Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Kurasawa – Predictions

Our form of political predictions allows us to avoid catastrophe

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology – York University of Toronto, Constellations, 11(4)) jl

Rather than bemoaning the contemporary preeminence of a dystopian imaginary, I am claiming that it can enable a novel form of transnational socio-political action, a manifestation of globalization from below that can be termed preventive foresight. We should not reduce the latter to a formal principle regulating international relations or an ensemble of policy prescriptions for official players on the world stage, since it is, just as significantly, a mode of ethico-political practice enacted by participants in the emerging realm of global civil society. In other words, what I want to underscore is the work of farsightedness, the social processes through which civic associations are simultaneously constituting and putting into practice a sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to prevent global catastrophes. Although the labor of preventive foresight takes place in varying political and socio-cultural settings – and with different degrees of institutional support and access to symbolic and material resources – it is underpinned by three distinctive features: dialogism, publicity, and transnationalism. In the first instance, preventive foresight is an intersubjective or dialogical process of address, recognition, and response between two parties in global civil society: the ‘warners,’ who anticipate and send out word of possible perils, and the audiences being warned, those who heed their interlocutors’ messages by demanding that governments and/or international organizations take measures to steer away from disaster. Secondly, the work of farsightedness derives its effectiveness and legitimacy from public debate and deliberation. This is not to say that a fully fledged global public sphere is already in existence, since transnational “strong publics” with decisional power in the formal-institutional realm are currently embryonic at best. Rather, in this context, publicity signifies that “weak publics” with distinct yet occasionally overlapping constituencies are coalescing around struggles to avoid specific global catastrophes.4 Hence, despite having little direct decision-making capacity, the environmental and peace movements, humanitarian NGOs, and other similar globally-oriented civic associations are becoming significant actors involved in public opinion formation. Groups like these are active in disseminating information and alerting citizens about looming catastrophes, lobbying states 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 is most explicit in the now commonplace observation that we live in an interdependent world because of the globalization of the perils that humankind faces (nuclear annihilation, global warming, terrorism, genocide, AIDS and SARS epidemics, and so on); individuals and groups from far-flung parts of the planet are being brought together into “risk communities” that transcend geographical borders.5 Moreover, due to dense media and information flows, knowledge of impeding catastrophes can instantaneously reach the four corners of the earth – sometimes well before individuals in one place experience the actual consequences of a crisis originating in another. My contention is that civic associations are engaging in dialogical, public, and transnational forms of ethico-political action that contribute to the creation of a fledgling global civil society existing ‘below’ the official and institutionalized architecture of international relations.6 The work of preventive foresight consists of forging ties between citizens; participating in the circulation of flows of claims, images, and information across borders; promoting an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism; and forming and mobilizing weak publics that debate and struggle against possible catastrophes. Over the past few decades, states and international organizations have frequently been content to follow the lead of globally- minded civil society actors, who have been instrumental in placing on the public agenda a host of pivotal issues (such as nuclear war, ecological pollution, species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights violations). To my mind, this strongly indicates that if prevention of global crises is to eventually rival the assertion of short-term and narrowly defined rationales (national interest, profit, bureaucratic self-preservation, etc.), weak publics must begin by convincing or compelling official representatives and multilateral organizations to act differently; only then will farsightedness be in a position to ‘move up’ and become institutionalized via strong publics.7 Since the global culture of prevention remains a work in progress, the argument presented in this paper is poised between empirical and normative dimensions of analysis. It proposes a theory of the practice of preventive foresight based upon already existing struggles and discourses, at the same time as it advocates the adoption of certain principles that would substantively thicken and assist in the realization of a sense of responsibility for the future of humankind. I will thereby proceed in four steps, beginning with a consideration of the shifting socio-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 warning about global cataclysms can overcome flawed conceptions of the future’s essential inscrutability (II). From this will follow the claim that an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism – of solidarity that extends to future generations – can supplant the preeminence of ‘short-termism’ with the help of appeals to the public’s moral imagination and use of reason (III). In the final section of the paper, I will argue that the commitment of global civil society actors to norms of precaution and transnational justice can hone citizens’ faculty of critical judgment against abuses of the dystopian imaginary, thereby opening the way to public deliberation about the construction of an alternative world order (IV).