by Indie Research.net 24 /6/24
“I use a theoretical approach that draws on the notion of sediments of time”
(Reinhart Koselleck)
To celebrate its 50th anniversary the Review of International Studies has just published a Special issue examining the challenges facing global politics for the next 50 years:
Like many modern social sciences, IR has regularly turned its attention backwards towards its historical origins… Looking to the past has been an exercise in contextualising and making sense of present disciplinary understandings…. Rather than revisit the past again, therefore, the editorial team chose to invite authors to look towards the future.
Ten contributions identify several recurrent and salient issues raised by the task of thinking about the next 50 years:
- How to think about the future
- Revisiting the past in order to interrogate legacy “narratives” and identify their influence on our view and understanding of the present and the possible futures.
- How technological change mediates, and often directly generates, power relations and their changes over time.
- Trajectories of socio-technical change over the last 200 years which have left us with a range of socio-ecological crises which operate at a planetary scale.
In this post, I want to highlight two papers profiling a single key idea: Thinking about the future with our present conceptual baggage is like thinking of travelling to the stars on a chariot or dreaming about freedom inside a jail.
The control of the future?
The idea is well captured in Mark Lazy’s paper1 “The Future of Control/The Control of the Future:”
In this article, I want to suggest that, while it might be risky to predict specific events or the emergence of specific technologies, I think we can provide a ‘sketch’ of the challenges and desires that might be central to the political, economic, social, and ethical problems that will intensify in the years out to 2074.
He beging describing how Gilles Deleuze suggested in the 1980s that surveillance could become ubiquitous. The multiplication of security challenges, together with technologies and actors, in particular non-state actors, will likely continue to accelerate over the next 50 years. The desire for control is fundamental to the politics of security in modernity.
- States will seek to produce societies of control to produce order and security in a situation of domestic disruption and foreign ‘interference’
- Individuals, groups, and non-state actors might be able to engage in activities with dramatic impacts, the type of actions previously only states would be able to orchestrate: individuals exploring technology and biology, groups exploring the possibilities of AI for nefarious activities, criminals exploring the potential of robotics (and AI and robotics) to create new crimes of the future.
The Free 