Book launch: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century – Friday 31 March 14.00-15.00 CET online
How do scholars write the future of global politics? Written in futur antérieur style, around the 200-year anniversary of the birth of International Relations (IR) as a discipline, the contributions to The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century engage in world-building and imagine futures of IR. Set in a multiverse, 23 chapters draw on a range of possible themes and imaginaries, such as post-pandemic conditions, the Anthropocene, and not least academic practices and the role of researchers. A concluding chapter anchors these explorations in contemporary discussions. The book mirrors the format of existing handbooks, combining outlines and discussions of theories, structures, and processes in IR with academic science fiction of how these might play out over the course of the next century. In doing so, the book challenges IR and provides alternative imaginaries, rather than predicting future conditions for all humanity. The book invites readers to reflect on how thinking about the future has become an increasingly radical, but more than ever necessary act.
- AI-run societies,
- A wars of algorithms,
- Gene selecting immigration policies
- Post-apocalypse hope and community building
- Cloning pursued by the believers of Cybele
All of this and more are taken seriously and to their possible end results in this volume, written by scholars and practitioners.
Bring your craziest futurisms and discuss with us the possible politics of the 22nd Century!
See the book’s website here, including open access links to the introduction and conclusion. As Kim Stanley Robinson, best-selling author of The Ministry for the Future and the Mars trilogy writes: “This book collects the latest thinking on all the looming issues we face in dealing with climate change and all the other parts of the poly-crisis facing us in the 21st century. It’s a great bit of cognitive mapping, a crucial guide to our immediate future.”
In the online launch event moderated by Sonia Lucarelli (Bologna), the book editors Ayşem Mert (Stockholm), Franziska Müller (Hamburg) and Laura Horn (Roskilde) will provide a brief outline of book, highlighting what academic science fiction can contribute to IR. Several contributors will offer flashtalk presentations of their chapters, and then there will be time for Q&A.
