Governing the Future


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This conference was organized by Jenny Andersson and Ariel Colonomos and took place at Ceri on June 14th 2010. It now continues online. It brings together different scholars from different disciplines who share a common interest in the study of the future and discusses the role of predictions in different areas such as the environment, finance and demographics. A specific attention is paid to the causes and historical reasons for the development of these predictive tools and the social demands these modern oracles respond to. The different papers will underline the role knowledge plays into the elaboration of predictions. Predictive knowledge includes social sciences theories and models or techniques such as computer science or statistics.

The contributors provide answers to specific questions such as:

    Has the role of forecasting changed over time?What is the role of future technologies?What is the impact of forecasting?

Papers open for discussion

Sovereign ratings as normative predictions. The preference for a stable future.

Ariel Colonomos

Date of publication: 14 June 2010
This paper examines the role of sovereign ratings and focuses on their normative dimension. It argues that, as predictions, sovereigns have a normative and regulatory impact as they develop a highly conservative vision of the future while occulting change and favoring stability.

The Great Future Struggle: Futures Studies and the Struggle for the World

Jenny Anderson

Date of publication: 14 June 2010
This paper describes the history of future studies, concentrating on the periodization of the presence of the future in world history and the technological, institutional and scientific reasons that made future so present in some past historical periods.

Predicting Financial Crises

Ivan Manokha

Date of publication: 14 June 2010
In this paper I outline a series of factors that have led to the current financial crisis and raise a number of questions with respect to more general implications for our understanding of the possibility of predicting financial crises, particularly by political authorities.

The Past Future. How and Why Past Population Projections Failed

Hervé Le Bras

Date of publication: 14 June 2010

Towards A Social History of the Purification of Governance: The Case of the IIASA

Egle Rindzeviciute

Date of publication: 03 August 2010

The Time Machine. An Argument for Future History

Matthew Connelly

Date of publication: 19 September 2010
People have long dreamed of a device that would actually transport them through time to witness both the past and the future. In fact, a Time Machine has been there all along, hiding in plain sight. Only we needed an owner’s manual to know how to make it work: integrating the history of the future, of forecasting and future scenarios, with the future of history—a new, more global history that can explain the contemporary era and prepare us for the world to come.
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