Imagining global futures

Can we imagine a fairer global future-and then can we develop concrete proposals to get there?Critical approaches to international politics habitually stand accused of excelling at relentless deconstruction, in impenetrable jargon, without proposing viable alternatives.Imagining global futures seems ideally poised to counter this stereotype: it moves beyond critique to imagine alternative futures, and it does so in inviting and accessible language.As the book shows, there are many challenges at stake, from fighting 'digital colonialism' to shifting class solidarities in labour organizing in companies like Amazon.The contributors successfully demonstrate the constructive potential of the decolonial language beyond critique.The book offers contributions stripped of some of the heaviness of academic writing, including fragments of fiction and poetry.Empirically and ethically, some undeclared but persistent commonalities bind the book together.Among these, there is an instinctive preference for bottomup and community-led forms of organizing; a commitment to learning from oppressed and marginal(ized) communities; a local or sometimes transnational reading of action, which is suspicious of formal cooperation among nation-states; and an understanding of power as something to be resisted rather than co-opted.Given the activist backgrounds of many of the contributors, what emerges is also a profile of Gramsci's 'organic intellectual': deeply involved in producing academic knowledge, but also embedded in many of the transnational struggles and transclass solidarities that knowledge interrogates.Theoretically, the book seems to pick up where Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019; reviewed in International Affairs 96: 5, September 2020) left off.This edited volume can be read as an analytical move from the imperial past into a decolonized future.In particular, Aslı Bâli and Omar Dajani's rethinking of political community and authority for Kurds and Palestinians speaks directly to Getachew's project of decoupling struggles for self-determination from the analytical and political confines of the nation-state.There is something deeply moving and graceful about these readings of the future.AbdouMaliq Simone's chapter on 'southern urbanisms' describes city dwellers who can refuse the prevailing beggar-my-neighbour mentality and 'turn to each other

Business · Economics · Financial economics · Futures contract · Regional resilience and development