Editorial New Perspectives across viral time: Russia in the World Nicholas Michelsen King’s College London, UK Over the last five years, New Perspectives has created a space for constellations between different views on politics and international relations, globally and in Central and Eastern Europe. The journal moves forward from a position of strength and creativity, in partnership with Sage, established under the previous editor-in-chief Benjamin Tallis. The spirit and vision he invested has been central to making New Perspectives what it is today, and we will miss him. In this, the final issue of 2020, we are pleased to announce the passing on of this project to a new editorial team and collective that reaffirms the unique vision of New Perspectives. Rooted in Central and Eastern Europe, New Perspectives is a global journal, dedicated to bringing cutting edge scholarship on politics and international relations to wider publics through essays, commentaries and cultural interventions, as well as traditional-form research articles. Europe, and especially its central and eastern regions, sits at the cross roads of global changes, and thereby constitutes a bell-weather for wider trends in world politics (Kacandes and Komska, 2017: 2). Our unruly present has revealed how human affairs are irrevocably shaped by ‘conditions inherited and evolving in the ecological realm’. As existing work on the microbial drivers of previous geo- political eras has noted, the differential immunity of populations to diseases has marked international events in ways that historians have often tended to ignore (McNeill, 2010). This tendency is unlikely to continue, following the socio-economic crises that the current pandemic is accelerating. As the ongoing pandemic resets relationships within and between states, our rediscovered sense of exposure to the natural world calls to mind the ‘other’ modernity evoked by the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud a decade ago, defined by a pervasive sense of exile from the present (Bourriaud, 2009). That sense of exile we perceive when faced by the nonhuman forces and processes of the pan- demic is in itself a powerful call for original writing and new constellations of international scholars. New perspectives on politics and international relations are needed now more than ever. Yet the academic experience of exile from the present finds its manifestation in the loss of disciplinary centres, in fragmentation, and in the abandonment of common languages and shared forums for discussion between theoretically and politically divided literatures. New Perspectives’ vision is of a scholarship built around its purposeful relationship to society. We are committed to engaging wider publics, and this is why we welcome creative short essays, forums and visual essays. In being more than an International Relations, Areas Studies or Political Science journal, we want to speak to the intersection of cultures, politics and societies, and thereby create a theoretically and stylistically open space. Our commitment to creating constellations is a commitment to creating space in which ‘meaningful’ conversations between plural perspectives can take place (Jackson, 2016: 17). While the academic research article remains at the core of the journal, the more open essay form has been an important tool by which to carve out these constellations. Walter Benjamin, a master of New Perspectives 2020, Vol. 28(4) 431–434 ª The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20972896 journals.sagepub.com/home/nps