The coronavirus pandemic has led to millions of deaths around the world. In many countries, it has also exposed long-standing inequities and injustices in health care, income distribution, labour market practice, and social protection for the poor, women, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized segments of the population. The disproportionate casualties among vulnerable populations have also exposed predatory corporate practices, such as the refusal to share vaccine patents with low-income countries (LIC) in the Global South. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that this “vaccine apartheid” could lead to the further spread of more dangerous forms of virus variants, and that global solidarity and collaboration may be the only viable approach to current and future pandemics.1 Scientists have long warned that the continued destruction of the environment and ecological diversity would lead to future waves of cross-species (zoonotic) viral pandemics, due to the elimination of “natural borders” that once existed between human and non-human species. In the last several decades alone, humanity has suffered from five major zoonotic pandemics: AIDS, SARS, MARS, Ebola, and COVID-19.2 This Special Issue focuses on a select group of Asian countries in order to critically examine the impact of socio-legal inequities in state-centric policies upon domestic populations, including indigenous peoples, and to explore the possibility of international collaborative strategies for controlling the spread of deadly viruses and their variants in the coming years and decades, in Asia and beyond.

This article interrogates the necropolitical logics of the Israeli settler-state apparatus towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines these logics and practices through the prism of coloniality, which conceptualizes manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) as a diffuse set of practices, opening up the conversation to discuss the ways in which international organizations, other states, and the Palestinian Authority continue to inflict the colonial harm through the employment of particular policies. Centring coloniality as an analytic allows a more global perspective and widens the discussion to include the ways in which Palestinians practise decoloniality, building and imagining “otherwise” worlds. This article maps the ways in which the devastation of the pandemic is not a product of the pandemic itself, but larger legacies of material, epistemic, and ontological colonial intervention.