This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies. Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies, we have curated a Special Issue examining the challenges facing global politics for the next 50 years. IR has regularly turned its attention backwards towards its historical origins. Instead, we look to the future. In this Introduction, we start by outlining four traditions of future-oriented thinking: positivist, realist prediction; planning, forecasting, and scenario-building; utopian dreams of an ideal political future; and prefigurative thinking in activist politics. From these traditions, we learn that thinking about the future is always thinking about the present. We then outline four themes in the Special Issue articles: How do we think about the future at all? How do we think about imperial pasts and the ongoing questions of colonization and racialization in the present? How will technological change mediate and generates geopolitical change? How are socioecological crises, and in particular climate change, increasingly shaping how we think about the future of global politics? Overall, these provide us with a diverse, stimulating, and thought-provoking set of essays about the future of global politics, as both discipline and set of empirical problems.

Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.

In a recent article, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Swati Parashar1 trace the continued salience of Eurocentrism in critical International Relations (IR), demonstrating how the ‘master’s outlook’ continues to stifle the study of global politics; they ultimately encourage an unsettling and even implosion of the discipline. Starting from this proposed ‘implosion’ of critical IR, this article reflects on our hopes, as two current PhD candidates and one early career researcher in global politics, for teaching and learning in this future world. We begin by reflecting on our own complicity in reproducing the Western-centrism of the discipline and consider how this discomfort can be used productively. The article then considers the radical potential of the classroom and the necessity of empathetic, collaborative inquiry to the future of the discipline of global politics. We advocate for an IR which is imaginative, relational, messy, and vulnerable – and are hopeful about how this may animate a meaningful and sustainable implosion. Embracing our discomfort and the possibility of failure, we hope to contribute to the ongoing ‘unsettling’ of academia from the standpoint of incipient feminist scholars and hopeful early-career teachers.

In recent years, scholars of global politics have shown that issues of race and white supremacy lie at the centre of international history, the birth of the field of International Relations, and contemporary theory. In this article, I argue that race plays an equally central role in the 21st century’s current and future crises: the set of systemic risks that includes intensifying climate change, deepening inequality, the endemic instabilities of capitalism, and migration. To make this argument, I describe the contours of the current crisis and show how racism amplifies its effects. In short, capitalism’s winners and losers and the effects of climate change fall along racial lines, amplifying both direct and indirect racial discrimination against non-white migrants and states in the Global South. These interdependent crises will shape the next 50 years of international politics and will likely perpetuate the vicious cycle of global racial inequality. Accordingly, this article presents a research agenda for all IR scholars to explore the empirical implications of race in the international system, integrate marginalised perspectives on global politics from the past and present into their scholarship, and address the most pressing political issues of the 21st century.

This article examines ‘diasporic geopolitics’ as a significant factor in the future of global politics. Whereas discussions of global order in IR have been highly spatialised, we instead highlight the extent to which different regions of the world are entangled via ongoing migration processes, and their legacies in the form of global diasporas. We examine the significance of these interconnections by focusing on rising powers and their relations with the existing international order. Major migration-sending states such as China, India, and Turkey are now aspiring great powers that seek to exert global influence in international affairs. In this context, their diaspora governance policies are also undergoing a transformation, with diasporas increasingly understood as important assets for promoting sending states’ geopolitical agendas and great power ambitions. We examine three mechanisms by which such states exert power transnationally via their diaspora engagement policies. States can treat ‘their’ diasporas as economic assets that facilitate trade and foreign investment; as soft power assets that contribute to the promotion of ‘civilisational’ politics; and as diplomatic assets that can be strategically mobilised or repressed. We conclude by discussing the implications for thinking about the nature of global order and power politics in the coming 50 years.

While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, this article proposes to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, the article is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions.

Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.

Intelligent machines – from automated robots to algorithmic systems – can create images and poetry, steer our preferences, aid decision making, and kill. Our perception of their capacities, relative autonomy, and moral status will profoundly affect not only how we interpret and address practical problems in world politics over the next 50 years but also how we prescribe and evaluate individual and state responses. In this article, I argue that we must analyse this emerging synthetic agency in order to effectively navigate – and theorise – the future of world politics. I begin by outlining the ways that agency has been under-theorised within the discipline of International Relations (IR) and suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts prevailing conceptions. I then examine how individual human beings and formal organisations – purposive actors with which IR is already familiar – qualify as moral agents, or bearers of duties, and explore what criteria intelligent machines would need to meet to also qualify. After demonstrating that synthetic agents currently lack the ‘reflexive autonomy’ required for moral agency, I turn to the context of war to illustrate how insights drawn from this comparative analysis counter our tendency to elide different manifestations of moral agency in ways that erode crucial notions of responsibility in world politics.

In this article, I am going to suggest that questions of societal and political control will be fundamental to the challenges humanity faces in the next 50 years, a continuation of the political and social problems of modernity but playing out in a range of political contexts and with a range of technological ‘tools’. Technicians of security will attempt to manage the disorder and insecurity that results from the potential weaponisation of everything, to use a phrase from Mark Galeotti, and the weaponisation of everywhere, a condition where the state will be seeking to control a range of emerging terrains and domains. But at the same time, while societies in 2074 might be confronting conditions that are an intensification of modern political problems, there is the possibility that the impact of climate emergencies and other ecological/technological dangers might produce global disorder unlike anything experienced in modernity, radically transforming (or mutilating) the ‘material’ foundations of international politics, presenting us with problems unlike anything encountered before. At this point, as Bruno Latour suggested, we might have to depart (for our own survival and the survival of others) from the ideas about politics and economy that we have ‘inherited’ from modernity.

This article interrogates United Nations (UN) calls that ‘making peace with nature’ should become the crucial mission of the 21st century. It ponders the kind of diplomacy envisioned for such a reconciliation ecology to be credible. Drawing on one of the most promising and less known programmes of the UN system – namely, Harmony with Nature (HwN), which pioneers Earth-based jurisprudence and rights of nature – it conceptualises this diplomatic shift and assesses the conditions under which ecological diplomacy can be productively operationalised in the 21st century vis-à-vis a mere rhetorical appropriation and co-optation by intergovernmental agendas. Building on Indigenous thought and animist epistemologies, programmes such as HwN espouse a new relationship with Planet Earth and make it possible to explore ‘nature’ as diplomatic interlocutor. We argue that existing paradigms of peacebuilding fail to sufficiently capture the diplomatic aspects and complex local dynamics of the human–nature relationship and suggest a reconceptualisation based on an ecological diplomacy that is both expansive and transformative and views this relationship as one of troubled coexistence.

Human capacity to explore and shape outer space will increase substantially over the next 50 years. Yet, International Relations (IR) theory still treats outer space as an isolated, unique, or inconsequential realm of political life. This paper moves IR beyond its ‘terrestrial trap’ by theorising planetary politics as inherently embedded in relations with environments and actors that are located beyond Earth. To face the momentous and often alarming political developments taking place in outer space, from space militarisation to space colonisation, we challenge two of IR’s terrestrial biases. First, we confront the assumption that developments in international relations take place only or primarily on Earth. We show how the historically constituted ideologies and political economies of colonisation and domination are extended to – but also transformed within – outer space exploration and settlement. Second, we challenge the notion that developments in outer space form a logical extension of politics as it has emerged on the habitable surface of our planet. We move beyond zones of human habitation and explore how the material conditions of space intersect with situated histories of political governance and control. By analysing politics beyond Earth, we retool IR theory to confront an extraterrestrial political future.