This issue of the journal Ecología Política, entitled «Pandemics and civilisational crisis», allows us to visualise pandemics from a double perspective: the one that that describes those diseases that spread across the territory, and the metaphorical one, which describes the logics of power that develop under the narratives of capitalism. Thus, the issue details the intrinsic relationship between the unsustainability of the economic system and the destruction of life, but also gives space to the development of collective strategies and experiences that confront the dynamics of capital in the time of a pandemic.