The dual uncertainty regime: Creative and destructive uncertainty in the ontology of political futures

This article argues that the political future cannot be explained by a single logic of uncertainty. In the chronopolitics literature, the future is approached through multiple registers—normative imagination, anticipatory governance, and empirical future-making—yet the co-functioning of its uncertainty dynamics remains invisible at the mechanism level. The gap is addressed by reconstructing Arendt's ontology of action through a creative line that treats uncertainty as the constitutive condition of beginning and action. Beck's risk analytics is constructed through a destructive line of uncertainty produced by manufactured risks. Methodologically, primary texts were analyzed through contextual-conceptual reconstruction. The two theoretical horizons are subjected to a hermeneutic synthesis around the problem of regimes of uncertainty. The article's central contribution is the Dual Uncertainty Regime model, which differentiates three mechanisms through which creative and destructive uncertainty co-constitute the political future. These three mechanisms are defined as follows: interaction–amplification, neutralization–suppression, and differentiation–categorical divergence. The COVID-19 pandemic was employed not as a comprehensive empirical test but as an illustrative application demonstrating how mechanisms can operate at varying intensities within a single conjuncture. The result is a context-sensitive, mechanism-oriented explanatory schema for debates on the political future.