On living in an already-unsettled world: COVID as an expression of larger transformations

ABSTRACT

This essay elaborates the terms of our central argument about the current intensification of global disjunctures. We introduce a crucial dimension of our engaged theory of globalization that can usefully be brought to the fore to understand these cleavages and tensions. The essay scrutinizes two key conjunctures, comparing the current Global Covid Crisis with the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. It concludes that massive disjunctures in the way we live locally and globally have had incongruous effects on the global-local nexus, but without leading to positive transformation. Rather, they are both expressions of a longer-term transformation we have been calling the Great Unsettling. Without reflexive counter-practices, the most likely mid-term prognosis for the world is an intensification of tensions and disjunctures that are leading to a further thickening of this complex dynamic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• globalization
• Great Unsettling
• capitalism
• transformation
• climate change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These changes can be understood as explicable in the coming together of the exponential shifts described in terms of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015), and the disjunctive consequences of the Great Unsettling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul James

Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University. He is author or editor of over 30 books, including Globalization matters (with Manfred Steger, Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Urban sustainability in theory and practice (Routledge, 2015).

Manfred B. Steger

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa and Global Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is the author of twenty-eight books on globalization and social theory, including, The rise of the global imaginary: Political ideologies from the French revolution to the global war on terror (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Globalization matters: Engaging the global in unsettled times (with Paul James; Cambridge University Press, 2019).