The Covid-19 Pandemic: Territorial, Political and Governance Dimensions of Bordering

Abstract

Whether we talk about the global scale of the threat or focus on the disruption and potential reversal of processes and realities that we assumed immutable, the epochal significance of the COVI-19 pandemic is indisputable. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, no other event has revived territorial borders and sent territorialist shockwaves across the world as COVID-19. The wave of contagion and fear that shadowed the discovery of the coronavirus at the end of 2019 was followed by a wave of bordering in the spring of 2020 when borders were broadly closed as a kneejerk reaction to a threat perceived largely as external. With a focus on Europe, North America and Africa, this special issue aims to advance our knowledge of the multiscalar and multidimensional dynamics triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in various border contexts. The articles in this special issue investigate the response of institutional structures and the agency of regional actors in the face of rebordering, the securitización of the pandemic, the essentialization of fear, the disruption of daily life and livelihoods, the contestation of border closures vis-à-vis questions of survival, and the re/deconstruction of borders dictated by shifting power balances supporting contested border regimes. In the aggregate, this collection of articles reminds us that territory and territoriality remain vigorous and fitting instruments in the toolbox of nation states as demonstrated by the rebordering shocks triggered by the coronavirus pandemic across the world.