Geopolitics, geo-pandemics, geo-healthcare: coronavirus and global politics

Abstract

The current pandemics is not the wellspring of a single conflict between men and nature, but of manifold inter-human conflicts. The Covid-19 and the fight against it cannot overcome the conditionings and the spatial determinations which articulate our life on this planet, but rather are partially dependent on such determinations and to a certain extent intensify them. The pandemic cannot escape geopolitics and geoeconomics, nor does it allow us to escape these dimensions. The oxymoron «geo-pandemics», which combines a parceled spatiality with the world-wide spread of the infection, is the result of this dynamics, and suggests that the current pandemics is not a natural fact, but a social, political, economic and cultural one, which involves a confrontation between East and West, North and South, public and private realms. Space – understood as a system of spatially situated differences of political and economic power, scientific knowledge and organizational capacities – remains a crucial dimension for the fight against Covid-19. «Geo-healthcare» is the differentiated answer to this challenge.