“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 weaponization of everything² is already happening everywhere, and the challenge for states will be on how to manage the balance of liberty and security/control.

This scenario about the world in 2074, very much in line with the ideas of “Surveillance Capitalism”, is but ‘a linear story of modernity,’ where the political challenges and questions produced by social, political, economic, and technological innovation and change remain the same as they were since the start of industrialisation, modern states, and globalisation. However, there is another more intriguing possibility:

What if the 21st century produces events that exceed attempts to protect this ‘linear’ direction of modernity?

It might be that ideas and solutions to political and economic challenges depart from anything developed in the ‘classic’ works and political movements of modernity. The next 50 years might push the possibilities of technology, society, politics, and international relations beyond what we can currently imagine.

Bruno Latour suggested that we might have to depart (for our own survival) from the ideas about politics, economy, and the world of sovereign states that we have ‘inherited’ from the theories and practices fundamental to modernity. In “On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo”, Latour and Nikolaj Schultz explore the way that ecology might come to constitute a political ideology, agenda, and narrative in a future politics at a level similar to the definitional/organisational power and consistency of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism.

One of the most radical possibilities for the world in 2074 will be that a body is not the same as a body in 2024 or 1924, raising the possibility that violence, pain, and suffering might not be the same as it has been understood in the history of political thought and international theory,

The world in 2074 would no doubt feel alien to us. Or, in other words, weird. This is exactly the possibility we explore in our Futures Game. Usually under stressed or avoided in future studies, and mainly explored through dystopian science fiction, it is the possibility of fundamental changes which we feel too weird for us, but very likely not be perceived as weird by future generations.

The future is just another past

In “The future is just another past”, Oliver Kessler and Halvard Leira³ stress the fact that there are always two stories to tell. The first story is that of continuity. The second story is that of discontinuity. They present the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change and tools which conceptual history provides us for grasping conceptual change.

It becomes hard to assume that our future will hold our conceptual framework constant and hence that we already possess the conceptual apparatus that will become necessary to understand the future present. The assumption that the states and the state system have existed and worked in constant ways has appeared as more than dubious from a historical point of view for decades

The future itself is a concept that has undergone significant conceptual transformations. It is a recent invention that the future is actually separate from the past and hence that time is thought of in linear terms.

Conceptual history is predominantly associated with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, who formulated the thesis of a ‘Saddle Time’.

Saddle Time for us indicates an epistemological shift that de-stabilises established meanings and semantic fields

Between 1750 and 1850, ‘a flood of previously unknown words and meanings appeared, thus testifying to a new understanding of the world, which soon infused the entire language’. The sum total of present conceptual change, particularly to the extent that changes involve reconfigurations of how time is perceived, might suggest that we are at the onset of another Saddle Time, when expectations and experience (or the lack thereof) are increasingly determined by technological innovations.

They raise the question of a possible new Saddle Time primarily as a way of challenging the imagination. The future has a specific conceptual history. The future we know today is part of a linear concept of time that historically emerged around the 18th century.

Without a sound understanding of those past futures, we miss more than half of the available history. In particular, we run the risk of a double survivorship bias. The first element of that is straightforward enough, in that we tend to prioritise observed outcomes, with alternative outcomes serving as empirical counterfactuals. The second element is what we are after here, namely that we typically remain confined to our own understanding of time and our place in it, ignoring the conceptual counterfactual or indeed the conceptually unimaginable, of what if differently imagined past futures had been realised. Why did those futures never come to be, and yet, how do they help structure our current present and future?

The future will always be weird… for inhabitants of the present.

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(1) Lacy, Mark. ‘The Future of Control/The Control of the Future: Global (Dis)Order and the Weaponisation of Everywhere in 2074’. Review of International Studies 50, no. 3 (May 2024): 560–78. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000093.

(2) Phrase from Mark Galeotti

(3) Kessler, Oliver, and Halvard Leira. ‘The Future Is Just Another Past’. Review of International Studies 50, no. 3 (May 2024): 425–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000135.