Pandemic Geopolitics and the Bordering of COVID-19 Academic and Lay Geographies of the Pandemic and Policies to Contain and Mitigate the Novel Coronavirus

Individual and collective strategies to cope with the pandemic are highly geopolitical, revealing the intricacies of the relations between power and space. Attempts to contain and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 can be understood as sociospatial practices. Places where the disease has been identified are isolated. Spaces are disrupted when established connections (such as airlines connections) are severed and mobility is restricted. Networks are disturbed through social distancing (a misnomer for physical distancing) and self-isolation, and reinvented and reconfigured through telecommunications. More specifically scale is a useful lens to examine pandemic geopolitics, both the policy responses and the representations that make sense of these policy responses. Practices aiming at containing the pandemic are multiscalar bordering processes. They range from the delimitation and the separation of specific body parts (through facemasks, gloves, new habits including handwashing to avoid contact of potentially contaminated body parts with mouth and eyes), the seclusion of ill, contaminated and/or (potentially) contagious bodies (through protective suits and quarantine arrangements), the segregation of hospital departments devoted to COVID-19 patients and of accommodations dedicated to potential virus carriers, and even entire cities (through isolation), countries (through closed state borders) and continents (through discontinued intercontinental air traffic). Last but not least the temporality of these bordering practices remain uncertain with no perspective on the temporal closure of the pandemic, of the sanitary measures or of the exceptional political and policing arrangements that enabled them (and their impact on the rule of law). This chapter explores the representations of the pandemic and the measures taken to contain and mitigate it through the lens of critical geopolitics. It analyzes academic and lay geographies of the pandemic by reviewing representations of the pandemic in popular culture and news media (popular geopolitics), in COVID-19 policy communication (practical geopolitics) and in geographical publications (formal geopolitics).