It is mid-September 2020. As we gather our thoughts to give final expression to the monumental changes which have occurred since this book project began, it is difficult to overstate their significance for life across the planet. Many of us are reeling from the impact of the pandemic on our sense of self, of place, our frameworks of understanding, our plans, hopes and fears for the future. It's clear that nobody is unaffected by the coronavirus moment, though clearly not all in the same way. As an Italian correspondent put it in a letter to The Guardian newspaper: COVID-19 exposes:

The sense of existential connectedness expressed here, and across the chapters in this book, may be a source of both comfort and critique in the times to come, in spite of those systems of power which seek to differentiate and divide. As Arundhati Roy (2020: np) puts it, ‘For all the suffering, finally, we have all been compelled to interrogate “normal” ‘.

This unparalleled context has precipitated degrees of paralysis, panic or chaos worldwide as powerful interests rush to shore up economic models which have informed and infused all aspects of social, political and cultural life, the mounting and visible contradictions of which have previously been denied or quietly and crudely mitigated. The hegemonic ‘market-first’ approach has finally and unequivocally been exposed as grossly inadequate in the face of a pandemic which does not recognise borders, boundaries or biometrics. In fact, the intensity, extensity and velocity of global interconnectedness (see McGrew, 2020) so necessary for predatory mobile capital, could be said to provide a perfect conduit for the spread of contagion. The crisis has also confirmed just how precarious and inequitable supply chains of goods, services and workers are.