Student Ambassador Joshua Jones sat down with Prof. Nomi Claire Lazar to discuss her stint as a Visiting Professor at the European Institute and the field of apocalyptic politics.

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Towards the end of the last academic year, I had the privilege to sit down with Professor Nomi Claire Lazar, Visiting Professor at the European Institute and Full Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. 

As an expert on emergency politics and the politics of time, Prof. Lazar spent her time at UCL investigating the role of apocalyptic politics in European extremist movements. Our conversation spanned her interdisciplinary background in political science, legal theory, and philosophy, and research to date. 
 

J: What it was that brought you to London as a Visiting Professor? 

NL: I first became familiar with the European Institute through contributing to one of its podcasts on states of emergency as we were heading into the pandemic. More broadly I am very attracted to the idea of interdisciplinarity – in part because disciplinary boundaries are artificially constructed – and the European Institute is unusually integrated in this sense. 

To focus specifically on questions of Europe also made sense at that point in my research because I was beginning to delve into case studies for my apocalyptic politics book and there are so many interesting cases of apocalyptic politics in the European sphere. That became more acute after I agreed to come over because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise of apocalyptic rhetoric coming out of Russia.
  

J: What fostered your interest in the fields of political science, philosophy, and legal theory? What interdisciplinarity links do you draw upon? 

NL: At the core of my interdisciplinarity is the fact that I am interested in problems in the world, and whilst it is possible to find problems that are discipline-specific, that is more the exception than the rule. Just as the boundaries between biology, chemistry, and physics can be blurred in the sciences, that is absolutely the case when we deal with social or political phenomena. Law is political because it is ethical, moral, and related to justice. Politics is also shaped by norms, whether they are formal or informal, and by social behaviour. 

If you begin with problems in the world rather than questions in literature, then interdisciplinarity is the only approach that allows you to take a broad enough view; which is made even more acute when asking questions about big problems. So, that drove my interest in being an interdisciplinary scholar – it expands your toolkit for approaching problems in the world. 

J: ‘States of Emergencies in Liberal Democracies’ is a problem that you worked on in your first book. With major emergencies such as the pandemic unfolding in recent years, have you found yourself reflecting on this topic further since the book’s publication in 2009? 

NL: It’s important to recognise that states of emergency are really common. We often think of them as unusual situations, but in many jurisdiction, a state of emergency – at the local, provincial, or state level – are the normal ways that things like storms are dealt with (although we don’t necessarily pay attention to those states of emergency, partly because they’re less political). 

Nevertheless, two huge things came up which made that research relevant after the book was published. The first was the pandemic, where states of emergencies arose in dozens of jurisdictions around the world. The second were the pandemic-adjacent convoy protests in Canada in February 2022, whereby people protesting vaccine mandates essentially took over the capital city: a complete breakdown of law and order which made citizens very nervous. 

We are probably heading into a condition in which the shape and rhythm of emergencies is about to change dramatically. As we move into the climate change era, we’re going to be looking at crises that are more complex, more frequent, economically disruptive, and which will be taking place in a polarised environment that impacts political responses. So, we have to expect that the kind of emergencies that our emergency powers are currently designed to address are not going to be the emergencies we have going forward, and we may not have a year of peaceful calm in which to reflect on what happened and hold the government to account. 

We may end up in a crisis cascade and now is the time to think through how we’re going to handle that and preserve the rule of law. History shows that, when we try to engage emergency powers during a crisis, then things get bad. I’m treating the pandemic and convoy crisis as a moment to raise before the public, now that we are at a hinge. We should not miss an opportunity to confront the coming climate crisis cascade. 

J: Do you also feel that now is also the time for funding to be injected into this field, especially when politics seems rather dominated by short-term thinking? 

NL: I think that our discourse around impact is shaped wrongly, but this is hard to fix. Both the theoretical work I’ve done on emergency powers and on temporality are now showing their potential for direct impact and so we must absolutely continue to fund theoretical research, whilst keeping in mind the need for balance.  
 

J: Where are your research interests leading you next? Did you find yourself being led by particular instances of crisis or by more theoretical notions of crises as a whole? 

NL: I think it’s always both. Once your brain is hooked on a particular constellation of theoretical questions and problems arise in the world that engage with that framework, then you start to see application. 

But your framework can also shift. This is what happened as I moved from my work on temporality into my current work on extremism and apocalyptic politics. As I saw new forms of apocalyptic politics become mainstreamed, I realised that the theoretical framework on temporality was lacking. In that sense, the real world can reflect back onto the theoretical framework which, once tweaked, finds new applications in terms of understanding and ideally intervening in the world. 

J: You mention your recent focus on apocalyptic politics in Europe. What areas have you specifically been exploring and has your research brought you fear or hope for the future? 

NL: It’s interesting that you juxtapose fear and hope. This is part of the paradox of apocalyptic politics, in that the same politics inspires fear in some people, hope in others, and in most people, derision. How is it that this temporal-rhetorical dream can make some people give up everything, leave their families, kill and die, and make other people just laugh? 

That’s at the core of the apocalyptic project and I think it is coming out in the European context and in the rest of the world in two key ways. The first is that, whenever we see a leader like Putin engaging in behaviour that seems insane, it makes sense to take a step back and question would make this not insane. It’s still morally abhorrent but what premise is this person working with that is not obvious to us? 

Along those lines I think we can gain some insight from the history of Russian political thought, which has this deeply apocalyptic tone: we increasingly heard that as the war escalated, and we’re still hearing it with figures such as Patriarch Kirill talking about how this is the battle of good and evil. So, that aspect might help some people in the West understand how some Russians are buying this and potentially, how it might make sense to Putin. Political leaders sometimes do seemingly irrational things from an objective perspective and there you look for some kind of ideology or political theory that helps it makes sense, as the apocalyptic does here. 

The other aspect is that, from Anders Brevik to Extinction Rebellion, there are increasingly mainstreamed apocalyptic discourses both on the right and left of the political sphere that shift politics, not only by drawing adherence, but by drawing reaction. Apocalyptic politics are the favoured conceptual framework for extremists in part because it’s a very good way to get people willing to commit acts that they wouldn’t otherwise commit. It challenges the legitimacy of existing government and laws because those things don’t matter if you’re facing the end; so, once you get people engaged in apocalyptic politics then your system of government is in trouble. 

When we frame climate change as an apocalyptic challenge, people also start calling for authoritarian government to deal with it. They point out that the [slower] timeframes of democracy will not allow for climate action fast enough. But, if you pull that rhetoric back a little and question whether this it apocalyptic or just really bad, that can make us a little more cautious about this kind of rhetoric. I also think that when you frame climate change as apocalyptic, most people sneer as they get tired of it. Some get upset and anxious, but most people question what we can do about it. 

J: Do you think apocalyptic politics can or will stop? 

NL: I don’t think apocalyptic politics will ever stop – it will just become more and less evident. This is partly because there are few types of stories that are more deeply appealing to us than the apocalyptic story. Taking The Hobbit as an example, you’re in the Shire and everything is peaceful and suddenly, some dark force wrenches calm people into a place where they don’t want to go. Apocalyptic politics becomes a devastating battle for the ultimate achievement of good or evil: we love that story, it’s all our favourite movies and novels. It will keep bubbling up, as it has for thousands of years whenever there’s a political entrepreneur that is willing to use it and people who are ready to listen. But it will always appeal to a minority, and never to the majority. It will always end up as this battle between the legitimacy of the status quo and attempts to delegitimise it. 

 

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Nomi Claire Lazar is a Full Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. She was formerly a Visiting Professor at the European Institute.

Joshua Jones is a Student Ambassador with the UCL European Institute 2022-23.

Image credit: Angela Benito on Unsplash.

Notes: The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and not of the UCL European Institute, nor of UCL.