Geopolitics on the ‘Other Side’: Counterpart’s Imaginary of a World System after the Virus

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 Counterpartas 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.