Volume 18, Issue 3 - Editors' Forum: Global Futures

This essay lays out the concept of global futurities, which I define as the discursive scales and plural epistemologies by which marginalized identities and groups articulate, construct, imagine, or locate their futures. While global future is usually based on what could happen to all people and the planet, my framework of global futurities maps the differential horizon of being and co-becoming for those who have been historically denied a future due to discriminatory processes such as Black communities, Indigenous peoples, formerly colonized populations, migrants, etc. Such futurities are not simply pluralistic in terms of cultural diversity, but they serve as counter-hegemonic forms of futuring and worlding, shaped by dissident interests and political actors dedicated to promoting (Other)worldly justice. These subaltern viewpoints challenge a singular framing of humanity, as they involve multiple nodes and networks of power/knowledge/desire. These ontological and temporal geographies are centered in queer, feminist, intersectional, anti-racist, multi-species forms of collective agency amid existential threats from colonialism, globalization, the Anthropocene, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preparing for the next pandemic became not only a national task, but a problem with international, even global dimensions. No single nation on its own is able to stop the next pandemic; no borders are strong enough to keep microbial threats outside the nation-state’s territory. This essay focuses on the role of the WHO in pandemic preparedness planning in the 1990s and early 2000s: What vision of the global future did the international organization follow and design? What measures did it propose to reduce risks? What narratives did it use to define its own role in these processes?

Macro-social theory has been on the wane. There are various reasons for this, but among the consequences of this gap is that an urgent social problem – climate change – has received little attention and is poorly connected to existing theories. This problem, in turn, is tied to the fact that the transition to modernity is no longer central to social theory. Instead, a recent focus has been on how the “rise of the West” is predicated on dominance over “the rest.” This essay addresses both problems, arguing that the transition to modernity is still central, but that a second transition, the post-war “great acceleration” and how it led to an “age of limits,” should be equally central. The essay traces the transformation of nature and its impact on the climate through these two transitions, and argues that responsibility for addressing the consequences of climate change will increasingly mean tracking the connections, and lack of connections, between the Global North and South.

What forces will shape the global future? We begin with discussion of the central roles of globalization and the ecologically destructive Anthropocene and then move onto more current popular and political debates about questions of unchallengeable globalization versus de-globalization and re-globalization. We side with the former. The broad story is how historical global capitalism, with different leading core states or hegemons, inexorably pushed global society into an increasingly tight related connected world-economy, meshed together by commodity webs and supply chains that linked increasingly far-flung locations, geologies, landscapes, and ecosystems. The vision is one of a world-system, embedded to a large degree on market and nation-state capitalism and political power, conflict, and cooperation, that grows more and more tightly integrated, spatially widespread, and ecologically destructive as it expanded for six hundred years. We disagree with a fundamental “break” from the old political economy view. In fact, we are confident that today’s current Anthropocene global consciousness remains – with major concern with climate change and worldwide pandemics. There is little doubt that worldwide globalization is not only needed but essentially inescapable.

It is not a surprise that, in times when beliefs about the cost-free benefits of infinite economic growth are urgently discussed, we find ourselves tempted to look back at the times when it emerged as a desirable future for the planet. This essay proposes an analysis of the Storia filosofica e politica della navigazione , del commercio e delle colonie degli antichi nel Mar Nero (Venice, 2 vols., 1788–89) written by Venetian polygrapher Vincenzo Formaleoni, who, urging the Venetians to regain their glorious trade in the Black Sea, revisited several centuries of ancient history. Building on Formaleoni’s reflection, I show that the increasingly global extension of commercial exchanges experienced in the 18th century reshaped contemporary ways to narrate the past, comprehend the present and conceive the future, a future which increasingly appeared as inescapably global. I argue that, beyond different economic doctrines, 18th-century historical narratives produced a vision where the history of humankind was essentially appreciated through an economic gaze – a sense of history that still prevails today.

The link between the global condition and planetary thinking is a crucial one when thinking about the future. Positing itself in the context of future-oriented history and posthumanist and planetary thinking, the essay reflects on a central concept of global thought such as cosmopolitanism, theorizing the possibility of a posthuman cosmopolitanism. Built on concepts such as multiple modernities and secularities, philosophical posthumanism, and non-anthropocentric history, posthuman cosmopolitanism is primarily future-focused, globally rooted, and planetary oriented. Specifically, by proposing as a case study of a sort a posthumanist approach to a rethinking of cosmopolitanism, the essay emphasizes how thinking planetary and in a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric way does not entail, as it may be assumed, a relativization and loss of relevance of “the human” per se, but a more complex web of intra-active relations. By building on the work of authors such as Braidotti, Domanska, Chakrabarty, Simon, and Latour, the essay proposes an original reflection, engaging with a crucial issue such as how to think about a global future that focuses on globality as the product of interconnected, multiple processes and constantly shifting interrelations between human and non-human forces.