Geopolitics on the 'Other Side

Counterpart's Imaginary of a World System after the Virus

Bibliographic Data

ID3948338
AuthorsR A Saunders (0000-0001-7457-4574, Department of History, Politics, and Geography, Farmingdale State College (SUNY), Farmingdale, New York, USA, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume27
Issue5
Pages1574-1598
Publication date2022-10-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2020.1863792
OpenAlexW3134700516
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited39

Drawing on analytic frameworks from feminist IR’s interrogation of fear in geopolitics and approaches rooted in the popular culture-world politics (PCWP) continuum, this article examines the ways in which the television series Counterpart (STARZ, 2017–2019) presaged a world defined by a novel form of ideological xenophobia and apolitical anthropophobia at the global level. As a premier example of immersive geopolitical television, the series examines diplomacy, biopolitics, and everyday attitudes to international relations via a screened imaginary that very much resembles our so-called ‘real world’ in the midst of the COVID–19 pandemic, while also auguring the likely reality to come. As I argue, our ‘new normal’ parallels many of the ‘other-worldly’ geopolitical codes and visions presented in Counterpart, thus explaining renewed interest in the series since early 2020. Focusing on the policing of bodies and borders in the time of COVID–19, I examine the series’ discursive and visual world-building against various ‘real-world’ governmental and societal responses to the ‘virus’. This is done through the lens of a new, global geopolitical thinking that is founded in the fear of (other) humans who are/might be (un)knowing carriers of the virus. Using Counterpart as a tool to think with, I attempt to bind geopolitics – an imagined/imaginary system of power relations based on limits and control – to anxieties triggered by the wide-ranging and uncontrollable flows of the novel coronavirus

Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Global Security and Public Health · Globalization and political ideologies · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Psychology