Anthropocenic war: coronavirus and total demobilization

This paper argues that the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic of 2019–2020 constituted the first Anthropocenic war: as an anthropogenic virus and biological attack on the human body and as the first global pandemic requiring a truly global response since our recognition of the Anthropocene. The paper explores how each nation was forced by the virus into a pause of global connections and relationships and a war against the human body, with the ‘total demobilization’ and bunkerization of their domestic populations. With space cut-off, this became a war of time and of endurance, with relations reduced, as Virilio suggests, to those of the connected ‘terminal citizen’. Beyond the civil war against the body, however, there was also the civil war within the domestic populations who were active participants in this imploded home front line, producing and sharing both feel-good and disciplinary propaganda and engaging in debates around politics, conspiracy theories and disinformation. The paper explores the problems governments face in remobilization, the new data regime of informational totalitarianism remobilization will help produce and the likely instability of the post-covid-19 international order. It concludes that this ‘war’ was only the beginning and that anthropogenic environmental factors will play an increasing role in human conflicts in coming years.