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.
