Geopolitics, neoliberalism and colonial thinking in times of pandemic and war

Abstract

The current world crisis ranges from the health emergency generated by the pandemic to the Ukraine-Russia-US-NATO geopolitical conflict and its multiple consequences, among which, for Europe, perhaps the most serious is associated with energy costs. This situation motivates a set of reflections on the relationship between the geographical configuration of globalized neoliberal capitalism and the policies implemented to contain this multidimensional crisis.

In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, with diverse strategies to contain the spread of covid-19, a competition between laboratories to produce vaccines and an eventual global political-military conflict, the dominant geopolitical discourse exacerbated the representative tendencies of colonial thinking, exalting the virtues of the central states of the West and belittling the dependent and peripheral countries to the hegemonic power of current Western capitalism.

In this article we reflect on these tendencies, considering the formation of a modern geopolitical imagination; for which we refer to the historical and geographical context in which this crisis is inscribed. Thus, the current geopolitical conflict reveals a dispute for leadership in this sort of multipolar hegemony that characterizes the 21st century, in which the persistence of colonial thinking in the dominant discourse and in large sectors of the population stands out.