Vincenzo Cicchelli (Ceped, Université de Paris) & Sylvie Mesure (Gemass, CNRS/Paris Sorbonne) Call for contributions Reimagining the Cosmopolis: living in a Confined Humanity (Brill Publishing, 2022) Aim and scope Some authors have described the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 as a ‘cosmopolitan virus’ (Koopmans, 2020). At the end of August 2020, there were more than 23 million cases worldwide and more than 800,000 deaths due to this infectious disease. New waves of contamination are reappearing in some countries, such as Spain, France, and Germany, Israel, or Australia, which seemed to have contained the pandemic. If the situation seems to have calmed down in other European countries, it is still dramatic in the United States, in Brazil and Latin America, Mexico, and India. Because of this pandemic, the moment we are living through can be interpreted as a ‘cosmopolitan moment’, following the meaning given by Ulrich Beck to characterize modern societies exposed to the risk of climate change, which it is difficult not to think of today as the world is facing the current risk of a pandemic (see, in particular, Beck, 1996; 2012). Even in the heart of our confined lives, withdrawn into ourselves, facing the pandemic, our fears have not erased the sense of belonging to the same humanity, not only by virtue of the moral obligations that lead us to see in every other human being another ourself, but also through the almost carnal awareness that we are all fragile and vulnerable. If the virus does not strike at random by attacking primarily the oldest, the weakest, and also the most deprived, we all run the risk of being contaminated and infecting others. It is precisely this universality of risk that leads to the idea of belonging to the same humanity through the idea of a shared vulnerability and that allows us to interpret the moment we are living in as properly cosmopolitan. However, no global response, not even the slightest bit coordinated, has been made to the worldwide threat created by this pandemic. Instead of cooperation, mutual aid or concerted action, we have witnessed, at least at the beginning of the crisis, a disorderly and hasty return of borders and the strengthening of the State, now understood as the only effective defense in the face of the invisible but imminent danger threatening the security of citizens. Although necessary, but fraught with psychological, ethical, political, and economic consequences, the containment measures strengthen the feeling that withdrawal and closure were the only way to salvation. They reinforce the conviction that the reign of ‘every man for himself’ was now at hand, for collective and individual destinies alike. In this unprecedented context, many voices have been raised against globalization to denounce in the health crisis both an effect and a powerful revelation of its contradictions as well as its failures. As a result, some have considered cosmopolitanism as a ‘post-ideological ideology’ (McCrae & Smith, May 2020, 50) at the service of a global elite, indifferent or blind to the world's difficulties: This ideology would overlook the fact that, by defending worldwide governance and promoting international institutions as