Marwan M. Kraidy, a leading authority on Arab media and incoming dean and CEO of Northwestern University-Qatar (NU-Q), will give a tour d’horizon of the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on media and geopolitics.

This webinar will focus on rival media narratives that have emerged as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in late 2019 turned into a pandemic by March 2020. There has been a perceptible shift in how politicians speak about security, borders and identity. Is this a return to hard sovereignty? What do new emerging boundaries—physical, political, affective—mean for our understanding of identity and geopolitics? Will our understanding and appreciation of globalization shift? What are the implications of the “war of words” between the U.S. and China for the post-pandemic world order? How will U.S. global influence be affected by the pandemic?

This is part of the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ Confronting COVID-19: Global Implications and Futures webinar series.