Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Anticipating the future is both a social obligation and intellectual challenge that no scientific discipline can escape.1 The field of international studies is no exception to this, and we believe that few other disciplines reflect so deeply about their own capacity to provide accurate forecasts and to deliver useful early warning schemes. One school of thought declares prediction to be an impossible aspiration, sometimes because certain events are a priori considered to be unforeseeable (cf. Beyerchen 1992). The ex post facto realization that dramatic singular events like the fall of the Berlin Wall (e.g., Gaddis 1992) or the September 11 terrorist attacks (e.g., Herrmann and Choi 2007) shape global politics dramatically nurture this radical skepticism. Government, IGO, and NGO officials often take the opposite view that academics could anticipate the future if they would accept their “responsibility” of contributing something useful to society. Users of such forecasts in offices around the world are, for obvious reasons, convinced that anticipating the future is possible. In the words of one civil servant of the European Commission, “it can safely be argued” that the implemented early warning schemes have
Source: International Studies Review
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Norges Forskningsråd
OpenAlex ID: W2125452864