The Realism of Our Time? Futures, Fictions, and the Mid-Century Bang

The Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century (HGP22 is a unique project that diffuses the dichotomy between the factual and the fictional. In a future antérieur style, each contributor to this volume has used their creativity to ask tricky, sad, hopeful, cynical questions: Where is IR, in times of war, climate and ecological catastrophe, and deepening social and political conflicts? Looking at our discipline, a number of anachronistic, but also futurist features seem remarkable: the broken, but re-establishing trust in global cooperation, the trust in post-human techno-fixes that enhance, or sometimes even replace human cooperation thanks to benevolent algorithms, the hope for radical, more-than-human encounters.