The temporal politics of inevitability: mass death during the COVID-19 pandemic

Millar, Katharine M. ORCID: 0000-0003-2511-5325, Han, Yuna and Bayly, Martin J. ORCID: 0000-0002-5772-9770 (2025) The temporal politics of inevitability: mass death during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Studies Quarterly. ISSN 1468-2478 (In Press)

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Abstract

Many international phenomena, from complex, interconnected processes to specific catastrophes have been deemed “inevitable” by elites, policymakers and scholars. Yet existing scholarship treats “inevitability” as an objective fact to be assessed retrospectively, rather than an expression of politics and contestation. To see the “politics of inevitability”, we argue, requires attention to the underlying politics of time through which inevitability is narrated and naturalized. Drawing upon the “temporal turn” in IR, we identify three constitutive practices of inevitability: problem definition, designations of agency and responsibility, and distribution throughout a political community. Empirically, we illustrate our argument through a discourse analysis of how mass death was produced as “inevitable” (or not) during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. The politics of inevitability does not cause the outcomes that are deemed inevitable, but through narrating time in a particular way, it provides the conditions in which certain policy choices become imaginable and/or desirable. This has vital implications for the ways that other future events are cast as inevitable, including climate change, war, and future pandemics.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author
Divisions:	International Relations
Subjects:	J Political Science R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine J Political Science > JZ International relations
Date Deposited:	27 Feb 2025 10:51
Last Modified:	27 Feb 2025 10:57
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/127461

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