The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization: The Post-Pandemic New Global
The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization: The Post-Pandemic New Global

Summary/Abstract: Globalization, spelled out as the triumph of neoliberalism and global market economy in the 1980s, with its advent in 1990s entered the phase of the great uncertainty (Robertson), gradually turning our life into confluence of crises (Chomsky). Today’s post-pandemic new normal is analyzed as a structural effect of the world risk society (Beck). It involves an emerging safety-and-security-lead culture, dominated by the ethos of avoiding risks and seeking for sustainability in all spheres of human life; growing medicalization, enabled by further digitalization, techno-medical quantification and totalizing observation of all aspects of human existence, leading to new unions between political power, medical expertise, and technology – safetycracy (Agamben). Analyzing COVID-19 as a dress rehearsal of risk society, the paper discusses three major effects of the pandemics as systematic consequences of the process of globali zation: the deglobalization, including mobility halt and re-bordering of nation-states, on the one hand, hyper-digitization, on the other, and development of safety-lead new global as a negation of the neoliberal format of globalization.

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