Future Endings: Comparative Apocalypses, Impending Sovereignties, and Cataclysmic Utopias with Suzanne Schneider, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

The fourth and last seminar in the Future Endings lecture series will be held by Suzanne Schneider, Deputy Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

All lectures in the series will take place at 14:30 on the 9th floor of the Social Sciences building.

With new wars involving nuclear powers, the ever-deepening climate crisis, the still ongoing pandemic, and the increasing everyday surveillance of the last decades, people’s expectations of the future have changed dramatically. In the global north, the idea that younger generations would have better, richer, and fuller lives than their parents has gradually dissipated. Outside of the global north, climate change is cutting short people’s lives and livelihood in unprecedented ways, and is increasingly curtailing positive visions of the future. More and more people fail to see how their lives in the present moment can be sustained in the foreseeable future. Instead, the feeling that humanity is gradually approaching a precipice, where the here-to-fore known world will collapse, is edging out the blissful optimism of earlier generations. For more and more people, there is no longer a question of saving the world; there is only a question of how to react to its impending end.

Such apocalyptic thought has become a mainstay in recent global upheavals. In the United States, the January 6th coup attempt was in part inspired by Christian nationalists’ belief that the end of the world was imminent. In Syria and Iraq, the so-called Islamic State was utterly convinced that the Day of Judgement was right around the corner, and that Muslims needed to prepare themselves accordingly. Secretary General of the United Nations’ Antonio Guterres statement that “our world is in peril” in early 2023, prompted renewed global protests to stop the extraction and use of fossil fuels. In 2020, many of the global protests against COVID lockdowns and the vaccine were fueled by apocalyptic narratives. And most recently, Hamas’ attacks and the Israeli invasion have prompted Iranian official channels and sections of the umma to speculate if these events signaled the onset of the endtimes.

To understand the new global socio-political environment, in other words, it is becoming increasingly necessary to re-examine notions of the apocalypse. As more and more people feel and act as if the world is coming to an end, new questions arise for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Crucially, contemporary research needs to examine what apocalypses mean across contexts, what visions of sovereignty accompany them, and how they are connected to political utopias. This has been a relatively neglected field of inquiry. In efforts to account for and analyze the rise and spread of global apocalypticism, apocalypticism has often been treated as a monolithic phenomenon, connected only to divinely ordained sovereignty, and usually contained by an over-arching Christian eschatology. However, as apocalyptic thought is spreading across radically different communities in the US, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, more nuanced analyses of the end of the world are demanded

For this lecture series we therefor ask:

• How are different apocalypses being made in different contexts, and what are their impacts on contemporary socio-political formations?

• How are we to understand different visions of sovereignty created, sustained, and advanced by different apocalypses?

• What are the relations between utopia/dystopia and apocalypses, and how are they imagined to emerge at the end of the world?

• How can these different apocalypses and their effects be compared across different contexts, and what does this tell us about contemporary global developments?