Who must lose for tomorrow to be won? Relational imagination and the reproduction of war

This theoretical, reflective, and methodological commentary responds to Riel Miller’s futures illiteracy and the reproduction of war by asking who is positioned to lose when tomorrow is imagined as something to be won. I adopt Miller’s distinction between anticipation-for-the-future (AfF) and anticipation-for-emergence (AfE) while questioning whether power can remain secondary. Anticipatory frames and capacities are historically and materially shaped through colonial governance, capitalist accumulation, education, and social reproduction. Using an Indigenous epistolary methodology, I relate first-person autoethnographic reflection on Ancestral Calling and dispossession, second-person dialogue, and third-person historical-material inquiry. Writing from South Africa’s democratic transition and an Indigenous and Africana Womanist relational worldview, I place Bateson’s account of Versailles in conversation with South Africa’s negotiated settlement to examine how settlements reorganise relational premises that later generations may experience as reality. Relational imagination examines how imagined futures distribute agency, possibility, vulnerability, and loss. Reorientation extends Futures Literacy through embodied, pluriepistemic inquiry that makes inherited premises and participation in their reproduction perceptible and revisable. UNESCO’s social contract for education thus becomes both aspiration and warning: universal principles cannot secure relational justice while peace and development continue to distribute vulnerability and loss unequally.