Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the ... Articles/Constellations...

Constellations Volume 11, No 4, 2004. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight

Fuyuki Kurasawa

Introduction

As we float in a mood of post-millennial angst, the future appears to be out offavor. Mere mention of the idea of farsightedness – of trying to analyze what mayoccur in our wake in order to better understand how to live in the here and now –conjures up images of fortune-telling crystal balls and doomsday prophets, or ofeccentric pundits equipped with data-crunching supercomputers spewing forthfanciful prognostications. The future, then, has seemingly become the province ofmystics and scientists, a realm into which the rest of us rarely venture. This curi-ous situation goes back to a founding paradox of early modernity, which soughtto replace pagan divination and Judeo-Christian eschatology with its own rationalsystem of apprehending time. Thus came into being the philosophy of history,according to which human destiny unfolds teleologically by following a know-able and meaningful set of chronological laws leading to a final state of perfec-tion; Condorcet, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, to name but a few, are the children ofthis kind of historicism that expresses an unwavering faith in the Enlightenment’scredo of inherent progress over time. Yet in our post-metaphysical age, where theidea of discovering universal and stable temporal laws has become untenable, thephilosophy of history lies in ruins. What has stepped into the breach is a variety ofsciences of governance of the future, ranging from social futurism to risk man-agement. By developing sophisticated modeling techniques, prognosticators aimto convert the future into a series of predictable outcomes extrapolated frompresent-day trends, or a set of possibilities to be assessed and managed accordingto their comparative degrees of risk and reward.1 Although commendable in theiradvocacy of farsightedness, these scientistic forms of knowledge are hamperedby the fact that their longing for surefire predictive models have inevitably comeup short.

If historicism and scientistic governance offer rather unappealing paradigmsfor contemplating the future, a turn to the conventional political forecasts of thepost-Cold War world order hardly offers more succor. Entering the fray, one israpidly submerged by Fukuyama’s “end of history,” Huntington’s “clash ofcivilizations,” Kaplan’s “coming anarchy,” or perhaps most distressing of all, theso-called ‘Bush Doctrine’ of unilateral pre-emption. For the Left, this array ofunpalatable scenarios merely prolongs the sense of hope betrayed and utopias

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© 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

crushed that followed the collapse of the socialist experiment. Under suchcircumstances, is it any wonder that many progressive thinkers dread an unwel-comed future, preferring to avert their gazes from it while eyeing foresight withequal doses of suspicion and contempt?

But neither evasion nor fatalism will do. Some authors have grasped this,reviving hope in large-scale socio-political transformation by sketching out uto-pian pictures of an alternative world order. Endeavors like these are essential, forthey spark ideas about possible and desirable futures that transcend the existingstate of affairs and undermine the flawed prognoses of the post-Cold War worldorder; what ought to be and the Blochian ‘Not-Yet’ remain powerful figures ofcritique of what is, and inspire us to contemplate how social life could be orga-nized differently. Nevertheless, my aim in this paper is to pursue a different tackby exploring how a dystopian imaginary can lay the foundations for a construc-tive engagement with the future.

In the twenty-first century, the lines of political cleavage are being drawnalong those of competing dystopian visions. Indeed, one of the notable features ofrecent public discourse and socio-political struggle is their negationist hue, forthey are devoted as much to the prevention of disaster as to the realization of thegood, less to what ought to be than what could but must not be.2 The debates thatpreceded the war in Iraq provide a vivid illustration of this tendency, as bothcamps rhetorically invoked incommensurable catastrophic scenarios to maketheir respective cases. And as many analysts have noted, the multinational anti-war protests culminating on February 15, 2003 marked the first time that a massmovement was able to mobilize substantial numbers of people dedicated to avert-ing war before it had actually broken out. More generally, given past experiencesand awareness of what might occur in the future, given the cries of ‘never again’(the Second World War, the Holocaust, Bhopal, Rwanda, etc.) and ‘not ever’(e.g., nuclear or ecological apocalypse, human cloning) that are emanating fromdifferent parts of the world, the avoidance of crises is seemingly on everyone’slips – and everyone’s conscience. From the United Nations and regional multilat-eral organizations to states, from non-governmental organizations to transnationalsocial movements, the determination to prevent the actualization of potential cat-aclysms has become a new imperative in world affairs. Allowing past disasters toreoccur and unprecedented calamities to unfold is now widely seen as unbearablewhen, in the process, the suffering of future generations is callously tolerated andour survival is being irresponsibly jeopardized. Hence, we need to pay attentionto what a widely circulated report by the International Commission on Interven-tion and State Sovereignty identifies as a burgeoning “culture of prevention,”3 adynamic that carries major, albeit still poorly understood, normative and politicalimplications.

Rather than bemoaning the contemporary preeminence of a dystopian imagi-nary, I am claiming that it can enable a novel form of transnational socio-politicalaction, a manifestation of globalization from below that can be termed preventive

Cautionary Tales: Fuyuki Kurasawa 455


foresight. We should not reduce the latter to a formal principle regulating inter-national relations or an ensemble of policy prescriptions for official players on theworld stage, since it is, just as significantly, a mode of ethico-political practiceenacted by participants in the emerging realm of global civil society. In otherwords, what I want to underscore is the work of farsightedness, the social proc-esses through which civic associations are simultaneously constituting andputting into practice a sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to pre-vent global catastrophes. Although the labor of preventive foresight takes place invarying political and socio-cultural settings – and with different degrees of insti-tutional support and access to symbolic and material resources – it is underpinnedby three distinctive features: dialogism, publicity, and transnationalism.

In the first instance, preventive foresight is an intersubjective or dialogicalprocess of address, recognition, and response between two parties in global civilsociety: the ‘warners,’ who anticipate and send out word of possible perils, and theaudiences being warned, those who heed their interlocutors’ messages by demand-ing that governments and/or international organizations take measures to steer awayfrom disaster. Secondly, the work of farsightedness derives its effectiveness andlegitimacy from public debate and deliberation. This is not to say that a fullyfledged global public sphere is already in existence, since transnational “strongpublics” with decisional power in the formal-institutional realm are currentlyembryonic at best. Rather, in this context, publicity signifies that “weak publics”with distinct yet occasionally overlapping constituencies are coalescing aroundstruggles to avoid specific global catastrophes.4 Hence, despite having little directdecision-making capacity, the environmental and peace movements, humanitarianNGOs, and other similar globally-oriented civic associations are becoming signific-ant actors involved in public opinion formation. Groups like these are active in dis-seminating information and alerting citizens about looming catastrophes, lobbyingstates and multilateral organizations from the ‘inside’ and pressuring them from the‘outside,’ as well as fostering public participation in debates about the future.

This brings us to the transnational character of preventive foresight, which ismost explicit in the now commonplace observation that we live in an interdepend-ent world because of the globalization of the perils that humankind faces (nuclearannihilation, global warming, terrorism, genocide, AIDS and SARS epidemics,and so on); individuals and groups from far-flung parts of the planet are beingbrought together into “risk communities” that transcend geographical borders.5

Moreover, due to dense media and information flows, knowledge of impedingcatastrophes can instantaneously reach the four corners of the earth – sometimeswell before individuals in one place experience the actual consequences of a crisisoriginating in another.

My contention is that civic associations are engaging in dialogical, public, andtransnational forms of ethico-political action that contribute to the creation of afledgling global civil society existing ‘below’ the official and institutionalizedarchitecture of international relations.6 The work of preventive foresight consists



of forging ties between citizens; participating in the circulation of flows ofclaims, images, and information across borders; promoting an ethos of farsightedcosmopolitanism; and forming and mobilizing weak publics that debate andstruggle against possible catastrophes. Over the past few decades, states andinternational organizations have frequently been content to follow the lead of glo-bally-minded civil society actors, who have been instrumental in placing on thepublic agenda a host of pivotal issues (such as nuclear war, ecological pollution,species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights violations). Tomy mind, this strongly indicates that if prevention of global crises is to eventuallyrival the assertion of short-term and narrowly defined rationales (national interest,profit, bureaucratic self-preservation, etc.), weak publics must begin by convinc-ing or compelling official representatives and multilateral organizations to act dif-ferently; only then will farsightedness be in a position to ‘move up’ and becomeinstitutionalized via strong publics.7

Since the global culture of prevention remains a work in progress, the argu-ment presented in this paper is poised between empirical and normative dimen-sions of analysis. It proposes a theory of the practice of preventive foresight basedupon already existing struggles and discourses, at the same time as it advocatesthe adoption of certain principles that would substantively thicken and assist inthe realization of a sense of responsibility for the future of humankind. I willthereby proceed in four steps, beginning with a consideration of the shiftingsocio-political and cultural climate that is giving rise to farsightedness today (I).I will then contend that the development of a public aptitude for early warningabout global cataclysms can overcome flawed conceptions of the future’s essen-tial inscrutability (II). From this will follow the claim that an ethos of farsightedcosmopolitanism – of solidarity that extends to future generations – can supplantthe preeminence of ‘short-termism’ with the help of appeals to the public’s moralimagination and use of reason (III). In the final section of the paper, I will arguethat the commitment of global civil society actors to norms of precaution andtransnational justice can hone citizens’ faculty of critical judgment against abusesof the dystopian imaginary, thereby opening the way to public deliberation aboutthe construction of an alternative world order (IV).

I. The Cradle of Prevention

Although farsightedness has a long history in world affairs, we can trace back thefactors responsible for its present-day standing to the second half of the twentiethcentury. Societies emerging from the horrors and devastation of two world warscame to recognize that certain dangers (principally wars of aggression, genocide,crimes against humanity, and nuclear armageddon) needed to be averted at allcosts. The international community thereby devised a number of institutionalresponses, such as the Charter giving birth to the United Nations, the signing ofthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the UN Convention on the



Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, by paralyzingthe United Nations system and fuelling a nuclear arms race, the onset and escal-ation of the Cold War rendered the institutional sphere largely ineffective. Inresponse to this paralysis came the nuclear disarmament and peace movements,which were spurred on by the terrifying realization that human beings haddevised the means for their own annihilation and that the two geopolitical blocswere pursuing an exterminist logic; given that human survival could no longer beentrusted to governments or multilateral institutions, citizens had to organizethemselves to tackle the problem head-on. In the 1970s and 1980s, widely circu-lated reports from the Club of Rome and the Brundtland Commission8 combinedwith environmental activism brought another global threat to public attention, theprospect of ecological ruin caused by a rampant industrialism that mercilesslydepleted the earth’s resources and polluted it at an unsustainably destructive pace.

Yet it is since the end of the Cold War that the idea of prevention has trulycome into its own in both the formally and informally organized domains of glo-bal governance. The dissolution of the bipolar stalemate between East and Westopened the door to greater inter-state coordination and collaboration, perhapsmost significantly at the United Nations Security Council.9 The creation of supra-national judicial institutions (e.g., the International Criminal Tribunal for theformer Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court) are also signal achieve-ments of the post-Cold War world order, for they may well have a latent deter-rence effect despite the fact that they are designed to prosecute crimes againsthumanity ex post facto. The Rome Treaty establishing the International CriminalCourt is itself part of an expanding infrastructure of multinational conferencesand agreements that has come into being over the past decade or so; governmentsand NGOs have participated in large-scale, UN-sponsored summits that haveyielded agreements or declarations incorporating strong preventive language: theRio Summit on the environment, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the Inter-national Treaty to Ban Landmines, and, of most relevance for our purposes, theDeclaration on the Responsibilities of the Present Generations Towards FutureGenerations.10 Furthermore, the unfolding of a process of globalization frombelow has meant that certain civil society organizations are increasingly vocal indemanding that governments, multilateral institutions and transnational corpor-ations take preventive action or cease to engage in activities and support policiesthat imperil humankind.

In addition, farsightedness has become a priority in world affairs due to theappearance of new global threats and the resurgence of ‘older’ ones. Virulentforms of ethno-racial nationalism and religious fundamentalism that had mostlybeen kept in check or bottled up during the Cold War have reasserted themselvesin ways that are now all-too-familiar – civil warfare, genocide, ‘ethnic cleansing,’and global terrorism. And if nuclear mutually assured destruction has come topass, other dangers are filling the vacuum: climate change, AIDS and otherdiseases (BSE, SARS, etc.), as well as previously unheralded genomic perils



(genetically modified organisms, human cloning). Collective remembrance ofpast atrocities and disasters has galvanized some sectors of public opinion andmade the international community’s unwillingness to adequately intervene beforeand during the genocides in the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or to take remedialsteps in the case of the spiraling African and Asian AIDS pandemics, appearparticularly glaring.

Returning to the point I made at the beginning of this paper, the significance offoresight is a direct outcome of the transition toward a dystopian imaginary (orwhat Sontag has called “the imagination of disaster”).11 Huxley’s Brave NewWorld and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, two groundbreaking dystopian novelsof the first half of the twentieth century, remain as influential as ever in framingpublic discourse and understanding current techno-scientific dangers, while recentparadigmatic cultural artifacts – films like The Matrix and novels like Atwood’sOryx and Crake – reflect and give shape to this catastrophic sensibility.12 And yetdystopianism need not imply despondency, paralysis, or fear. Quite the opposite,in fact, since the pervasiveness of a dystopian imaginary can help notions of histor-ical contingency and fallibilism gain traction against their determinist and absolut-ist counterparts.13 Once we recognize that the future is uncertain and that anycourse of action produces both unintended and unexpected consequences, theresponsibility to face up to potential disasters and intervene before they strikebecomes compelling. From another angle, dystopianism lies at the core of politicsin a global civil society where groups mobilize their own nightmare scenarios(‘Frankenfoods’ and a lifeless planet for environmentalists, totalitarian patriarchyof the sort depicted in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale for Western feminism,McWorld and a global neoliberal oligarchy for the alternative globalization move-ment, etc.). Such scenarios can act as catalysts for public debate and socio-politicalaction, spurring citizens’ involvement in the work of preventive foresight.

Several bodies of literature have touched upon this sea-change toward a cultureof prevention in world affairs, most notably just-war theory,14 internationalpublic policy research,15 and writings from the risk society paradigm.16 Regard-less of how insightful these three approaches may be, they tend to skirt over muchof what is revealing about the interplay of the ethical, political, and sociologicaldynamics that drive global civil society initiatives aimed at averting disaster.Consequently, the theory of practice proposed here reconstructs the dialogical,public, and transnational work of farsightedness, in order to articulate the socio-political processes underpinning it to the normative ideals that should steer andassist in substantively thickening it. As such, the establishment of a capacity forearly warning is the first aspect of the question that we need to tackle.

II. The Aptitude for Early Warning

When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one islikely to encounter from some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism



about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of thinking, forinstance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, tostrive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional para-digms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no intrin-sic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, andif, contra scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted withouterror, then the abyss of chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at ourfeet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore,rather than embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, weshould adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history;let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise.

While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of allpredictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency ofhistory with unwarranted assertions about the latter’s total opacity and indetermin-acy. Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with absolute cer-tainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand what is brewingon the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In fact, theincorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means thatwe must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses thatprovoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return inthe final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, theacceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsight-edness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders ofpresent generations. The future no longer appears to be a metaphysical creature ofdestiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure random-ness. It becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in thepresent – including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible andavoidable sources of harm to our successors.

Combining a sense of analytical contingency toward the future and ethicalresponsibility for it, the idea of early warning is making its way into preventiveaction on the global stage. Despite the fact that not all humanitarian, techno-scientific, and environmental disasters can be predicted in advance, the multipli-cation of independent sources of knowledge and detection mechanisms enables usto foresee many of them before it is too late. Indeed, in recent years, global civilsociety’s capacity for early warning has dramatically increased, in no small partdue to the impressive number of NGOs that include catastrophe prevention at theheart of their mandates.17 These organizations are often the first to detect signs oftrouble, to dispatch investigative or fact-finding missions, and to warn the inter-national community about impending dangers; to wit, the lead role of environ-mental groups in sounding the alarm about global warming and species depletionor of humanitarian agencies regarding the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, fre-quently months or even years before Western governments or multilateral institu-tions followed suit. What has come into being, then, is a loose-knit network of



watchdog groups that is acquiring finely tuned antennae to pinpoint indicators offorthcoming or already unfolding crises.

This network of ‘early warners’ are working to publicize potential and actualemergencies by locating indicators of danger into larger catastrophic patterns ofinterpretation, culturally meaningful chains of events whose implications becomediscernable for decision-makers and ordinary citizens (‘this is why you shouldcare’).18 Civic associations can thus invest perilous situations with urgency andimportance, transforming climate change from an apparently mild and distantpossibility to an irreversible and grave threat to human survival, and genocidefrom a supposedly isolated aberration to an affront to our common humanity.

The growing public significance of preventive message in global affairs is partand parcel of what Ignatieff has termed an “advocacy revolution,”19 since threat-ened populations and allied organizations are acting as early warning beacons thateducate citizens about certain perils and appeal for action on the part of states andmultilateral institutions. Global civil society players have devised a host of ‘nam-ing and shaming’ strategies and high-profile information campaigns to this effect,including press conferences, petitions, mass marches, and boycotts, and spectacu-lar stunts that denounce bureaucratic inertia, the reckless pursuit of profit, or thepreponderance of national interests in world affairs.20 The advocacy revolution ishaving both ‘trickle-down’ and ‘trickle-up’ effects, establishing audiences ofconstituents and ordinary citizens conversant with some of the great challengesfacing humanity as well as putting pressure on official institutions to be proactivein their long-term planning and shorter-term responses.

None of this would be possible without the existence of global media, whosespeed and range make it possible for reports of an unfolding or upcoming disasterto reach viewers or readers in most parts of the world almost instantaneously.Despite the highly selective character of what is deemed newsworthy and state andcommercial influence on what is broadcast, several recent attempts to hide evid-ence of acts of mass violence (Tiananmen Square, East Timor, Chechnya, etc.) andcrises (e.g., during the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union or theSARS outbreak in China) have failed; few things now entirely escape from thesatellite camera, the cellular telephone, or the notebook computer. And althoughthe internet may never become the populist panacea technological deterministshave been heralding for years, it remains a key device through which concernedcitizens and activists can share and spread information. While media coveragealmost always follows a crisis rather than preceding it, the broadcast of shockingimages and testimonies can nevertheless shame governments and internationalorganizations into taking immediate steps. The ‘CNN or BBC effect,’ to which weshould now add the ‘Al-Jazeera effect,’ is a surprisingly powerful force in impact-ing world public opinion, as the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison photographsremind us. The possibility that the threat of media exposure may dissuade individ-uals and groups from enacting genocidal plans or reckless gambles with our futureis one of the lynchpins of prevention in our information-saturated age.



Are forewarnings of disasters being heard? The mobilization of official inter-vention and popular interest has certainly been mixed, yet global civil society ishaving some success in cultivating audiences and advocates coalescing aroundspecific perils (mass human rights violations, ecological devastation, geneticengineering, epidemics, and so on). After Bhopal and Chernobyl, after ‘mad cowdisease’ and the war in Iraq, citizens are scrutinizing, questioning and evencontesting official expertise in risk assessment more than ever before.21 Hence, ina world where early warnings of cataclysms are often available, pleading ignor-ance or helplessness to anticipate what may come in the future becomes less andless plausible.

III. Cultivating a Farsighted Cosmopolitanism

In the previous section, I described how the capacity to produce, disseminate, andreceive warning signals regarding disasters on the world stage has developed inglobal civil society. Yet the fact remains that audiences may let a recklessness orinsouciance toward the future prevail, instead of listening to and acting upon suchwarnings. There is no doubt that the short-sightedness and presentism are strongdynamics in contemporary society, which is enveloped by a “temporal myopia” thatencourages most individuals to live in a state of chronological self-referentialitywhereby they screen out anything that is not of the moment.22 The commercialmedia, advertising, and entertainment industries are major contributors to this“tyranny of real time”23 that feeds a societal addiction to the ‘live’ and the imme-diate while eroding the principle of farsightedness.

The infamous quip attributed to Madame de Pompadour, ‘après nous, ledéluge,’ perfectly captures a sense of utter callousness about the future that repre-sents one of presentism’s most acute manifestations. Two closely related notionsunderlie it: the belief that we should only concern ourselves with whether ouractions, or lack thereof, have deleterious consequences visible to us in the short-to medium-term (temporally limited responsibility); and sheer indifference towardthe plight of those who will come after us (generational self-centeredness).Substantively, the two are not much different because they shift the costs andrisks of present-day decisions onto our descendants. “The crisis of the future is ameasure of the deficiency of our societies, incapable as they are of assessing whatis involved in relationships with others,” Bindé writes. “This temporal myopiabrings into play the same processes of denial of others as social shortsightedness.The absence of solidarity in time between generations merely reproduces selfishnessin space within the same generation.”24 Thus, to the NIMBY (‘not-in-my-back-yard’) politics of the last few decades can be added the ‘not-in-my-lifetime’ or‘not-to-my-children’ lines of reasoning. For members of dominant groups in theNorth Atlantic region, disasters are something for others to worry about – that is,those who are socio-economically marginal, or geographically and temporallydistant.



The variations on these themes are numerous. One is the oft-stated belief thatprevention is a luxury that we can scarcely afford, or even an unwarrantedconceit. Accordingly, by minimizing the urgency or gravity of potential threats,procrastination appears legitimate. Why squander time, energy, and resources toanticipate and thwart what are, after all, only hypothetical dangers? Why acttoday when, in any case, others will do so in the future? Why not limit ourselvesto reacting to cataclysms if and when they occur? A ‘bad faith’ version of thisargument goes even further by seeking to discredit, reject, or deny evidencepointing to upcoming catastrophes. Here, we enter into the domain of deliberatenegligence and “culpable ignorance,”25 as manifest in the apathy of US Repub-lican administrations toward climate change or the Clinton White House’s disen-genuous and belated responses to the genocides in ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda.At another level, instrumental-strategic forms of thought and action, so pervasivein modern societies because institutionally entrenched in the state and the market,are rarely compatible with the demands of farsightedness. The calculation of themost technically efficient means to attain a particular bureaucratic or corporateobjective, and the subsequent relentless pursuit of it, intrinsically exclude broaderquestions of long-term prospects or negative side-effects. What matters is themaximization of profits or national self-interest with the least effort, and as rap-idly as possible. Growing risks and perils are transferred to future generationsthrough a series of trade-offs: economic growth versus environmental protection,innovation versus safety, instant gratification versus future well-being.

What can be done in the face of short-sightedness? Cosmopolitanism providessome of the clues to an answer, thanks to its formulation of a universal duty ofcare for humankind that transcends all geographical and socio-cultural borders. Iwant to expand the notion of cosmopolitan universalism in a temporal direction,so that it can become applicable to future generations and thereby nourish avibrant culture of prevention. Consequently, we need to begin thinking about afarsighted cosmopolitanism, a chrono-cosmopolitics that takes seriously a senseof “intergenerational solidarity” toward human beings who will live in our wakeas much as those living amidst us today.26

But for a farsighted cosmopolitanism to take root in global civil society, thelatter must adopt a thicker regulative principle of care for the future than the onecurrently in vogue (which amounts to little more than an afterthought of the non-descript ‘don’t forget later generations’ ilk). Hans Jonas’s “imperative of respon-sibility” is valuable precisely because it prescribes an ethico-political relationshipto the future consonant with the work of farsightedness.27 Fully appreciatingJonas’s position requires that we grasp the rupture it establishes with the presen-tist assumptions imbedded in the intentionalist tradition of Western ethics. Inbrief, intentionalism can be explained by reference to its best-known formulation,the Kantian categorical imperative, according to which the moral worth of a deeddepends upon whether the a priori “principle of the will” or “volition” of theperson performing it – that is, his or her intention – should become a universal



law.28 Ex post facto evaluation of an act’s outcomes, and of whether they corres-pond to the initial intention, is peripheral to moral judgment. A variant of thislogic is found in Weber’s discussion of the “ethic of absolute ends,” the “passion-ate devotion to a cause” elevating the realization of a vision of the world above allother considerations; conviction without the restraint of caution and prudence isintensely presentist.29

By contrast, Jonas’s strong consequentialism takes a cue from Weber’s “ethicof responsibility,” which stipulates that we must carefully ponder the potentialimpacts of our actions and assume responsibility for them – even for the inci-dence of unexpected and unintended results. Neither the contingency of outcomesnor the retrospective nature of certain moral judgments exempts an act from nor-mative evaluation. On the contrary, consequentialism reconnects what intention-alism prefers to keep distinct: the moral worth of ends partly depends upon themeans selected to attain them (and vice versa), while the correspondence betweenintentions and results is crucial. At the same time, Jonas goes further than Weberin breaking with presentism by advocating an “ethic of long-range responsibility”that refuses to accept the future’s indeterminacy, gesturing instead toward a prac-tice of farsighted preparation for crises that could occur.30 From a consequential-ist perspective, then, intergenerational solidarity would consist of striving toprevent our endeavors from causing large-scale human suffering and damage tothe natural world over time. Jonas reformulates the categorical imperative alongthese lines: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the perman-ence of genuine human life,” or “Act so that the effects of your action are notdestructive of the future possibility of such life.”31 What we find here, I wouldhold, is a substantive and future-oriented ethos on the basis of which civic asso-ciations can enact the work of preventive foresight.

Having suggested a way to thicken the normative foundations of farsightedcosmopolitanism, I would now like to discuss the socio-cultural strategies thatglobal civil society participants have begun employing in order to create a senseof intergenerational solidarity. Both the moral imagination and reason constitutetriggers of farsightedness that have entered public discourse in a variety ofsettings, with the objective of combatting the myopia of presentism.32 The first ofthese catalysts appeals to us to carefully ponder our epoch’s legacy, to imaginethe kind of world we will leave to future generations (what will social life be likeif today’s risks become tomorrow’s reality?). Left dystopianism performs just thisrole of confronting us with hypothetically catastrophic futures; whether throughnovelistic, cinematic, or other artistic means, it conjures up visions of a brave newworld in order to spark reflection and inspire resistance.33 By way of thickdescription, dystopian tales call upon audiences’ moral imagination and plungethem into their descendants’ lifeworlds. We step into the shoes of NineteenEighty-Four’s Winston Smith or are strongly affected by The Handmaid’s Tale’sdescription of a patriarchal-theocratic society and The Matrix’s blurring of simulacraand reality, because they bring the perils that may await our successors to life.



NGOs and social movements active in global civil society have drawn uponthe moral imagination in similar ways, introducing dystopian scenarios less asprophecies than as rhetorical devices that act as ‘wake-up calls.’ Dystopias arethrust into public spaces to jolt citizens out of their complacency and awakentheir concern for those who will follow them. Such tropes are intended to becontroversial, their contested character fostering public deliberation about thepotential cataclysms facing humankind, the means of addressing them, and theunintended and unexpected consequences flowing from present-day trends. Inhelping us to imagine the strengths and weaknesses of different positions towardsthe future, then, the dystopian imaginary crystallizes many of the great issues ofthe day. Amplifying and extrapolating what could be the long-term consequencesof current tendencies, public discourse can thereby clarify the future’s seemingopaqueness. Likewise, fostering a dystopian moral imagination has a specificallycritical function, for the disquiet it provokes about the prospects of later gener-ations is designed to make us radically question the ‘self-evidentness’ of the existingsocial order.34 If we imagine ourselves in the place of our descendants, the taken-for-granted shortsightedness of our institutionalized ways of thinking and actingbecomes problematic. Indifference toward the future is neither necessary norinevitable, but can be – and indeed ought to be – changed.

Aside from the moral imagination, and given that the idea of gambling withhumanity’s future or failing to minimize its possible sources of suffering islogically unsustainable, the appeal to reason represents another main triggerof intergenerational solidarity. Since actual deliberation between current andfuture generations is obviously impossible, a Rawlsian contractualist thought-experiment allows us to demonstrate the soundness of a farsighted cosmopolitan-ism. If, in the original position, persons were to operate behind a chronologicalveil of ignorance that would preclude them from knowing the generation to whichthey belong, it is reasonable to expect them to devise a social order characterizedby a fair distribution of risks and perils over time. Conversely, it is unreasonableto expect them to agree to a situation where these burdens would expand overtime and thereby be transferred from one generation to the next. “The life of apeople,” Rawls writes, “is conceived as a scheme of cooperation spread out inhistorical time. It is to be governed by the same conception of justice thatregulates the cooperation of contemporaries. No generation has stronger claimsthan any other.”35 Via the practice of preventive foresight, this norm of cross-generational fairness may acquire sufficient weight.

Independently of this contractualist justification, global civil society actors areputting forth a number of arguments countering temporal myopia on rationalgrounds. They make the case that no generation, and no part of the world, isimmune from catastrophe. Complacency and parochialism are deeply flawed inthat even if we earn a temporary reprieve, our children and grandchildren willlikely not be so fortunate unless steps are taken today. Similarly, though it mightbe possible to minimize or contain the risks and harms of actions to faraway



places over the short-term, parrying the eventual blowback or spillover effect isimprobable. In fact, as I argued in the previous section, all but the smallest andmost isolated of crises are rapidly becoming globalized due to the existenceof transnational circuits of ideas, images, people, and commodities. Regardless ofwhere they live, our descendants will increasingly be subjected to the impact ofenvironmental degradation, the spread of epidemics, gross North-South socio-economic inequalities, refugee flows, civil wars, and genocides. What may havepreviously appeared to be temporally and spatially remote risks are ‘cominghome to roost’ in ever faster cycles.

In a word, then, procrastination makes little sense for three principal reasons: itexponentially raises the costs of eventual future action; it reduces preventiveoptions; and it erodes their effectiveness. With the foreclosing of long-rangealternatives, later generations may be left with a single course of action, namely,that of merely reacting to large-scale emergencies as they arise. We need onlythink of how it gradually becomes more difficult to control climate change, letalone reverse it, or to halt mass atrocities once they are underway. Preventiveforesight is grounded in the opposite logic, whereby the decision to work throughperils today greatly enhances both the subsequent room for maneuver and thechances of success. Humanitarian, environmental, and techno-scientific activistshave convincingly shown that we cannot afford not to engage in preventive labor.Moreover, I would contend that farsighted cosmopolitanism is not as remote oridealistic a prospect as it appears to some, for as Falk writes, “[g]lobal justicebetween temporal communities, however, actually seems to be increasing, asevidenced by various expressions of greater sensitivity to past injustices andfuture dangers.”36 Global civil society may well be helping a new generationalself-conception take root, according to which we view ourselves as the provi-sional caretakers of our planetary commons. Out of our sense of responsibility forthe well-being of those who will follow us, we come to be more concerned aboutthe here and now.

IV. Towards an Autonomous Future

Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-politicalrelations are nurturing a thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention frombelow, which challenges presumptions about the inscrutability of the future (II) anda stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is substan-tively ‘filled in,’ the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since farsighted-ness does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this sectionproposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through whichcitizens can determine the ‘reasonableness,’ legitimacy, and effectiveness of com-peting dystopian visions in order to arrive at a socially self-instituting future.

Foremost among the possible distortions of farsightedness is alarmism, themanufacturing of unwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and



market institutions may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretch-ing interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to exaggeratethe prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by intentionally promotingcertain prognoses over others for instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressivedystopias can operate as Trojan horses advancing political agendas or commercialinterests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and opposition.Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent threat ofuse of ‘weapons of mass destruction’; the severe curtailing of American civilliberties amidst fears of a collapse of ‘homeland security’; the neoliberal dismant-ling of the welfare state as the only remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscalcrisis; the conservative expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedlyspiraling crime waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and codes the future inparticular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief struc-tures, and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture offear, the reverse is no less true.

If fear-mongering is a misappropriation of preventive foresight, resignationabout the future represents a problematic outgrowth of the popular acknow-ledgment of global perils. Some believe that the world to come is so uncertain anddangerous that we should not attempt to modify the course of history; the futurewill look after itself for better or worse, regardless of what we do or wish. Oneversion of this argument consists in a complacent optimism perceiving the future asfated to be better than either the past or the present. Frequently accompanying it is aself-deluding denial of what is plausible (‘the world will not be so bad after all’), ora naively Panglossian pragmatism (‘things will work themselves out in spite ofeverything, because humankind always finds ways to survive’).37 Much more com-mon, however, is the opposite reaction, a fatalistic pessimism reconciled to the ideathat the future will be necessarily worse than what preceded it. This is sustained bya tragic chronological framework according to which humanity is doomed to decay,or a cyclical one of the endless repetition of the mistakes of the past.

On top of their dubious assessments of what is to come, alarmism and resigna-tion would, if widely accepted, undermine a viable practice of farsightedness.Indeed, both of them encourage public disengagement from deliberation aboutscenarios for the future, a process that appears to be dangerous, pointless, orunnecessary. The resulting ‘depublicization’ of debate leaves dominant groupsand institutions (the state, the market, techno-science) in charge of sorting out thefuture for the rest of us, thus effectively producing a heteronomous social order.How, then, can we support a democratic process of prevention from below? Theanswer, I think, lies in cultivating the public capacity for critical judgment anddeliberation, so that participants in global civil society subject all claims aboutpotential catastrophes to examination, evaluation, and contestation. Two norma-tive concepts are particularly well suited to grounding these tasks: the precaution-ary principle and global justice.



Salient in discussions of environmental and techno-scientific risks, the precau-tionary principle posits prudence and vigilance as deontological counterweightsto the multiplication and intensification of sources of danger in the contemporaryworld. From a precautionary standpoint, the lack of absolute certainty about aserious danger should not deter us from erring on the side of caution and takingreasonable measures to address it.38 Consequently, the instrumental-strategicorientation to action must be balanced out by a two-part moral injunction: actprudently (in a manner that aims to avoid mass human suffering and ecologicaldamage), and do no harm (in a manner that worsens the existing state of affairs ormoves us closer to catastrophe). Kant’s bold cry of “Sapere aude!” comes face-to-face with Jonas’s humble pleas of “beware!” and “preserve!” Built into anyprecautionary stance is a participatory and reflexive concept of “measuredaction,” which stipulates that we should only decide on a particular course ofaction after extensive public input, deliberation, and informed consideration ofthe range of options and their probable effects.39

This kind of participatory reflexivity forthrightly acknowledges the fallibilismof decision-making processes about the future, notably because of the existenceof unexpected and unintended consequences. As such, measured action is anintersubjective practice that is always subject to revision through decisional feed-back loops incorporating factors that may emerge out of a subsequent broadeningof collective horizons (better arguments, new evidence, unforeseen or inadvertentside-effects, shifting public opinion, etc.). Additionally, the norm of precaution’sself-limiting character allows us to advocate turning away from certain possibil-ities if they are likely to introduce large-scale risks without proper steering mechan-isms to control or alleviate them – endangering human survival, potentiallycreating greater problems than the ones targeted by the original action, or riskingmass human suffering and ecological destruction.

The second normative concept that can assist the development of global civilsociety’s capacity for discussion of and discernment among rival dystopianscenarios is a comprehensive vision of a just world order. I would argue that thisappeal to global justice should balance the injunction to precaution, to the extentthat the pursuit of the latter must be consistent with the realization of the former.Indeed, they are mutually constitutive and complementary. Given that severalthinkers have already detailed the different components of global justice, a shortoverview suffices for our purposes. One of the first steps would have to be amajor overhaul of the existing institutions of transnational governance (rangingfrom the United Nations Security Council to the World Bank, the InternationalMonetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization), or indeed the founding of anew institutional order committed to genuine multilateralism and popular repre-sentation (for instance, through a global peoples’ assembly). What would alsoneed to be achieved is substantial progress in terms of socio-economic and riskredistribution across the North-South chasm (e.g., through debt forgiveness and aglobal resource tax), as well as a consistent application and promotion of human



rights standards in all parts of the world. Integral to global justice, too, is the goalof world peace through the elimination or minimization of occasions for inter-national and domestic wars, and an ‘enforceable’ body of international humanitar-ian law capable of deterring mass atrocities.40 For their part, techno-scientificdiscoveries should be kept in the public domain and considered the property ofhumanity as a whole, while applications flowing from such discoveries should besubject to the aforementioned norms of precaution and participatory deliberation.Last but not least, a just world order requires an attitude of stewardship of nature.

By articulating the norms of precaution and global justice, we can formulate amore general evaluative template to guide public deliberation about differentdystopian narratives. Three sets of considerations, each combining intentionalistand consequentialist elements, are particularly appropriate for this task:

1. Analytical: Is a particular scenario plausible according to credible know-ledge of the past, the present, and the future? What evidence substantiatesit?

2. Ethical: What values and principles underpin it? Does it strengthen orerode the work of preventive foresight, and specifically the principles ofprecaution and global justice?

3. Political: By whom is it adopted or rejected, in whose interests, andthrough what frameworks and institutions? What effects does this have,notably to what kind of future is it likely to contribute?41

Notwithstanding the overlap between these three dimensions in practice, itremains useful to distinguish between them for heuristic purposes. Applying themto the critique of misuses of farsightedness allows us to demonstrate that alarm-ism, for one, thrives by demagogically appealing to societal fears that can neitherbe substantiated nor correlated with plausible representations of reality. Further,fear-mongering aims to conserve questionable aspects of the status quo (say,regarding the weakness of environmental regulations) or to dangerously reshapedomestic and global socio-political orders (in the case of belligerant unilateral-ism), in effect consolidating the positions of dominant groups and institutions.Similarly, resignation does not fare well when subjected to these evaluative cate-gories. The naively optimistic conceits according to which ‘the world will not beso bad after all’ and ‘it will all work itself out in the end’ beg the question: forwhom? Although some privileged sections of future generations may experiencefewer risks and suffer less from mass disasters, most will not be so fortunate.

Moreover, keeping in mind the sobering lessons of the past century cannot butmake us wary about humankind’s supposedly unlimited ability for problem-solving or discovering solutions in time to avert calamities. In fact, the historicaltrack-record of last-minute, technical ‘quick-fixes’ is hardly reassuring. What’smore, most of the serious perils that we face today (e.g., nuclear waste, climatechange, global terrorism, genocide and civil war) demand complex, sustained,long-term strategies of planning, coordination, and execution. On the other hand,



an examination of fatalism makes it readily apparent that the idea that humankindis doomed from the outset puts off any attempt to minimize risks for our succes-sors, essentially condemning them to face cataclysms unprepared. An a prioripessimism is also unsustainable given the fact that long-term preventive actionhas had (and will continue to have) appreciable beneficial effects; the examples ofmedical research, the welfare state, international humanitarian law, as well asstrict environmental regulations in some countries stand out among many others.

The evaluative framework proposed above should not be restricted to the cri-tique of misappropriations of farsightedness, since it can equally support publicdeliberation with a reconstructive intent, that is, democratic discussion and debateabout a future that human beings would freely self-determine. InvertingFoucault’s Nietzschean metaphor, we can think of genealogies of the future thatcould perform a farsighted mapping out of the possible ways of organizing sociallife. They are, in other words, interventions into the present intended to facilitateglobal civil society’s participation in shaping the field of possibilities of what isto come. Once competing dystopian visions are filtered out on the basis of theiranalytical credibility, ethical commitments, and political underpinnings andconsequences, groups and individuals can assess the remaining legitimate cata-strophic scenarios through the lens of genealogical mappings of the future.Hence, our first duty consists in addressing the present-day causes of eventualperils, ensuring that the paths we decide upon do not contract the range of optionsavailable for our posterity.42 Just as importantly, the practice of genealogically-inspired farsightedness nurtures the project of an autonomous future, one that issocially self-instituting. In so doing, we can acknowledge that the future is ahuman creation instead of the product of metaphysical and extra-social forces(god, nature, destiny, etc.), and begin to reflect upon and deliberate about the kindof legacy we want to leave for those who will follow us. Participants in globalcivil society can then take – and in many instances have already taken – a furtherstep by committing themselves to socio-political struggles forging a world orderthat, aside from not jeopardizing human and environmental survival, is designedto rectify the sources of transnational injustice that will continue to inflict need-less suffering upon future generations if left unchallenged.

Conclusion

In recent years, the rise of a dystopian imaginary has accompanied damningassessments and widespread recognition of the international community’srepeated failures to adequately intervene in a number of largely preventable disas-ters (from the genocides in the ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor to cli-mate change and the spiraling AIDS pandemics in parts of sub-Saharan Africaand Asia). Social movements, NGOs, diasporic groups, and concerned citizensare not mincing words in their criticisms of the United Nations system and itsmember-states, and thus beginning to shift the discursive and moral terrain in



world affairs. As a result, the callousness implicit in disregarding the future hasbeen exposed as a threat to the survival of humanity and its natural surroundings.The Realpolitik of national self-interest and the neoliberal logic of the market willundoubtedly continue to assert themselves, yet demands for farsightedness areincreasingly reining them in. Though governments, multilateral institutions, andtransnational corporations will probably never completely modify the presentistassumptions underlying their modes of operation, they are, at the very least, findingthemselves compelled to account for egregious instances of short-sightedness andrhetorically commit themselves to taking corrective steps. What may seem like amodest development at first glance would have been unimaginable even a fewdecades ago, indicating the extent to which we have moved toward a culture ofprevention. A new imperative has come into being, that of preventive foresight.

Does this mean that we can expect all impending disasters to be comprehen-sively addressed before long? Apart from the unabashed assertion of national andcommercial interests, at least two other structural factors make such an outcomeunlikely within the existing world order. In the first place, because of the decen-tralized institutional design of global civil society, there exist few coordinationmechanisms between its different participants and no single clearing-house forthe collection and analysis of information about possible cataclysms – informa-tion that could then be transmitted to the general public, governments, or inter-national organizations. Warnings may not always reach these addressees, or mayget lost in the clamor of multiple campaigns and messages. The second problemis the asymmetry between the official and unofficial spheres of world politics.Despite mounting evidence that states and multilateral institutions are respondingto preventive claims and requests, global civil society remains a weak publicdeprived of direct decision-making power. It has made important advances ingaining lobbying influence over and access to decision-making bodies, yet itsmain tool continues to be the mobilization of public opinion to pressure or con-vince these bodies to act. Until global civil society can convert itself into a strongpublic, it is not in a position to ensure the translation of demands for preventionfrom below into prevention from above.

We should acknowledge that these two limits pose serious obstacles to a moremuscular culture of prevention without meaningful institutional reforms of theglobal system. At the same time, and in lieu of a major overhaul of the regime ofinternational governance, it would be a mistake to underestimate or simplydismiss the impact of the web of treaties, summits, judicial innovations, andgrassroots ‘naming and shaming’ tactics and protest movements that have cometo form, in recent years, a vast preventive infrastructure. I have argued that thisdynamic is itself constitutive of global civil society and can thus best be appreci-ated when observed from below. Civic associations are engaging in dialogical,public, transnational struggles to avert catastrophe, cultivating a farsighted anddystopian flavored form of social action that is ethically and politically orientedtoward the future.



I further claimed that the work of preventive foresight is composed of threesets of practices striving to overcome difficulties constituent of the predicamentof our times. Participants in global civil society are engaged in developing anearly warning capacity about upcoming crises by collecting evidence, disseminat-ing it, and laboring to have it publicly recognized. This sort of farsightednessresponds to the contingent nature of the future without succumbing to the convic-tion that it is absolutely unknowable and indecipherable. Transnational associ-ative groups are also nurturing intergenerational solidarity, a sense of care forthose who will follow us. I suggested that, to adequately combat the presentistand shortsighted indifference toward the future that is typical in the contemporaryworld, a more explicitly farsighted cosmopolitanism needs to take root withinglobal civil society. Normative thickening of this ideal could be accomplished viathe long-term consequentialism of Jonas’s imperative of responsibility, a prospectwhose basis we can already find in growing public appeals to the moral imagin-ation and reason to activate our concern for later generations.

Lastly, I contended that the work of preventive foresight can parry alarmistmisappropriation or resignation by advocating a process of public deliberationthat blends the principles of precaution and global justice. A farsighted politicscan function through the public use of reason and the honing of the capacity forcritical judgment, whereby citizens put themselves in a position to debate, evalu-ate, and challenge different dystopian narratives about the future and determinewhich ones are more analytically plausible, ethically desirable, and politicallyeffective in bringing about a world order that is less perilous yet more just for ourdescendants. Many fora, ranging from local, face-to-face meetings to trans-national, highly mediated discursive networks, are sowing the seeds of such apractice of participatory democracy.

None of this is to disavow the international community’s rather patchy recordof avoiding foreseeable calamities over the last decades, or to minimize the diffi-culties of implementing the kinds of global institutional reforms described aboveand the perils of historical contingency, presentist indifference toward the future,or alarmism and resignation. To my mind, however, this is all the more reason topay attention to the work of preventive foresight in global civil society, throughwhich civic associations can build up the latter’s coordination mechanisms andinstitutional leverage, cultivate and mobilize public opinion in distant parts of theworld, and compel political leaders and national and transnational governancestructures to implement certain policies. While seeking to prevent cataclysmsfrom worsening or, better yet, from occurring in the first place, these sorts ofinitiatives can and must remain consistent with a vision of a just world order. Fur-thermore, the labor of farsightedness supports an autonomous view of the future,according to which we are the creators of the field of possibilities within whichour successors will dwell. The current socio-political order, with all its short-termbiases, is neither natural nor necessary. Accordingly, informed public participa-tion in deliberative processes makes a socially self-instituting future possible,



through the involvement of groups and individuals active in domestic and supra-national public spaces; prevention is a public practice, and a public responsibility.

To believe otherwise is, I would argue, to leave the path clear for a series ofalternatives that heteronomously compromise the well-being of those who willcome after us. We would thereby effectively abandon the future to the vagaries ofhistory (‘let it unfold as it may’), the technocratic or instrumental will of officialinstitutions (‘let others decide for us’), or to gambles about the time-lags of risks(‘let our progeny deal with their realization’). But, as I have tried to show here,this will not and cannot be accepted. Engaging in autonomous preventive strug-gles, then, remains our best hope. A farsighted cosmopolitanism that aims to avertcrises while working toward the realization of precaution and global justice repre-sents a compelling ethico-political project, for we will not inherit a better future.It must be made, starting with us, in the here and now.

NOTES

Research for and writing of this paper were made possible by a Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada Standard Research Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship from theCanada-US Fulbright Program. I would like to thank Jeffrey Alexander, Amy Bartholomew, CraigCalhoun, Bruce Curtis, Nancy Fraser, James Ingram, Brian Singer, Lorna Weir, and the anonymousreviewers from Constellations for their advice, as well as the audiences at the Annual Meeting ofthe Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (Halifax, June 2003) and the ‘Rules’Speaker Series at Carleton University (Ottawa, January 2004), where I presented earlier versions ofthe paper. For their stellar research assistance, thanks are also due to Sabina Heilman and PattiPhillips.

1. On the history of such sciences, see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 1990). The World Futures Studies Federation promotes research alongsuch lines that is more explicitly critical; see http://www.wfsf.org. On risk management, see TomBaker and Jonathan Simon, eds., Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Respon-sibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); William Leiss, In the Chamber of Risks:Understanding Risk Controversies (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2001).

2. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 49. Ofcourse, the two objectives are logically interdependent, since critique and opposition to the realiza-tion of certain outcomes is premised upon adherence to certain ethico-political ideals (freedom,justice, equality, etc.) – and vice versa. I will return to this point in the last section of the paper.

3. Gareth Evans, and Mohamed Sahnoun, chairs, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of theInternational Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Develop-ment Research Centre, 2001), 27.

4. The distinction between strong and weak publics is found in Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking thePublic Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Justice Interrup-tus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (London and New York: Routledge,1997), 69–98.

5. See Beck, Risk Society; Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (London: Sage, 1999); WorldCommission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987). Even regions of the world less prone to ‘local’ humanitarian disasters on their own soil(e.g., North America, Oceania) are invariably affected by them, notably through increased refugeeflows, geopolitical destabilization, and diasporic politics.



6. It should be kept in mind that, contrary to what is ordinarily assumed in the literature onthe subject, global civil society is politically contested rather than inherently progressive; religiousfundamentalists and criminal organizations are no less part of it than Leftist social movements. Onthe development of global civil society, see Richard A. Falk, Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuitof Justice in a Globalizing World (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Marlies Glasius, MaryKaldor and Helmut Anheier, Global Civil Society 2002 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

7. See Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (NewYork: Basic Books, 2002); Samantha Power, “Raising the Cost of Genocide,” in The New KillingFields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention, eds. Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner (NewYork: Basic Books, 2002), 264.

8. See Donella L. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’sProject on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972); World Commission onEnvironment and Development, Our Common Future.

9. It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration’s current stance of aggressiveunilateralism will jeopardize this trend over the long term.

10. See respectively, the following websites: http://unfccc.int; http://www.icbl.org; http://www.unesco.org/cpp/uk/declarations/generations.pdf (accessed November 7, 2003)

11. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation (New York:Anchor, 1966), 209–25. For a superb discussion of the role of dystopias in modern thought, seeKrishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

12. Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and SocialTheory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 43; Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Tech-nology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 4–9; Jürgen Habermas, “The New Obscurity:The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” in The New Conserva-tism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1989), 50–51.

13. See Beck, Risk Society; Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), 1–6; Agnes Heller, A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Oxford: Black-well, 1993). This acknowledgement of contingency has also tempered the kinds of utopias nowbeing formulated, which tend to eschew what had been a deeply engrained, intransigent perfection-ism and absolutism in favour of fallibalism and self-critique.

14. The contemporary locus classicus of just-war theory is Michael Walzer, Just and UnjustWars, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

15. See Evans and Sahnoun, The Responsibility to Protect; Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Vigilanceand Vengeance: NGOs Preventing Ethnic Conflict in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: Brook-ings Institution Press, 1996).

16. Beck, Risk Society and World Risk Society.17. Virtually all major environmental and humanitarian NGOs include early warning and

prevention in their stated objectives. See Evans and Sahnoun, The Responsibility to Protect, 21;Rotberg, ed., Vigilance and Vengeance. Organizations specifically devoted to disaster preventioninclude the Climate Action Network (http://www.climatenetwork.org), the International CrisisGroup (http://www.intl-crisis-group.org), the Center for the Prevention of Genocide (http://www.genocideprevention.org), and the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response (http://www.fewer.org) (accessed December 19, 2003).

18. For instance, the melting of polar ice caps and the stirring of ethnic hostilities by politicalleaders are not particularly significant in and of themselves, yet they are now widely read as warningsignals of the possibility of climate change and genocide, respectively. In this and the next paragraph,the analysis partly draws from Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Socio-logy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a typology of early indicators of conflict, seeForum on Early Warning and Early Response, Conflict Analysis and Response Definition (London:FEWER, 2001); available at <http://www.fewer.org/res/70.pdf> (accessed December 19, 2003).

19. Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry,ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8.



20. For a discussion of legal and public pressure innovations with respect to human rights, seeIgnatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” 10–12. On boycotts, see Beck, World Risk Society, 40–47.Over the years, Greenpeace has excelled in gaining public notoriety and media exposure.

21. See Beck, Risk Society, 29–32.22. Jérôme Bindé, “Toward an Ethics of the Future,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 91.23. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, tr. Jacqueline Rose (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 18–19.24. Bindé, “Toward an Ethics of the Future,” 93.25. On the concept of culpable ignorance, see Stephen F. Haller, Apocalypse Soon? Wagering

on Warnings of Global Catastrophe (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2002), 152–55. Regarding how this applies to genocides in the 1990s, see Power, ‘A Problem fromHell’.

26. Bindé, “Toward an Ethics of the Future,” 111.27. See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Techno-

logical Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).28. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Thomas K.

Abbott (New York: Macmillan, 1949 [1785]), 17–19.29. For Weber’s discussion of the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, see

Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerthand C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 [1921]), 115–27.

30. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 21–22.31. Ibid., 11. See also ibid., 38–42. Such ideas are similar to the ones adopted in Articles 3 and

4 of the UNESCO Declaration on the Responsibilities of the Present Generations Towards PresentGenerations; see http://www.unesco.org/cpp/uk/declarations/generations.pdf (accessed November7, 2003)

32. On the importance of the moral imagination for solidarity with others, see Thomas W.Laqueur, “The Moral Imagination and Human Rights,” in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry,ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 127–39; Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); RichardRorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in Truth and Progress: PhilosophicalPapers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167–85. Rorty neverthelessunjustifiably privileges the roles of moral sentiments without properly considering how the facultyof rational judgment must also come into play here.

33. See Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 27–30. However, I would argue that Jonas’sconcept of a “heuristics of fear” goes too far in searching to evoke and rely upon negative senti-ments that unscrupulous demagogues or opportunists can easily manipulate. Dystopian scenariosshould provoke concern, rather than fear, in order to trigger the public use of reason through demo-cratic deliberation.

34. On this point with respect to science-fiction more generally, see Fredric Jameson, “ProgressVersus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 147–166.

35. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 289.However, from a cosmopolitan perspective, “humankind” should replace “people” in the abovequotation, since Rawls’s understanding is too bound up with the nation-state and, as a result,spatially and culturally particularistic. For confirmation of this, see John Rawls, The Law of Peoples(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For an incisive critique, see Thomas Pogge,“An Egalitarian Law of Peoples,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 23.3 (1994): 195–224. On thegenerational component of the original position, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 137, 284–89.

36. Falk, Human Rights Horizons, 29.37. There is also a technologically determinist variant of this line of thinking, which believes

that humankind will be able to discover techno-scientific solutions to its socially producedproblems. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ as the proverb states.

38. See Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe, Agir dans un monde incertain:Essai sur la démocratie technique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 263–308; Commission of the EuropeanCommunities, Communication from the Commission on the Precautionary Principle (Brussels,



2000); François Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophyof Precaution,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, eds.Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 282–89; Haller,Apocalypse Soon?, 99–113. As Ewald points out, the precautionary principle is entrenched in Arti-cle 15 of the United Nations’ 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. See http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english (accessed November 27, 2003).

39. For an excellent discussion of the concept of measured action, to which I am indebted inthis paragraph, see Callon et al., Agir dans un monde incertain, 263–308.

40. In this respect, we can best combat terrorism through multilateral non-military means,such as collaboration and information-sharing between national law-enforcement and intelligenceagencies, the prosecution of suspects in international courts of law, and the promotion of “preven-tive democracy.” For an elaboration of the latter idea, see Benjamin R. Barber, Fear’s Empire: War,Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: Norton, 2003).

41. For instance, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereigntyproposes a series of conditions for external military intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state:the scale of the humanitarian crisis (just cause), the right intention or purpose, multilateral authority,last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects of success. See Evans and Sahnoun, TheResponsibility to Protect, xii, 32–37; Thomas G. Weiss and Don Hubert, The Responsibility toProtect: Research, Bibliography, Background (Ottawa: International Development ResearchCentre, 2001), 140–43. See also Michael W. Doyle, “The New Interventionism,” in Global Justice,ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 219–241; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 80–85;Michael Walzer, “Arguing for Humanitarian Intervention,” in The New Killing Fields: Massacreand the Politics of Intervention, ed. Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner (New York: Basic Books,2002), 19–35. Based on the Commission’s criteria and those I have proposed here, it should be clearthat the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war is deeply flawed.

42. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 41–42.

Fuyuki Kurasawa is Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University,Toronto, and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at YaleUniversity. He is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-CulturalCritique of Modernity (2004).

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