The specter of race in global Covid-19 responses: the future is decolonial.

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic reified pre-existing inequalities predicated on anti-Black racism, imperial geographical cartography, and the violent language of biomilitarism. In this reflective essay I deploy tools of historical sociology to underscore the importance of race, racism, racialization, and global responses to pandemics. I considerer the following questions. First, how can world society develop ideas and concepts for the imagination of a post-imperial global health regime? Second, can alternative futures be imagined if the monopolistic control of power, global scientific processes and knowledge regime is framed around a problematic lexicography of a Eurocentric totalizing project of being human? Lastly, if there is a scientific consensus that we need alternative futures, what kinds of knowledge is needed to bring about a post-imperial liberated order? The future of global health regime is a decolonial one predicated on a new biopolitics. I provide four paradigmatic approaches to subvert imperial global health: (i) pivoting ecocide in the imperial global health regime; (ii) abandonment of a Eurocentric conceptualization of racial hierarchy and modernity; (iii) disbanding the commodification of public health; and (iv) organizing a new world order through health reparations.