Description
As discourses of future world orders conjure up increasingly catastrophic visions of climate disasters, human extinction and techno-war, IR’s understanding of the future remains problematically human-centric. Building on Environmental Studies, Black and Indigenous Thought, and Science and Technology Studies, this paper rethinks extant understandings of time in world politics to appraise the politics of global futures critically and creatively. First, we claim that we need to move beyond a notion of time centred on the human subject to foreground geological and multispecies visions of futurity, where humans do not occupy a privileged place in global political ecologies. Second, we stress the historical co-constitution of the time of world politics and colonial violence, reflecting on the entanglement between race and the future of (some kinds of) humanity. Lastly, we experiment with narratives of techno-war that bring the future of conflict outside the scope of human agency, speculating about the possibility of wartime(s) beyond human extinction. Together, these moves set the stage for an international political sociology of deep global futures that takes seriously the role of time in shaping the subjects, limits, and trajectories of world politics.
