“BIOPOLITICS OF THE PANDEMIC”

Second lecture from CEURUS Public Lecture Series, 18 February 2022

Dr. Sergei Medvedev, Moscow Free University

The lecture is going to be held at 14.00 – 15.30, at Lossi 36, room 214, and is open to everyone interested in the topic.

Over the past two years, the Covid pandemic has profoundly transformed humankind, exposing us to nature, revealing the contingency and fragility of human life, and calling for new forms of politics and a new social contract. Governments have recoursed to traditional biopolitics, using the instruments of quarantine, lockdown and vaccination. Meanwhile authoritarian regimes like Russia have used the pandemic to further extend their power and to install an epidemiological state of emergency; a new form of “sanitary authoritarianism” has emerged. What will be the long-term effect of the pandemic on world politics, and on the evolution of Russia? The lecture will seek to spark a lively discussion on these questions.

DR. SERGEI MEDVEDEV

Sergei MEDVEDEV is Professor at the Free University in Moscow. Born in Moscow, he studied at the Moscow University, Charles University in Prague, and Columbia University in New York City, and holds a Ph.D. in history. In the past 25 years, he has held research positions and professorships in Russia, Germany, Italy and Finland. He specializes in political history, sociology and cultural studies.

Dr. Medvedev has written several books, including Mapping European Security After Kosovo (Manchester, 2002, with Peter van Ham). Russia and the West at the Millennium (Berlin, 2003) and Identity Politics in Wider Europe (Berlin, 2012). His most recent book on Putin’s Russia, The Return of the Russian Leviathan (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2019) has won the Pushkin House Book Prize as best English-language non-fiction book on Russia in 2020.