Covid‐19 and Global Networks: Reframing our understanding of globalization and transnationalism

Abstract

It is now over 3 years since the global Covid-19 pandemic cast its long shadow over the human face of globalization and transnationalism, fundamentally changing the practices of transnational actors and their constituent networks in both global and local affairs. Those global networks between individuals, family-members, firms, social groups, and organizations have been disrupted and reframed to produce new forms of capital flows, labour mobilities, communication technologies, and social-economic-political and cultural relationships. Such disruptions have transcended territorial borders presenting significant challenges to states, firms, cities, and governance. Covid-19 has fundamentally redrawn our understanding of research focused on (a) transnational social sciences perspectives; (b) networks, flows, connections, and disconnections; (c) human agency and 'globalization from below'; and (d) the future of globalization and transnationalism. The pandemic and ensuing post-pandemic disruption for global society have raised more questions than answers for individuals, communities, governance, states, and organizations. Global inequality has been magnified, populism remains a powerful force, and there is a growing debate whether we are drifting into a new epoch manifested by deglobalization, with heightened friction over the international trade of goods and services, global migration flows, and a new spirit of the protectionism of borders, which has been ramped-up over the past decade with Trumpism and, in Europe, Brexit. But, simultaneously, the fallout of Covid-19 has speeded up, intensified, and in some senses democratized communication and connections, through the advent (or just discovery) of platforms like MS Teams, Zoom, Bluejeans which have not only become normalized technologies for individuals to work from home or engage in their