Introduction to the Handbook of Translocal Development and Global Mobilities

When the coronavirus hit the world end of 2019, something happened that had not been observed in previous pandemics. Media coverage of the pandemic has exceeded the attention given to any other virus outbreak. This can be explained by the unprecedented scale of the disease, but arguably also because it squarely hit the self-centred core areas of the world: East Asia, Europe and North America. Furthermore, media attention has focused not just on the health impact and its human toll, but at least as much on the widespread ‘lockdowns’ imposed by governments in many countries in attempts to contain the spread of the virus. The pandemic virtually froze the world, immobilising what had become a global society based on flows: flows of people, of finance and capital, of merchandise and of information; flows that had become the defining features of the world of globalisation. The unprecedented feature was that the immobilisation of these flows seemed the real issue at stake in the pandemic, and that its cause, the health crisis due to the spread of a new virus, was the lesser issue of the two. At the time of writing, the true impact of COVID-19 is far from clear, but serious repercussions have been reported from across the globe. While the richer countries have been first-hit in relative terms – this due to their prominent involvement in global exchanges – it is clear that increases in the number of people being thrown into absolute poverty will be highest in low-income countries (IMF 2020). Unlike their counterparts in wealthier countries, vendors, craftspeople and people working in all sorts of local service activities in the Global South have little to no savings and cannot afford to remain home. Without a buffer or support scheme, they have to get out to make a living in markets, street-side shops and other places with often high levels of exposure to others and therefore risk of infection. This, admittedly, would have been the same in quarantine conditions imposed in the past. But now, much of the food and merchandise needs to be brought in from elsewhere, often over long distances. From the production side, much of the new employment linked to recent economic growth has been in industries of the networked economy of globalisation, be it garment workers in factories working for export or cleaners and waiters in