Dr Yuna Han, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations, co-authors publication on The Temporal Politics of Inevitability.
Dr Yuna Han, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations, co-authors a publication on The Temporal Politics of Inevitability: Mass Death during the COVID-19 Pandemic with Dr Katharine M. Millar and Dr Martin J Bayly (both at the LSE).
The article focuses on how (certain catastrophic) events become construed as 'inevitable' in political discourse and illustrates a theoretical argument through the case of how governments narrated mass death levels during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We spoke to Yuna to find out more:
Can you explain a little more about the research?
The research stemmed from a policy-oriented project funded by the LSE in 2021, as the first stages of the pandemic in the UK were unfolding. The broader project was a comparative one, comparing the discourses of four democratic countries (UK, Germany, Italy, and South Korea) regarding mass levels of death and its management as the world was learning how to react to the novel Covid-19 virus. As part of the project, we also looked at how past political discourses articulated devastation from the 1918 influenza pandemic (also known as the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic) in the UK. The main empirical takeaway was that there was surprising variation in the way each country explained, framed, and prepared their public for the mass levels of death we experienced during the first few months of the pandemic. Some countries expressed openly feelings of grief and sympathy, while other countries with similar levels of fatalities eschewed directly discussing death at all. Some countries focused on the context surrounding each death, including who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented, and the technical details about how virus acted, while others focused on more macro-level data and planning for ‘recovery’ from the pandemic. In other words, while this was not our initial objective, we started to notice interesting differences in how certain aspects of the pandemic became framed as ‘inevitable’ or ‘immutable’ across countries.
What was your motivation?
Once we had documented our main empirical findings, we wanted to dig deeper and understand better how the idea of inevitability is constructed in discourse, and from this better understand its implications. We found that existing literature in IR in particular took inevitability as an objective fact (a ‘natural’ condition), rather than treating it as a form/ result of politics. So, we wanted to develop a better theoretical framework to understand the politics of inevitability and its implications.
What did you discover?
Drawing from the ‘temporal turn’ in IR theory, we developed a theoretical framework to understand inevitability as a narration of time, which through its representation of future events conditions the possible range of policy choices and shape the assessment of what is happening/has happened, and most importantly, who has agency and responsibility. We argued that inevitability is constituted through the blurring of two ‘cultures’ of time—a modernist culture of time as knowable and controllable, and the archaic culture of unknowable, uncontrollable time—which create a sense that a given outcome is inescapable. We demonstrate this through the example of how mass levels of death were discursively framed during the ‘first wave’ of the pandemic in Western Europe.
Why is this important?
The research has important policy-relevant and normative stakes. In public discourse, referring to something as ‘inevitable’ usually implies that nothing can or could have been done to prevent or mitigate the event. Treating ‘inevitability’ as an objective fact—as most literature on international relations tend to do—thus has an important political implication, as it can exonerate individuals and collectives from considering their own contribution to catastrophic events (such as climate disasters), and ultimately, prevent discussions on accountability and responsibility from taking place fruitfully. Our research on the temporal politics of inevitability thus helps us unpack how various global events—ranging from pandemics, geopolitical risks, wars, and climate change—become understood as ‘inevitable.’ It can also help us locate counter-politics of inevitability, or how the ‘inevitabilisation’ of events can be contested.
What impact do you hope the research will have?
We hope our theory of inevitability pushes IR scholars to recognise inevitability not as a neutral category, but as a product of deep politics that constitutes something as immutable via time/timings. In other words,we hope that theorising how inevitability is constructed, and what it comes to mean, will help those studying mass catastrophic events such as climate change, war, or global health crises like pandemics, become more attuned to what is enabled or precluded in terms of capacity for change, intervention, and exoneration when we diagnose complex events as ‘inevitable.’
