-19 experiences with too broad a brush would be to miss crucial nuances. Wars are horrible, but some find self-actualization, liberation and even real joy in them sometimes, all of which should be captured when we tell the story of conflict. Similarly, COVID-19 has produced political awakenings and deepened personal relationships along with suffering, often in the same people. The best research on the COVID-19 era will meet people where they are (at least figuratively) and engage with the positive and negative outcomes of the pandemic.

Ariel Oseran tracked Israel’s transformation from a world leader in COVID-19 response to a cautionary tale. In early May, Israel’s closed borders and nationwide lockdown seemed to have suppressed the virus, and transmission was down to 30 new cases per day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reopened the country, urging Israelis to socialize and resume life largely as normal. That move seems to have been a mistake. Last week, Israel reached 1,929 new cases per day, a record high for the country. Israeli officials are warning that there may be a second lockdown coming, which may be a greater economic challenge than the first one, as Israeli unemployment now stands at 22%.

Kate Kohn delved into the US military’s use of video games as a recruitment method. With COVID-19 preventing recruiters from speaking to young people in person, the military’s long-standing fascination with video games has kicked into high gear. The Army now fields an esports team, and, when they’re not banning people for writing about US war crimes on their Discord channel, they are using it to reach younger teens in the hopes of meeting future recruitment goals.

Halima Gikandi reported on rising tension between government and citizens in Mali. At least 11 are dead and 150 injured in anti-government protests in Bamako that have grown in recent weeks. Malians face threats from both non-state armed groups, who have displaced over a million people in the region, and their own government, which, according to Amnesty International, has unlawfully executed civilians during counterterrorism operations. The government made some concessions to protesters last week, but the protests are continuing, calling for President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta’s resignation.

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The presidential palace in Brazil keeps rheas (smaller, less Australian emus), and COVID-19 suffering president Jair Bolsonaro tried to befriend one during his quarantine. It went poorly.

A ghost on St. Helena shakes his head ruefully, thinking about what might have been.

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided that bars are somehow safer in the COVID-19 era if patrons have to buy food every time they buy alcohol. This has led to some iconic menu innovations.

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