Description
While formal peace agreements matter for ending armed conflicts, feminist scholars have drawn attention to the long shadow of violence and its afterlives. Populations affected by violence and scholars studying their experiences have invented language that better tracks with their sense of milestones. They have spoken of “the pre-post-conflict,” “the post-accord.” In this paper, I apply these insights to a different domain by considering the limits and possibilities of language about time in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. I reflect on how both the pandemic itself and the grief associated with it have shuffled time for the subjects of world politics. Drawing from autoethnographic data, and from the experience of teaching in the world politics classroom, I look to different sites and subjects and examine their conflicting desires: What does it mean to ‘return to work’, or to a ‘pre-pandemic normal’? Are such returns feasible or desirable? And what do language and its limits suggest about how the subjects of world politics make sense of the ruptures and continuities that grief, memory, and loss have brought into being? In exploring these questions, I build on Arundhati Roy’s invitation to treat the pandemic as a portal to imagining a different set of relations in the wake of loss.
