The Future of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nuclear Physics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The book is devoted to the intriguing post-war activity called—with different terms—futurism, futurology, future research, or futures studies. It seeks to understand how futurists and futurologists imagined the Cold War and post-Cold War world and how they used the tools and methods of future research to influence and change that world. Forms of future research emerged after 1945 and engaged with the future both as an object of science and as an object of the human imagination. The book carefully explains these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post-war period. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which came from new strands of critical theory in the margins of the social sciences or sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. Different forms of prediction lay very different claims to how, and with what accuracy, futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over coming and not yet existing developments. Not surprisingly, such different claims to predictability coincided with radically different notions of human agency, of morality and responsibility, indeed of politics.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

5. From the End of the War to the Schuman Plan (the late 1940s to the early 1950s)

2014 ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Ian Bache ◽  
Simon Bulmer ◽  
Stephen George ◽  
Owen Parker
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
European Unity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Schuman Plan ◽  
Second World

This chapter charts the long history of plans for European unity, from the end of the Second World War to the Hague Congress, the Cold War, the Schuman Plan, and the Treaty of Paris. It also considers European federalism and the practical reasons why some moves to European unity found favour with the new governments of the post-war period: the threat of communism and the emergence of the Cold War; the so-called German Problem; and the need to ensure adequate supplies of coal for the post-war economic reconstruction. As a solution to these intersecting problems, Jean Monnet, came up with a proposal that paved the way for the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community. The chapter examines Monnet’s proposal, national reactions to it, and the negotiations that led to the creation of the first of the European communities.

The Genocide Convention and Cold War Humanitarian Intervention

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Dunne ◽  
Eglantine Staunton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Genocide Convention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Host State ◽  
State Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Consent ◽  
The Cold War

It is conventional in IR literature to observe a sharp break between the Cold War and post-Cold War phases in the evolution of human protection norms. The chapter revisits these arguments in conjunction with the cases of India in Pakistan, Vietnam in Cambodia, and Tanzania in Uganda, where unilateral interventions had humanitarian effects but neither humanitarian justifications nor external legitimation. The predominant view regarding these cases is correct; namely, no evidence can be found for the emergence of a norm of legitimate intervention for protection reasons (in the absence of host state consent). However, this perspective underestimates the extent to which there was a consolidation of norms regarding state responsibilities and how these influenced state practice during the post-1945 period. The end of the Cold War should be seen as less of a stark turning point in the history of responsible sovereignty than has previously been believed.

Uncommon Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Valentine ◽  
Amelia Hassoun
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Open Future ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Temporal Focus

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Munn (1992) argued that anthropology had neglected the future as a temporal focus. This concern continues to be echoed by anthropologists, even as a review of post–Cold War anthropology reveals that the future has become a recurrent, dominant temporality in the field. Reviewing texts from the past quarter-century that provide a diagnostic at the intersection of the anthropology of futurity and the future of anthropology, we argue that the urgency for an anthropology of the future—and concern over its neglect—presumes some continuity prior to the challenges of an uncertain “now” under constant transformation and, simultaneously, a desire for a common and open future world. Deriving this insight from the work of Black and Indigenous scholars, we suggest that an anthropology attuned to futures is most fruitful when it foregrounds decolonizing perspectives on commonality, continuity, and openness and problematizes them as the implicit grounds of anthropological futurity.

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