How can we understand global order when the future is not merely predicted but actively imagined, contested, and constructed? Scholarship on changing international orders often focuses on shifts that have already occurred in capabilities, institutions, alliances, cooperation, or conflict. This panel offers a complementary perspective by bringing Futures Studies and futures-oriented methodologies into debates on emerging global orders.
Futures Studies examines possible, probable, plausible, and preferable futures, alongside the assumptions, expectations, imaginaries, and anticipatory practices through which actors engage with what has not yet happened. Treating futures as constitutive dimensions of present politics, the panel explores how states, international organizations, communities, social movements, corporations, and other actors produce and mobilize future imaginaries—and how these shape current choices and power relations.
Contributions may engage with scenario building, horizon scanning, foresight, backcasting, anticipatory governance, futures literacy, Causal Layered Analysis, Three Horizons, or participatory, speculative, and experiential methods. The panel particularly welcomes research on why international orders persist, fragment, transition, or transform; how certain futures become possible while others remain unthinkable; and how futures methodologies can move inquiry beyond prediction toward alternative conditions for change.
Suggested Topics:
Futures Studies and the study of changing global orders.
Anticipation, expectation, and the production of international order.
Scenario building and the exploration of alternative global orders.
Foresight, horizon scanning, and early signals of systemic transformation.
Critical Futures Studies and the politics of possible, probable, and preferable futures.
Backcasting, Three Horizons, and methodologies for thinking about transitions.
Futures literacy and the democratization of global futures.
Anticipatory governance and the institutionalization of future-oriented practices.
Competing future imaginaries and struggles over the direction of global order.
Temporalities, spatialities, and the politics of transition.
Decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and situated approaches to imagining global futures.
Speculative, participatory, and experiential methods in the study of international politics.
Conditions for transformation: rupture, continuity, adaptation, and systemic change.
From prediction to possibility: methodological challenges in studying futures in world politics.
