Unknowing the future: Speculative foresight in international institutions and the unexpected ‘origins’ of expertise

Abstract Amidst a deepening sense of uncertainty and polycrisis, how do international organizations (IOs) relate to the future? This article explores the politics of speculative foresight as a pervasive but sparsely researched and undertheorized form of future-oriented expertise in international institutions that taps into eclectic knowledge genres – such as art and literature, management philosophy, geopolitics, and esotericism. First, I examine how foresight is created and validated as a bundle of epistemic practice in contemporary IOs. As a way of knowing, I find that foresight is authorized through claims to innovation, imagination, pluralism, and methodological correctness, challenging established understandings of IO expertise as based on bureaucratic rationality and scientific objectivity. Moreover, I argue that foresight differs from more well-researched future-oriented practices, like risk technologies, forecasting, and anticipatory modeling, by imagining the future as contingent, plural, and unknowable. In a second genealogical move, I illustrate how this specific rendering of the future was made possible historically through the establishment of futures studies as an activist, utopian, and aesthetic counter-project to ‘scientific’ Cold War futurology. The article mobilizes performative thinking in social theory and STS and builds on a transversal analysis of IO documents, digital platforms and archives, futurist writings, and historical literature.