This book explores the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic is poised to be a permanent temporality in the modern world in which contemporary time will be thought of in terms of before and after the pandemic.

Inocent Moyo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and Acting Deputy Dean of Research, Innovation, and Internationalisation in the Faculty of Science, Agriculture, and Engineering at the University of Zululand, South Africa. He researches borders, migration, and the political economy of the informal economy in the Southern African region.

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Research Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is a prominent historian and one of the leading decolonial scholars and theorists in the Global South. He was the Executive Director of the Change Management Unit (CMU) in the Principal and Vice-Chancellor's office at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Professor of African Political Economy at the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TMALI) at the same institution. Previously, he headed the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied Social Policy (AMRI).

Notes on Contributors vii

1 The planetary impact of COVID-19 1

Inocent Moyo and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

2 Reengaging power: state responses to COVID-19 and the provision of public goods in Canada and the United States of America 9

Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba and Kgoto Jan Mbele

3 COVID-19 and the challenges of trauma, transformations, and deborderisation: ethics, politics, and spirituality and alternative planetary futures 29

Ananta Kumar Giri

4 The COVID-19 moment: exacerbation of narrow nationalisms and their toxicity to integration aspirations 42

Zenzo Moyo

5 COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitics of health, and security entanglement in West Africa 60

Olukayode A. Faleye

6 The conundrum of balancing between COVID-19 policing and human rights protection in South Africa: a responsibility to protect perspective (R2P) 75

Patrick Dzimiri

7 A Trojan horse: critically exploring data as a colonial instrument during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa 90

Kyle John Bester and Danille Elize Arendse

8 Occupational health in the mining industry of South Africa and the COVID-19 pandemic 109

Robert Maseko

9 "On est pas de cobayes": Congolese migrants and health transnationalism in the COVID-19 moment 127

Leon Mwamba Tshimpaka and Christopher Changwe Nshimbi

10 "#Corona Jihad": remanufacturing Islamophobic narratives during COVID-19 in contemporary India 141

Sayan Dey

Index 160