Post-Covid Transformations

This volume explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the sustainability of the present global political and economic system and the extent to which that system may as a result be undergoing transformation. Towards this aim, the contributing authors raise a number of key questions. First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on neoliberal hyper-globalization? Second, what insights do earlier pandemics along with other inter-related crises such as those of climate, inequality, social reproduction, and continued fallout of the global financial crisis offer for understanding the medium- to long-term implications of COVID-19? Third, to what extent might the COVID pandemic lead to progressive political transformations? Towards this latter goal, the contributors to this volume also offer a number of suggestions as to what a post-COVID-19 world might look like and how post-COVID transformations might be channeled in a direction more conducive towards social justice and equality. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Introduction: post-COVID transformations 1. Pandemics in global and historical perspective 2. Trade, health and social reproduction in a COVID world 3. Shared pretenses for collective inaction: the economic growth imperative, COVID-19, and climate change 4. On living in an already- unsettled world: COVID as an expression of larger transformations 5. Global transitioning: beyond the Covid-19 pandemic 6. Vaccine nationalism: contested relationships between COVID-19 and globalization 7. India’s pandemic: spectacle, social murder and authoritarian politics in a lockdown nation 8. Work in the post-COVID-19 pandemic: the case of South Korea 9. A new deal after COVID-19 10. The post-pandemic world and the prospect for global justice: a commentary

Kevin Gray is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. His research interests relate to the political economy of development, with a regional focus on East Asia.  He has researched widely on the region, and in particular, on the political economy of both North and South Korea. He also has interests in Gramscian approaches to international relations and in theories of late development and state formation.  Barry Gills is Editor in Chief of Globalizations and Professor of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has written widely on World System theory, neoliberalism, globalization, global crises, democracy, resistance and transformative praxis.