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Short abstract

This paper reads the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) as an infrastructure of endless preparedness. It examines how “just-in-case” logics manage uncertainty and frame irreversible loss as preventable, thereby revealing how societies imagine, interpret and engage with the possibility of “the end”.

Long abstract

This paper examines how societies respond when “the end” is framed as possible, imminent or already underway, using Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) as a case. The global decline of crop diversity renders agricultural collapse imaginable and positions seed preservation as an urgent response to a future already unfolding. Located on Svalbard, Norway, the Vault stores millions of seed varieties from seedbanks worldwide and is widely presented as a safeguard for biodiversity and a mechanism for recovery after disaster. SGSV therefore exemplifies how distant, yet abstract risks are brought into the present through infrastructures of back-up and long-term storage, offering reassurance and a sense of control amid uncertainty.

By analyzing how SGSV is justified, normalized and evaluated, we explore how societies engage with the prospect of endings. SGSV operates in a tension between readiness for anticipated crises and the normalization of uncertainty as a permanent condition. At the same time, it embodies a form of institutional endlessness: terms such as “forever project,” “permanent collection,” and “intergenerational responsibility” articulate a temporal logic without a defined endpoint. Ongoing storage is framed as responsible action, while the uncertain future of food ensures that the Vault is both necessary and unnecessary.

Moreover, “just-in-case” logics tend to frame irreversible loss as insufficient foresight or mismanagement rather than as structurally embedded in industrial agriculture. Exploring back-up infrastructures as socio-technical responses to anticipated endings, we contribute to STS debates on temporality, risk governance, and future-making, asking how such responses shape what “the end” comes to mean.