Geopolitics of international migrations and the COVID-19 pandemic: Outlooksfor the European Union and Mercosu

Abstract

Declared on March 11, 2020 as a pandemic, COVID-19 has brought, in addition to the direct health impacts, effects in the most diverse areas of the social, political, economic, and cultural fields. In the context of international migration, it is estimated that 70 million migrants will be directly or indirectly affected by the disease and its economic, geopolitical, and bordering consequences. In this context, this article, through qualitative research, with an analytical-descriptive, documentary and bibliographic method, it analyses comparatively the political, legal and institutional aspects of the COVID-19pandemic in migrations in the territorial frame of the European Union and Mercosur. The theoretical approaches used in this study combine elements of classical territorial geopolitics linked, when possible, to the contributions of the political geography of migration. The preliminary results show the incidence of new migration models, based on the conceptual typology of perspective migrations, and they signal for a geopolitical reconfiguration in the twoblocks at different stages and levels, as well as the proper incidence of the disease