Beyond Bounded Space: Europe, Security, and the Global Circulation of Infectious Disease

Abstract:
The threat of pandemic spans beyond traditional security concerns to challenge conventional understandings of urgency, power, the threat-defence dynamics of states and the protection of sovereignty itself. This paper argues that confronting this non-conventional threat in Europe requires not only moving beyond a linear understanding of the proximity of threat across space and time to recognise the global circulation of disease, but also a reconceptualisation of how Europe is understood. In effectively confronting the challenge of infectious disease to the region, Europe needs to be understood less as a territorially bounded space, and more as a dynamic and fluid one, constituting a node within broader interdependent systems of circulation.