Pandemic Adjustments and Logistical Power

Abstract

Early pandemic supply chain disruptions posed unprecedented challenges for logisticians and logistical systems. This article investigates the loss prevention strategies pursued by supply chain operators in the face of these blockages. Focusing on the legal doctrine of force majeure, the redesign of supply chain models and financial risk management, I show how the adjustment of logistical rationalities to pandemic conditions involves their entanglement with legal, ecological and epidemiological logics. Far from being temporary modifications, these intersections register wider mutations of capitalism that both exceed the pandemic and have been hastened by it.

The coronavirus pandemic brought a series of adjustments to logistical expressions of power. While the virus spread across channels of mobility that enable the global stretching of supply chains and circulation of commodities, the slowdown and in many cases standstill of logistical operations were among the outbreak’s immediate consequences. Indeed, the management of infection and disease became primarily a management of mobility, which targeted both people and things. Border closures, supply chain blockages, the withdrawal of bodies from worksites and productive zones, the movement of social and professional life into digital spaces, the shutdown of airports and other transport facilities, the uptick in platform economies, contactless payments, social distancing, the identification and containment of Covid hotspots, contact tracing – all of these phenomena were logistical in quality and led to an unprecedented public awareness of the role of logistics in sustaining economies and lives. The pandemic brought into wide view what critical logistics scholars have emphasized for over a decade: the emergence of logistics as ‘perhaps the central discipline of the modern world’ (Thrift, 2008: 95). Yet it also made clear a more subterranean aspect of the critical logistics discourse, which has struggled to make its way into public consciousness – the constitution of logistical power as a means of governing circulation. This article takes up this later matter, focusing on pandemic adjustments to logistical power in three domains: legal, managerial, and financial. I consider the entanglements of logistical power across these spheres, asking how they fold into wider supply chain ecologies which, in the pandemic and its long tail, were trained on strategies of loss prevention.

The pandemic, particularly in its early stages, affords an unparalleled opportunity to study adjustments to logistical power. Many have noted that in a time of overlapping emergencies, which encompass the pandemic but also climate change and geopolitical confrontations, supply shocks have become more frequent, contributing to the return of inflation (see, for instance, Weber et al., 2022). However, the pandemic messed with supply chains in unprecedented ways. Lockdowns and other response measures withdrew labour from workplaces and transit sites, breaking logistical connections and creating blockages with cascading effects. Unlike ordinary supply chain disturbances, which are usually limited to a single sector or site and dissipate with ripple effects, the scope of these interruptions was expansive, with spillovers that scrambled supply and demand relations. The result was a paralysis that extended across continents and industries. As Ingrid Burrington (2020) observes, the situation revealed the inadequacy of the supply chain metaphor. Supply chains, she writes, ‘are more like constellations or ecologies, or if chains, they are maybe more like a mesh of chain maille’. Rather than unlinking discrete systems, early pandemic disruptions radiated chaotically across networks of logistical connection and supply. The gambit of this article is to return to this period of upheaval, which needs almost to be studied in a historical frame. I critically analyze changes to logistical power and governance occasioned by the early pandemic – shifts that I contend are crucial for framing and interpreting those that followed them, including adjustments to the energy and supply chain shocks occasioned by the Ukraine and Gaza wars.

Logistics genealogies are multiple. Commentators emphasize variously the role of Napoleonic military campaigns (Van Creveld, 1977), the transatlantic slave trade (Harney, 2018), missionary activity in Latin America (Virilio, 2005), the advent of the steamship (Campling and Cólas, 2021) and military-industrial collaboration in the lead up to the First World War (DeLanda, 1991). Not until the period of the so-called logistics revolution, beginning in the 1960s, did logistics emerge as its own distinct knowledge field, replete with professional associations, degree programmes and the like (Cowen, 2014). Initially addressed to lowering transportation costs and making processes of physical distribution more efficient, logistical techniques and technologies evolved to the point where they began to alter the spatial and managerial ordering of capitalist circulation. At stake was the reorganization of production at the global scale, the emergence of supply chains that stretched across national borders and regional spaces, and the computerization of business operations. Chua (2021: 1457) describes logistics as ‘a distinctive realm of movement (both material and financial) that expands the capacity of capital to reproduce itself’. Given this combination of processes and logics, it is unsurprising that critical logistics studies have worked the edges between Marxian and Foucauldian styles of theorization (Cowen, 2014; Into the Black Box, 2022; Neilson, 2012). A recurrent methodological and empirical approach has been to focus on chokepoints where the interoperability among logistical systems breaks down (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018; Carse et al., 2020; Rossiter, 2016). In these critical junctures, researchers have not only sought to upend myths of logistical seamlessness but also to explore labor conflicts, social inequalities, everyday workarounds and shifting relations among digital and analogue technologies. In the early pandemic, however, almost all sites of logistical transit became chokepoints. Responding to this situation required more than strategies of circumvention. What unfolded was a series of adjustments that at once laid bare the workings of logistical power and shifted its modes of operation.

To speak of logistical power is not only to theorize about the modes of sovereignty and governmentality that attend capitalist circulation but also to acknowledge that logistics has effects that extend beyond transport and communication. Tracking and tracing techniques derived from logistics industries have spread into a myriad of fields, including finance, manufacturing, policing, border control, retail, health, entertainment, and hospitality. With regard to the pandemic, the shared concerns of logistics and epidemiology are particularly relevant. Nonetheless, an account of the transformations of logistical power under pandemic conditions cannot restrict itself to mapping the significance of logistics beyond a narrow sectoral frame. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2021: 17) observe that logistics ‘emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness’. In analysing how loss prevention drives pandemic adjustments to logistical power, this article contends that such power moved to position pandemic disruptions as external to logistical industries. I suggest that the legal, managerial, and financial means used to establish such externality offer insight into the changing stakes of capital operations in a world learning to live with ecological and health calamities.

The article proceeds as follows. A brief discussion of how logistical power establishes supply chain ecologies is followed by an analytical discussion of how the legal doctrine of force majeure provided a privileged means to curtail pandemic losses. Next comes an examination of how the pandemic occasioned the technical redesign of supply chain management systems, pushing beyond paradigms of efficiency and resilience to introduce models that aim to guard against future blockages. Following this, I show how the application of financial logics to supply chain disruptions, a development underway before the outbreak, deployed risk modelling and scenario planning in an attempt to indemnify losses. Investigating the implications and effectiveness of these legal, managerial, and financial loss prevention methods draws attention to overlaps between logistical, ecological and epidemiological knowledge practices. These intersections, I argue, are crucial for understanding how the pandemic sparks mutations of capital.

Supply Chain Ecologies

Supply chains are various and variable in organization and function. To take an easy example, most manufacturing supply chains before the pandemic were organized according to just-in-time imperatives, cutting costs by reducing storage and pacing production to orders. By contrast, passenger airlines operated according to ‘yield management’ models involving overbooking and balancing of inventory against prices. The provision of goods and services through digital platform technologies, which would expand during the pandemic, functioned by creating and controlling privileged channels by which suppliers could reach consumers. We can think of these organizational strategies, and the relations among them, as supply chain ecologies. There are different theoretical means for describing such arrangements, including the filière approach, which traces product distribution across a discrete economy, the global production network approach, which maps international production flows and operations (Henderson et al., 2002), and the global value chain approach (Gereffi et al., 2005), which investigates the production of value at points along the chain. Within critical logistics studies, the concept of supply chain capitalism introduced by Anna Tsing (2009) has proved particularly adaptable. Tsing stresses the diversity of supply chain ecologies and how the social and cultural negotiations necessary for their workings generate frictions among actors, environments, and institutions.

None of these approaches has proved misguided in the pandemic. However, the pandemic raised a more basic problem that underlies these supply chain debates – the sheer material challenge of moving people and things around the world. Although not its only point of application, the administration and maintenance of circulatory processes is the fundamental task of logistical power. The pandemic made clear that these processes cannot be taken for granted but require organization, coordination, and, above all, labour. The unavailability of suddenly high-profile goods like medical, testing and personal protective equipment highlighted the impact of these challenges. At a time of digital flows and financialization, in which speculation on movements of money is crucial to capital reproduction, the pandemic underscored the ongoing need for physical practices of labour and transport. A register of this importance was the designation of many logistics employees as ‘essential’ workers – a categorization that provided not only formal recognition of capital’s continued need to extract value from labour and social cooperation but also a means of compelling people to work despite risk of infection.

Importantly, it was not the virus itself but the responses of governments and populations that led to supply chain disruptions. From the ‘grid reaction’ in China (Xiang, 2020) to shock migration in India (Samaddar, 2020) and the lockdowns and mobility restrictions enforced with various degrees of commitment around the world, the subtraction of bodies from sites of labour and exchange had ricochet effects. Doubtless, much work moved online, particularly among urban professional classes. There were also many bottom-up and nongovernmental efforts to address pandemic hardships. However, states reacted in ways that seemed to reinforce their traditional role of protecting populations from outside threats. As Wendy Brown (2020) notes, although the pandemic condition stems from the fact that microbes do not respect boundaries, border closures served ‘the important political function of treating the virus as if it invaded us from the outside and acting as if we are meeting that threat with sovereign power’.

On 19 March 2020, in the face of criticism about the US government’s failure to speed up the supply of personal protective equipment, President Donald Trump quipped: ‘We’re not a shipping clerk’ (White House, 2020). For many, the statement was a cynical attempt to deflect responsibility. However, Trump’s assertion also registers a split between logistical and sovereign power. The former involves the ability to track, direct and negotiate the material passage of people and things, a capacity that would turn out to be crucial in monitoring the pandemic, as the example of contact tracing shows. The latter, if we follow Michel Foucault (1979: 136), turns on ‘the right to take life or let live’. Indeed, many saw such sovereign power as operative in government decisions concerning lockdowns, social distancing measures, border closures and the like.

Sovereign power can take measures to protect life. However, it can also place life at risk, as is clear in the pandemic responses of figures like Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, whose decisions, off and on, were more oriented to preserving the health of the economy than safeguarding populations. Giorgio Agamben (2020) found in the Italian government’s lockdown measures evidence for his critical view of sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception. Derived from the political theories of Carl Schmitt, Agamben’s concern that such exception is becoming the norm resonated with anti-lockdown positions. Many, including Jean-Luc Nancy (2020), found his hasty judgements about the severity of illness resulting from infection with the virus to exhibit the danger of philosophy masquerading as epidemiology. Nonetheless, the problem of how sovereignty interacts with logistical power remains.

Sovereign decisions clearly differ from options and choices pursued in supply chain management. The distinction between sovereign and logistical power is an analytical and technical one that works itself out differently as conditions change. Explaining why vaccine rates vary markedly in different states, for instance, these powers seem to work in greater concert in coronavirus vaccine distribution than in routine container shipping. However, the practical entanglement of sovereignty and logistics, pointed out long ago by Michael Mann (1984: 113), does not militate against the conceptual division of these powers. Keeping such a division open, as the remainder of this article shows, is important for analysing the political stakes at work in legal, managerial and financial attempts to minimize the effects of pandemic supply chain disruptions.

Logistical power also varies from what Foucault (2007) calls governmentality. The network or mesh thinking that pervades Foucault’s discussions of governmentality has affinities with the workings of supply chains. However, contemporary logistical techniques and technologies function differently to the production of statistical knowledge that, for Foucault, was central to governmental power. Population statistics of the kind emphasized by Foucault rely on periodic stocktaking methods that sample self-elicited accounts and use various methods to sort them into preestablished categories. Although logistics has historically utilized statistical methods to monitor and control the circulation of goods and people, its current manifestations involve continuous forms of tracking, tracing, screening, profiling and prediction.

Logistical power is less bound by the division between the molecular and the molar, or the anatomical and the biological, that haunts Foucault’s notions of power (Isin and Ruppert, 2020: 7). This emergent form of power not only identifies and acts upon clusters of relations between bodies and populations, but also aims to close the gap between performance and measure, to allow real-time selection and analysis. Crucial in the pandemic monitoring of relations between infected and healthy bodies, such power does more than reduce individuals to ‘dividuals’ that can be divided into their constituent data (Deleuze, 1992). What matters are the processes of extraction, aggregation, valuation, modelling and pattern recognition applied to such data. In the case of coronavirus tracking and tracing, these practices not only sorted individuals into categories (close contact, casual contact, etc.) but also produced knowledge about the disease’s spread (peaks, troughs, reproduction rates, etc.). Governmental actions and sovereign decisions (e.g. compelling people to avoid hotspots, imposing lockdowns) tended to follow such logistical analysis.

Such a conceptualization of logistical power proves crucial to understanding how capital adapts to supply chain disruptions through legal measures as well as managerial and financial routes of restructuring, reallocation and leveraging. The following sections of this article take up these matters in detail, starting with an assessment of how the legal doctrine of force majeure provided the premier legal means of avoiding pandemic losses. Subsequent engagements with managerial technologies of fault tolerance and financial risk modelling suggest further how logistical power interacts with sovereign and governmental prerogatives to allow capital to externalize and domesticate disruptions in ways that are relevant beyond the pandemic.

Force majeure

With origins in Roman law and its classical modern formulation in the Napoleonic Code of 1804, the doctrine of force majeure specifies the conditions under which parties can exit contracts. As such, it provided a favoured legal device by which firms, governments, and other actors sought to dispense with contractual obligations under pandemic conditions. Force majeure is an element of most national law systems, although with variations in codification and applicability. The basic division is between common law systems that favour the Roman doctrine of pacta sunt servanda (‘contracts must be honoured’) and civil law systems that emphasize the principle of rebus sic stantibus (‘assuming things stay the same’). Although common law systems have devised alternative doctrines, they tend to enforce the sanctity of contract more than civil law systems, which focus on the presence of conditions that make a contract binding. These factors make the question of the jurisdiction in which a force majeure case is decided crucial to outcomes. Writing of the divergences between English common law and Chinese civil law, for instance, King Fung Tsang (2020) demonstrates that cases related to pandemic supply chain blockages adjudicated in China were more likely to suspend or adapt contracts.

From a legal perspective, a supply chain is a maze of contracts. The question of how law can deal with networked social phenomena plagues legal and social theorists (Luhmann, 2004). Due to their bilateral form, contracts do not show responsiveness to networked actors that exist beyond the substance of two-party agreements. In this way, the law’s normative closure limits the prospect of piercing the contractual veil to pass responsibility to parties acting up or down a supply chain. These issues were pronounced in the pandemic due to the uneven positioning of lead firms that act as ‘private sovereigns’ and suppliers that operate further down the chain (Beckers, 2020). In the garment and apparel industries, for instance, leading brands and retailers cancelled or failed to place orders, with devastating effects for workers in supplier firms, many of them located in the Global South (Anner, 2020). The doctrine of force majeure occupies an ambiguous position with respect to these dilemmas. On the one hand, it is the trigger pulled by actors that seek to release themselves from contractual obligations and push losses on to others in the chain. On the other hand, it presents an opening for lawyers who seek to check these actors in ways that question legal fictions such as the sovereign state, the separate corporate person and freedom of contract, none of which correspond with globally entangled relations as experienced by actors who operate in parts of supply chains far from consumer markets (Eckert and Knöpfel, 2020).

Force majeure provides a point of contact between law and logistical power; a relation made more evident by the pandemic. It is not a simple matter of claiming that when force majeure overrides contracts, sovereign power crosses to the logistical realm. States frequently use sovereign prerogatives to justify logistical interventions, not least in the pandemic where armed forces, for instance, were often used for medical operations and population control. The mobilization of force majeure can push law into the ‘system of Law-and-Sovereign’ from which, Foucault (1979: 97) argued, modern forms of disciplinary and governmental power depart. However, given the importance of jurisdictional issues to outcomes, force majeure can also pull law into a frame of conflicts and overlaps in which there is no sovereign position to mediate between normative orders or declare an exception. In this regard, the theoretical production surrounding international private law, the branch of law that decides in which jurisdiction or under which system of law a case is adjudicated, is relevant. This field is an area of renewal for legal theorists who seek a methodological toolbox for understanding collisions and overlaps among normative regimes that exist beyond as well as within the realm of state law. The resulting debates point to the interrelatedness and divergences among normative orders, recognizing the perils of collapsing global relations into national jurisdictional units and the making of contracts in ‘the blind spot of the distinction between system and environment’ (Teubner, 2007: 58). Regardless of whether force majeure affirms state law or pulls it into this pluralist context, the doctrine does not present a trump card that triumphs over or acts in the name of logistical power. Rather, the situation challenges and overstretches law’s capacities, potentially to the point where logistics determines its own rules.

Much has been written on whether the pandemic constitutes a force majeure event. A consistent feature of these analyses is the collocation of the pandemic with other kinds of disruptive incidents that courts have judged to constitute such events. By considering these associations, we learn something about the general ecology of catastrophe into which the pandemic inserts itself. Klaus Peter Berger and Daniel Behn (2020: 82–4) list 12 such events, including financial crises, earthquakes, hurricanes, currency fluctuations, central bank decisions, civil riots, ship detainments, pricing index shifts, and state embargoes and sanctions. The question of whether global warming might be a force majeure event, given scientific knowledge of climate change, troubles legal minds. Writing in the context of marine environmental law, Roxanne Saul et al. (2016: 33) conclude that such recognition is unlikely, although latitude exists for claims linked to the cascade effects of climate change until its specific cause and effect relationships are better understood. In any case, the force majeure doctrine is agnostic when it comes to specifying events as human-made or so-called natural disasters. What matters is that events are unforeseeable, unavoidable and irresistible.

One kind of contractual agreement that seems immune to force majeure claims is the smart contract, written in digital code, enabled by blockchain technologies and self-executable as opposed to legally enforceable. Katharina Pistor (2019: 187) writes of such arrangements: ‘The old Roman principle of pacta sunt servanda (contracts are to be honored) seems to be, at long last, within reach – and not as a normative aspiration, but as fact, as how things are done in digits.’ Smart contracts pose the problem of what happens when digital code substitutes for legal code. Such substitution may be partial, negotiated or blocked by ‘legacy’ state institutions, but its advocates understand it to offer means of circumventing anthropomorphic spheres of law and politics to introduce forms of governance that respond directly to the condition of the planet and the data it generates (Bratton, 2021). Inserted into a ‘natural history of logistics’, this approach envisions radical design possibilities that draw on geophysical data archives, sensing technologies and synthetic knowledge experiments (3/4, 2020). The question of how such alternative visions of data science grapple with the broader political and economic conditions of automation remains open. There is always the possibility that digital code will be used to further capital operations or combine with legal code to serve the interests of constituted powers.

As a device of logistical power, force majeure does not easily escape the clutches of sovereignty or governmental modes of administering circulation. It remains a legal doctrine and, as such, is bound to sovereign power and the legal systems it enacts, or seeks to suspend under claims of exceptionality. Force majeure opens a hole in the law, and this is the gap that supply chain actors sought to exploit in the pandemic. Yet, insofar as this strategy was primarily used by lead firms seeking to cancel orders made to suppliers less advantageously positioned in supply chains, logistical power matters. At stake are a series of logistical factors, including proximity to branding and consumers, patterns of outsourcing, timelines, modes of transport, and above all the shape of supply chains. Keeping the analytical distinction between logistical and sovereign powers open, despite their practical entanglement, allows us to see these relations and dynamics. Collapsing these varieties of power makes them disappear.

Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance is the logistical twin of force majeure, or, better, its opposite and attracting magnetic pole. Techniques and technologies of fault tolerance aim not to legally erase the consequences of a problem or to pass losses and harms elsewhere in the supply chain. Rather they seek to skirt around disruptions. Fault tolerant systems generate network topologies with redundancies, diversity and supplemental capacities. If an interruption emerges, the system searches for a path that averts the difficulty, even at the price of higher costs or longer turnover times, at least up to an optimal point. In this sense, fault tolerant systems exist in tension with efficient systems. This tension became evident in the early pandemic supply chain blockages, as just-in-time and lean production systems snapped, one after the other, leading to calls for more adaptable logistical strategies. As Orit Halpern (2020) shows, these calls derive from ecological discourses of resilience that assume volatility and uncertainty as normal conditions, define systems in terms of processes rather than stability, approach the future in probabilistic terms, and emphasize how diversity enables adaptability. The pandemic has made clearer the traffic between logistics and ecology.

For logistics operators, fault tolerance and resilience mean business continuity and, indeed, opportunity. A quick search shows the dominant rhetoric in action: just-in-case production has replaced just-in-time, firms must diversify geographically, manufacturers must acquire the capacity to rapidly switch the goods they make, vital services and processes must be identified and safeguarded. Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14017 ‘America’s Supply Chains’, and the task force report (White House, 2021) that followed it, register the drift of this rhetoric into US policy circles. The report advocates building more resilient supply chains as necessary for national security, economic security and technological leadership. Governmental efforts were to focus on strengthening the supply chains of four ‘key priority products’: semiconductors, large capacity batteries, rare earth minerals and pharmaceuticals. Significantly, this approach aimed to support environmental protection and national job creation, while adding a geopolitical dimension by insisting that the administration’s ‘approach to resilience must focus on building trade and investment partnerships with nations who share our values’ (p. 8). Among its other meanings, resilience in this context means taking steps such as sourcing rare earth minerals from countries other than China. Policy intellectuals have recast questions of ecology as ones of geopolitics.

As part of the ‘dual circulation model’ that informs its 14th 5-year plan, China also proposes to invest in strengthening supply chains. Focusing on building domestic consumer demand, the idea is to make national and overseas markets support each other more effectively. Among other measures, the plan promotes self-sufficiency in industries such as food and core technology, including semiconductors, funding the expansion of transport network infrastructures and subsidizing logistics companies to enlarge and protect supply chain operations. For China’s domestic logistics industries, the pandemic led to a slowdown, although sectors such as e-commerce and platform food delivery flourished. Developments in contactless delivery, hub construction, platform integration and emergency logistics promise to make systems more fault tolerant (Liu et al., 2020). With attention to geographical and cultural variegations, it would not be difficult to expand this discussion of supply chain resilience beyond the US and China to include many other regions and countries. Similarly, the list could be enlarged to encompass different products and industries. Striving for this kind of coverage delivers a sense of how spatial, economic, operative and social factors position supply chain actors unevenly. However, such an analysis does not necessarily register how the pandemic has been a period of profuse concept production for supply chain managers and technicians.

Consider the work of Craighead et al. (2020), who contend that the pandemic necessitates a departure from the resilience paradigms that have dominated supply chain thinking in recent years. These researchers suggest that companies ‘need to foster transiliency (i.e., the ability to restore some processes and change – often radically – others)’. In Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously, Evans and Reid (2014) characterize resilience as a discourse of survival that abandons any hope of changing the world. Craighead et al. (2020: 859) ask whether ‘the benefits of crisis avoidance outweigh the costs of building transiliency’. In so doing, they forge new parameters and protocols for logistical power, seeking to design techniques by which logistical operations not only respond to external inputs but also seek to change the world.

Dmitry Ivanov is another researcher for whom the pandemic forces a rethinking of supply chain dynamics. Ivanov (2022) seeks to move beyond paradigms of resilience, sustainability and digitalization by proposing a model of viable supply chains. In his account, viability is ‘the ability of a supply chain (SC) to maintain itself and survive in a changing environment through a redesign of structures and replanning of performance with long term-impacts’ (p. 1). Ivanov explains: ‘SC resilience is close to the role of immune systems, and viability is the ability to survive over the whole life through absorbing negative impacts with the help of a strong immune system and achieving performance by using positive changes’ (p. 11). Building on the work of Beer (1972), he extends his analysis beyond individual supply chains to encompass ‘integrated supply networks’ that ‘provide services to society (e.g., food service, mobility service or communication service) which are required to ensure a long-term survival’ (Ivanov and Dolgui, 2020: 2095). These ways of rethinking logistical power may seem abstract, but as developed and applied through mathematical models they have real operative impacts. In any case, it is not difficult to see how the pandemic pushes this turn to viability.

If resilience is a kind of immunity that supports the viability of supply chains, it performs a similar action to force majeure in externalizing negative inputs. The question of what lies inside and outside a supply chain is crucial to its operations insofar as internal governance mechanisms cannot fully discipline its interaction with external factors. Outside events or circumstances may provide negative disruptions, but they can also offer so-called positive externalities, even if their social or historical effects are harmful and deleterious. Moreover, capitalism internalizes and generates disruptions as part of its creative destruction. Applied to supply chain dynamics, immunity is less a defining feature of sovereignty (Esposito, 2008) than a register of how logistical power provides capital with an outside for prospecting and extraction. Aside from organizing the labour process, capital generates value from sources not of its own making (Luxemburg, 1913). To retain its dynamism, it must reach for activities or substances that are beyond its grasp, sorting that which is appropriable from that which is unabsorbable. Force majeure and fault tolerance are technologies that enable this kind of categorization and externalization.

Risk Modelling

Pandemics are a classically uninsurable risk. Insurers regularly underwrite other kinds of catastrophe risks, but the difficulty of spreading and diversifying pandemic risk means it is excluded from coverage in most insurance policies and reinsurance treaties (Hartwig et al., 2020). Nonetheless, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, a pandemic insurance product known as PathogenRX was jointly developed by reinsurance company Munich RE and Metabiota, a San Francisco-based start-up specializing in epidemiological data services. Targeted to industries such as tourism, hospitality and higher education, the policy had only one buyer before the pandemic (Ratliff, 2020). The story of PathogenRX parallels and contrasts that of the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, which, in 2017, introduced a financial instrument that promised to deliver aid to the world’s poorest nations in the case of viral outbreaks. Understood as ‘a harbinger of future global health finance’ (Erikson, 2019: 80), this product was part insurance, bond, swap and cash grant. The bond mechanism was bought largely by investors seeking to diversify portfolios. Due to mature in July 2020, investors had received almost USD 100 million before the pandemic’s onset, but, with its worsening, many tried to offload their bonds. Meanwhile, low-income countries had to wait until May for payouts, which were triggered by models requiring a certain number of deaths before release (Peterson, 2020). Criticized for waiting for people to die, the World Bank announced in October 2020 that it would not offer another such financial product.

PathogenRX and the World Bank pandemic bond ‘failed’ for similar reasons. In the first case, insurees were unprepared to pay premiums to protect themselves from an event that seemed unlikely to occur in the short run. In the second, investors bet that a pandemic would not occur in three years. Both instruments were made possible by models that combine scenario planning with predictive analytics to divide into tranches and price risk that was previously considered uninsurable. In the instance of the World Bank, the modelling was completed by data analytics firm AIR Worldwide, which subsequently published a pandemic model that features ‘a 500,000-year stochastic catalog containing nearly 1 million simulated [pandemic] events’ (AIR Worldwide, 2018: 2). The high-risk tranche was priced against a 9.44% risk of loss. As critics have pointed out, there was a complex set of triggers (including deaths) that had to be met before the fund paid out. However, market actors proved capable of pricing pandemic risk. The category of unforeseeability, crucial to force majeure claims, became the object of techniques that push back against the limit of catastrophe that, for Beck (1992), marks the edge of risk society. As Amoore (2013: 10) explains, ‘even where the limits of statistical risk . . . are breached by the exceptional case – a terrorist attack, flood event, hurricane, pandemic, or financial crisis – the more speculative knowledges of scenario planning, social network analysis, and predictive analytics reorient risk to action on the very basis of the imagination of those possibilities.’

It is no secret that global health professionals have presented the occurrence of a pandemic not as a matter of if but of when and where. Epidemiological models that enact pandemic simulations assemble a portfolio of future courses that are neither necessary nor impossible. Opitz (2017: 407) explains that these models ‘embody a different temporal logic vis-à-vis the future. Instead of giving an account of a dated future incident, they chart a series of futures’. In the legal context of force majeure, the coronavirus outbreak does not qualify as ‘foreseeable per se, given that no one could predict when and where such a pandemic would occur’ (Berger and Behn, 2020: 111). The exact time and place at which a virus jumps the barrier between nonhuman animals and humans remains irreducibly unknown. Tracing the diffusion of a virus after this emergence is a more feasible task, given that paths of infection tend to follow transport and trading routes. The intersection of viral transmission and logistical activity means that epidemiology must account for geoeconomic connections and the capital operations that forge them, as well as geopolitical factors such as border control. Infrastructures that facilitate the mobility of things open routes for human travel and vice versa. As Moody (2020) observes, ‘the virus has moved through the circuits of capital and the humans that labor in them, and not solely by random “community” transmission’. This coincidence of viral diffusion and human mobility is the reason why so many epidemiological models incorporate logistics data.

Epidemiology’s entanglement with logistics has a long history. John Snow’s famous map that traced the 1854 London cholera outbreak to a single water pump drew on measurements of walking times (Law, 2014). However, it was in the 20th century that data assembled for transport network analysis was formally integrated into infectious disease modelling. Soviet cyberneticians Leonid A. Rvachev and colleagues pioneered this method to model the geographical spread of influenza (Baroyan and Rvachev, 1967). Rvachev extended this technique by modelling the global spread of influenza using commercial aviation data (Rvachev and Longini, 1985). As Blasius (2020) points out, this kind of spatially explicit modelling, which leverages information on transport network topology, differs from territorially discrete clinical pathway models that are important for calculating healthcare demand. By estimating epidemic arrival times as effective distances, such modelling allows for analysis of the spread of infection in spatially distributed populations across time, accounting for the impact of factors such as travel restrictions and passage through third countries. These techniques were crucial in mapping the early global spread of coronavirus.

Logistical modes of knowledge and practice are not external to ways of knowing the emergence and circulation of viruses but are indeed crucial to the most sophisticated current methods of modelling and anticipating viral outbreaks. Beyond the mobilization of contagion as a basic social category, logistical ways of knowing and exercising power impact directly on the epistemic practices governing public reactions and policy responses to the pandemic as well as on financialized means of charting and pricing the risky futures brought by the virus. Again, the practical entanglement of sovereign and logistical power proves crucial to governmental strategies and capital operations addressed to the patterns of mobility and circulation at stake. On the analytical front, the separation of these powers allows us to specify how knowledge practices and governmental interventions combine to externalize disruptions in order that they might be incorporated back into logistical worlds, not as barriers to be overcome but as thresholds and limits that can be protocologically and parametrically adjusted.

Conclusion

Force majeure, fault tolerance and risk modelling at the edge of possibility – all offer techniques of externalizing disruptions to supply chain operations. Whether they derive from ancient legal doctrines or recent developments in data analytics, these methods support the emergence of logistical power as a privileged means of proliferating the social relation of capital. The point is not that logistical power eclipses or displaces practices of sovereignty and governmentality, which may cross its operations and/or animate the legal, technical and financial mechanisms that back it up. Rather, logistical techniques and technologies entwine with and sculpt these other forms of power, which in the pandemic were primarily directed toward loss prevention. Indeed, loss prevention is the primary logic underlying efforts to allay contractual agreements in the face of paralysis, avoid tangles by means of flexibility and resilience, or analytically block the future against impasses. However, there is a catch. Just as capital must externalize disruptions to straighten itself against loss, so it must draw upon its outsides to satisfy its drive for endless gain. At stake are not only ongoing processes of primitive accumulation but also the pre-existence of conditions that allow such accumulation to take place.

If the pandemic was a global and planetary event, the emergence of further logistical disruptions in its wake has taken on distinctly geopolitical dynamics, as the energy and supply chain shocks resulting from the Ukraine and Gaza wars demonstrate. The world faces an economy marred by widespread shortages, in labour, material, energy and capital. As the dominant rhetoric surrounding ‘friendshoring’ indicates, a logistical reorganization of the conduits of global circulation of commodities and people is underway, carving out new regional spaces, and, as the export restrictions surrounding semiconductors attest, new kinds of economic borders. Sanctions have forced the redesign of financial flows, and commodity supply chains have been rerouted, often via third countries and patterns of resale. Yet the general paralysis brought by the early pandemic is a turning point that future analysis of logistical operations under conditions of shortage and conflict cannot afford to ignore. Before this event, dominant governmental actors hoped that economies of scope, speed and collaboration would develop toward a digital economy and green growth. Now these same actors are mired in fossil fuel politics, arms trading, reciprocal tariffs, and struggles over the future of globalization. Although the question of why regimes of war have proliferated in the pandemic’s tail requires further investigation, the adjustments to logistical power brought by the early pandemic are here to stay. Whether legal, managerial or financial in quality, these techniques of mitigating loss and redrawing the barriers between sovereign, governmental and logistical powers seem doomed to play an ongoing role in making the world’s economic and environmental futures.

To note the contradiction that joins capital’s need to externalize loss under conditions of severe disruption to its drive to accumulate through the expropriation and incorporation of its outsides is not to ignore the regular exploitation of labour in logistical industries. Indeed, the exploitation of logistical labour itself mutated with the growth of gig work and platform economies that the pandemic accentuated. Discerning the workings and scope of these changes requires attention to the patterns of sharing, living knowledge, intelligence and ecological entanglement that pre-exist containment and congealment into the measurable and modular units of logistics. Analytically, it is important to include the coronavirus in these networks of life and matter. Although its emergence is prompted by ecological, epidemiological and economic predicaments that are inseparable from the circulation of capital, the virus and its mutations display modes of informativity, sequencing and transmission that do not simply mimic the workings of dominant logistical systems. It pays to repeat that the supply chain blockages occasioned by the pandemic were not the result of the virus itself but of social and governmental attempts to control its spread. Sticking with the confusion, dread and bewilderment generated by these disruptions offers a way to take stock of a situation that seems no longer to carry the temporality of a crisis but to index a permanently changed state of affairs.