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 de‐globalization, 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 daily workplace, but also to engage in social encounters perpetuating global‐local relations and sustaining networks and connections. The editors of Global Networks, Jonathan Beaverstock, Robin Cohen, Alisdair Rogers, and Steve Vertovec invited open call submissions to address the impacts of the pandemic on the human face of contemporary globalization and transnationalism. We challenged authors to comment on the effects of Covid‐19 reconfiguring global networks, inviting theoretically and empirically grounded contributions across a broad range of social science disciplines, subjects and empirical studies, and geographical contexts. To nudge the debate, we posited several broad sweeping questions for authors to consider in their own communities of practice: how have different facets of society, from people and families to firms and organizations coped, adapted, and reacted to the pandemic? Has the pandemic opened up new possibilities for reconfiguring global networks? Will the pandemic curtail global networks and realign to the local? Will globalization be finally undone by the pandemic? The accepted papers offer both significant individual contributions, but also as a collective, a deep understanding of how the challenge of Covid‐19 reconfigures contemporary globalization, international migration, transnationalism, supply‐chains, and ensuing global networks across society. Broadly speaking, the papers covered several inter‐related theoretically and evidence‐based topics from international migration, mobilities, and proximity (Ansar, 2023; Hari et al., 2023) to transnational immobilities (Kempny, 2023; Simola et al., 2023; Skovgaard‐Smith, 2023) to diasporic and transnational communities (Ceccagno & Thurø, 2023; Müller, 2023; Yamamura, 2023) and forced labour in global value chains (Hughes et al., 2023). Collectively, the authors should be highly commended for their resilience and inventiveness in completing original empirical work during a period of unprecedented disruption for themselves, their subjects and their institutions. The ability to conduct in‐person research, whether by interviews or participant observation, is often essential to transnational research and also often taken‐for‐granted. How far remote or virtual research methods can successfully capture the matters of interest remains to be seen. The Special Issue is composed of nine papers, all engaged with the grand mission of the journal Global Networks. The advent of Covid‐19 and the effective closure of international borders had an immediate effect on the experiences and mobilities of international students throughout the world. Through the theoretical lens of transnationalism and international student migration literatures, Hari et al. (2023) analysed the experiences of international students living in Ontario, Canada, from the onset of the Covid‐19 pandemic. The interviews revealed that the students, often thought of as archetypal transnational migrants, became highly dependent on their transnational families for support (economic and emotional), mediated through enhanced virtual communication, and also experienced precarity and anxieties about their financial independence, and future careers and mobilities. The authors conclude that the episode revealed challenges for the Canadian government to support international students in the future. Ansar (2023) offers a different perspective on the effects of the Covid‐19 pandemic on a contrasting group of international migrants, Bangladeshi women migrants living and working in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The research offers new theorical insights into the junctures between globalization ‘from below’, migration and gendered labour. The study interviewed 35 current and returnee Bangladeshi women domestic workers using the Bangladeshi Civil Society for Migration platform. The impact of Covid‐19 on these women were to use Ansar's (2022, p. 1) phrase, ‘colossal’. They became overworked, continually isolated, and experienced significant economic hardships (e.g., unpaid salaries and wage theft). Their mobility was restricted by GCC countries and interviewees, and secondary data reported sexual‐ and gendered‐based violence, and the absence of legal recompense. Empirically, Ansar's (2022) contribution brings to bear the precarity and vulnerability of contract female migrant labour during a period of unprecedented upheaval, thus shining further light on our understanding of globalization from below. Turning to immobilities and the Covid‐19 pandemic, Simola et al. (2023) investigate the experiences of transnational families ‘not being there’ with their (home) families because of lockdown and the inability to cross‐borders due to international travel restrictions. Their empirical study focused on migrants (N = 41) living in Finland and Belgium who had families (aged over 65) residing in Europe and North and South America. At the fulcrum of the analysis was the respondents’ emotional turmoil for seeking to be physical proximity with family members, but being unable to be physically co‐present because of lockdown. Simola et al. (2023) traced stories of disrupted mobility and the difficulty of overcoming ‘not being there’. The paper is rich with empirical findings and provides new insights into theoretical work on perceived and felt affinities between transnational families and their family members elsewhere, which Simola et al. (2023, p. 12) suggest, ‘has broader relevance beyond literatures on transnational family lives … beyond the context of the pandemic’. Continuing with the theme of immobility, Skovgaard‐Smith (2023) explores how the Covid‐19 pandemic dislocated and interrupted the cross‐border movement of migrants, and impacted their transnational life and sense of belonging. An important theoretical contribution was unpacking meanings of (pandemic) immobility contextualized in transnationalism and mobilities studies. Empirically, Skovgaard‐Smith (2023) drew on ‘virtual’ ethnography with 36 respondents across 26 different countries (using platforms like MS Teams, Zoom, WebX) and a qualitative survey of 102 responses. Stories gathered from the respondents illuminated transnational life during the pandemic; from living in the ‘zoom‐iverse’ to being in lockdown and, ‘“trapped” by closed borders’ (p. 7). The migrant stories paint graphic pictures of the impact of the pandemic on everyday life and theoretically teases out the effect of im(mobility) as a global disruptor on transnational families and living, and in a wider discourse, mobilities studies. Kempny (2022) completes the trio of papers on Covid‐19 and immobilities by focusing on how the pandemic has affected the transnational practices and mobilities regimes of migrant women in Northern Ireland, originating from eastern Europe, the United States, Argentina, and India, drawing on autoethnographic research and in‐depth interviews (N = 18). Theoretically, the paper is founded on migration and gender, and particularly female migration studies associated with women employed in (low and average paid) social and healthcare, and other professions (e.g., accountants and interpreters). The empirical work draws out the precarity of Covid‐19; travel disruption between borders, quarantine, the postponement of travel back to see family members at home, for example. Presenting the data in vignettes and stories embellishes the richness of the findings and provides important evidence‐based insights into both immobilities and uneven mobilities as they affect different experiences of female migration. For Kempny (2023), women migrant immobility can be differentiated; a controlled planned decision to stay, but also an unplanned constraint to stay imposed by difficult individual circumstances and, or externalities. Two papers focus on the effects of Covid‐19 on diaspora communities. Ceccagno and Thunø (2022) investigate how the Chinese state managed to create a geopolitical opportunity from the Covid‐19 crisis using social media to mobilize processes of ‘transnational nation‐building’ with its citizens living abroad (p. 1). In this study, the subjects of study were the Chinese diaspora resident in Italy (which has the highest number of Chinese nationals living in the European Union at approximately 318,000). The main argument of the paper was that the Chinese state's management of the Covid‐19 crisis created a, ‘significant capacity for extra‐territorial mobilization … to turn a severe health and political crisis into a transnational political tool’ (p. 2). Data were collected from secondary sources and interviews using Skype. The main finding was that the Chinese WeChat social media platform, which has over 1.2 billion regular users and at least 100 million outside China, became a mouthpiece of the Chinese state for establishing official digital transnational diaspora governance during the pandemic. Müller (2023) discusses how the practice of transnational lived citizenship of the Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora living in Nairobi was changed by Covid‐19 and the policy response of the government of Kenya. From the author's use of a combination of face‐to‐face and virtual interviews with members of these two diaspora communities (N = 16), it was clear that the practices of their transnational lived citizenship and networks had been disrupted from transnational to local, and back again. The shock of Covid‐19 had significantly disrupted these communities’ transnational networks encouraging a turn towards support from local networks; thus as, ‘transnational lived citizenship can easily become reconfigured as a local practice within and among diaspora communities’ (p. 11). Transnational communities are not only formed along lines of ethnicity and nationality, they can also cohere within activist movements. Sakura Yamamura (2023) explores the impact of ‘Covid‐19‐induced digitalization’ on LGBT* activists in Japan. Just as in Ceccagno and Thunø’s example of China (2022), in Yamamura's words, the pandemic ‘opened up new potential for social and political activism’. The relocation of social interaction and exchange onto virtual platforms, accelerated by the pandemic, meant that awareness of and support for local activism outside Japan increased markedly. Focusing on two case studies, Equality Act Japan and the Partnership Act for Tokyo, Yamamura also details how the postponed 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo were a good opportunity for this more energized politics. Although the Covid‐19 pandemic did not cause local LGBT* activism, it was an important catalyst for the transnationalization of the local movement. Hughes et al. (2023), through the lens of a global value chain (GVC) framework, explore the value chain for medical gloves (personal protective equipment [PPE]) and assess the ways that the heightened demand for forced labour in this industry (manufactured in the Global South) were affected by the Covid‐19 pandemic and the unprecedented activity of public sector health procurement to secure supplies of PPE for use in the Global North. Empirically, the paper focuses on forced labour in the GVC of the Malaysian medical glove industry that supplies the United Kingdom's National Health Service (UK NHS). The fieldwork undertaken for the paper draws upon multilocational and mixed methods approaches, including an interview survey with workers employed in glove manufacturing (N = 1491; 44% Nepalese and 40% Bangladeshi) and interviews with Malaysian glove manufacturers, UK NHS procurement managers, and UK state officials (N = 14). The paper contributes to our theoretical understanding of modern slavery and forced labour in GVCs and, empirically, puts under the spotlight the persistence of forced labour and unethical practices in the Malaysian medical glove industry which have been affected by Covid‐19, but not caused by the pandemic. Hughes et al. (2023) note that the pandemic changed the context for forced labour in this industry rather than causing it because it persisted before Covid‐19. As the world seemingly emerges from the most widespread experiences of the Covid‐19 pandemic (while it is certainly not over), corporations and nation states seek to draw lessons. This is taking shape in discussions about matters such as preventing future trade disruptions insecurities, working towards ensuring some kinds of resource self‐sufficiency, and creating measures to further regulate and ‘health‐proof’ labour migration and other mobilities. In order to mitigate the effects of future viruses, scientific networks, international governmental organizations (notably the World Health Organization), and pharmaceutical companies have to both co‐operate more closely and be subject to a stronger moral imperative defining the common good. As the contributions to this special issue of Global Networks have demonstrated, power and position matter to how pandemics and other worldwide disruptions are experienced. While decision‐makers, the well off, and the powerful are often well shielded from the most adverse effects, people like migrant workers, students, and ‘ordinary’ citizens of global diasporas feel the most brunt. CONFLICTS OF INTEREST The author declares no conflict of interest.