Geopolitics on the 'Other Side': Counterpart's Imaginary of a World System after the Virus. Issue 5 (20th October 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Saunders, Robert A.
• Is Part Of: Geopolitics. Volume 27:Issue 5(2022)
• Page Start: 1574
• Page End: 1598
• Publication Date: 2022-10-20
• Subjects: Geopolitics -- Periodicals; Boundary disputes -- Periodicals; Sovereignty -- Periodicals; 320
• DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1863792
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1465-0045

Abstract

ABSTRACT: 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.