Rarely has scientific research been as solicited as in the past two years, as societies struggle to cope with the coronavirus. The questions raised by COVID-19 are germane to the medical and the social sciences. From an International Relations perspective, COVID-19 gets to the heart of what comprises a common good-the global commons. From a public policy perspective, COVID-19 is the wicked policy problem par excellence, requiring inter-agency collaboration. From a comparative politics perspective, COVID-19 provides a vast living dataset to engage in multi-level comparisons and real-time experiments. In the medical research field, the pandemic has provided advancements in medical science that would not have been possible without access to a living laboratory. The huge advances in medical science have themselves been filtered by societal dynamics such as trust and transparency, or risk and resilience, themes that feature in several papers in this Special Issue.

Responding to existential dilemmas, the COVID-19 pandemic calls for a major transdisciplinary research effort that necessarily combines several levels of empirical analysis and methodological tools and bridges distinct academic and scientific traditions.