The Temporal Politics of Inevitability: Mass Death during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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.