Kevin Gray is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. His research interests relate to the political economy of development, with a regional focus on East Asia. He has researched widely on the region, and in particular, on the political economy of both North and South Korea. He also has interests in Gramscian approaches to international relations and in theories of late development and state formation. Barry Gills is Editor in Chief of Globalizations and Professor of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has written widely on World System theory, neoliberalism, globalization, global crises, democracy, resistance and transformative praxis.

• Introduction: post-COVID transformations 1. Pandemics in global and historical perspective 2. Trade, health and social reproduction in a COVID world 3. Shared pretenses for collective inaction: the economic growth imperative, COVID-19, and climate change 4. On living in an already- unsettled world: COVID as an expression of larger transformations 5. Global transitioning: beyond the Covid-19 pandemic 6. Vaccine nationalism: contested relationships between COVID-19 and globalization 7. India’s pandemic: spectacle, social murder and authoritarian politics in a lockdown nation 8. Work in the post-COVID-19 pandemic: the case of South Korea 9. A new deal after COVID-19 10. The post-pandemic world and the prospect for global justice: a commentary