The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

Many contemporary efforts to govern global challenges are driven by combinations of numbers and futures. This special section proposes the novel concept of ‘quantified futures’ as a way of grasping this widespread entanglement. Because existing scholarship has largely treated quantification and futurisation as discrete governing technologies, their intersections have remained undertheorised and underexplored. In this introductory article, we discuss similarities between quantification and futurisation to build an integrated analytical framework that outlines how quantified futures operate across transnational policy domains by shaping the salience, scope and urgency of global challenges and their solutions. The special section at large cautions against overly optimistic expectations regarding the capacity of quantified futures to tackle global challenges. Rather, it underscores the need to enquire into the mutually reinforcing effects between, on the one hand, the growing use of quantified futures and, on the other hand, the increase and diversification of global challenges.

With conflict prevention as a commonplace agenda of international organisations, numerous instruments for gathering knowledge about potential armed conflict have emerged. This article focuses on the mode of knowing war through quantification in the form of fatality statistics or ‘death counts’, which are taken by analysts and policymakers to indicate the severity and extent of conflicts. Drawing on official documents and interviews, I argue that fatality numbers are productive of the reality of violent conflict as they shape what counts as conflict and what does not. In the reporting by prevention actors, such numbers indicate past and future trends of armed violence and, in this way, bolster the imperative to prevent by creating quantified futures of conflict. However, fatality numbers also normalise deadly violence as a baseline criterion, thus also limiting the scope of what is known as future conflict and omitting lived experiences from the abstractions behind such numbers.

During the Covid crisis, while countries set up an unprecedented social protection response, international organisations quickly turned towards envisioning how to ‘build back better’ using social protection. Building on a qualitative document analysis, the article finds that international organisations frequently imagine the future through anticipations of protracted and multidimensional crises – often in quantified form. Arguing that futures are an ideational influence on policymaking, the article reconstructs two ways in which these crisis anticipations inform international organisations’ social protection policy proposals: first, as legitimising narratives for expanding social protection; second, in the form of policy proposals that embed crisis anticipation in their design, as in the case of ‘adaptive social protection’. The article shows that adaptive social protection departs from traditional social protection policy: it promotes strengthening individual, household and systemic resilience, and implementing preparedness as a governing rationale, thus moving from a focus on compensation and provision towards prevention.

Much contemporary economic policy analysis deploys demographic projections. To explore their macroeconomic significance, this article draws on documentary evidence from two case studies: (1) the World Bank’s Human Capital Index and (2) European Union models of population ageing within debt sustainability analysis. Combining constructivist and Foucauldian insights, we develop a threefold argument about the constitutive effects of quantified demographic futures on macroeconomic policy analysis. First, the World Bank’s and the European Union’s respective demographic futures mobilise urgency for contingent policy choices with reference to expected future ‘gaps’. Second, they build credibility for contested bodies of expertise on the basis of long-term population forecasts. Third, they delineate agency such that the effects of structural inter-dependencies between economies are rendered as national-level policy risks. These findings demonstrate how quantified demographic futures circumscribe national policy space, mediate the politics of macroeconomic ideas and contribute to the depoliticisation of economic policymaking.

Governments around the world have instrumentalised the idea of cities as innovation hubs in the drive for economic competitiveness and governance of anticipated futures. Producers of global indicators have identified cities as key actors in the global competition for talent – a race for human capital taking place against rapid technological changes, and political and social disruptions. In this article, we examine the rise of global cities as innovation hubs and its role in tackling global challenges. Using qualitative content analysis and conceptual analysis of strategies from rival cities in Europe (Amsterdam vs Copenhagen) and Asia (Singapore vs Hong Kong), we unpack how future cities are articulated and constructed in the nexus of migration and knowledge policy. We find that global indicators are actively used to produce more ‘robust futures’ that shape policymaking and strategies of cities while delimiting alternatives and potential ‘creative future visions’ in addressing global challenges.

In this article, I analyse the case of ‘modern’ central banking’s dual failures in effectively containing financial fragilities and inflationary pressures as a cautionary tale about the intrinsic limitations and contradictions of ‘governing through quantified futures’. I construct a genealogy of central banks’ much-vaunted ‘performative art’ of governing the economy through the management of expectations in order to reveal a crucial tension between the control of expectations about the future and controlling the future through (present) expectations of it. I argue that social scientific analyses tend to operate with a truncated understanding of performativity that prevents them from developing sufficiently precise and discerning accounts of the mechanics of performative processes to reveal their (intrinsic) limitations and explain how and why they (may) fail. By dissecting the surprisingly complex mechanics of central banks’ performative agency, I thus contribute towards a more precise theorisation of how governing through quantified futures operates.

In this article, we argue that number-making is a mode of imagining political futures – not only futures that are probable but, crucially, futures that are desired. In this way, rather than simply a mode of ‘technicising’ policy challenges, quantification fleshes out the utopian dream of a better world. Global governance is faced with the paradox of, on one hand, the utopian aspiration of the Sustainable Development Goals to create a perfect world (free of poverty, inequality, diseases and climate disaster) and, on the other hand, the dystopian effects of inaction – both tracked carefully through a complex network of indicators. This article focuses on the materiality of the Sustainable Development Goals as a productive device through which a monitoring agenda such as the Sustainable Development Goals has become ever more influential and has led to the emergence of a global public policy space.

International organisations have become increasingly contested resulting in worries about their decline and termination. While international organisation termination is indeed a regular event in international relations, this article shows that other institutions carry the legacy of terminated international organisations. We develop the novel concept of international organisation afterlife and suggest indicators to systematically assess it. Our analysis of 26 major terminated international organisations reveals legal-institutional and asset continuity in 21 cases. To further illustrate this point, the article zooms in on the afterlife of the International Institute of Agriculture in the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Refugee Organization in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Western European Union in the European Union. In these three cases, international organisation afterlife inspired and structured the design of their successor institutions. While specific international organisations might be terminated, international cooperation therefore often lives on in other institutions.

The literature on technocracy has shown that expertise is a crucial factor in driving support for technocrats. However, the literature has not investigated yet what happens when technocrats are opposed to partisan experts. In this article, we want to fill this gap by analysing the support for two potential ministers of health with relevant expertise for their portfolio but with a different relationship to partisan politics. For this purpose, we run a novel survey in 14 European countries with more than 20,000 respondents. Our main results show that non-partisan experts are preferred over partisan experts across Europe, both when citizens have a high sympathy and a low sympathy for the party appointing the minister. However, in the latter case, the effect is more evident.

European democracies are moulded by a ‘transnational cleavage’ between green-alternative-libertarian and traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties and attitudes. The territorial reverberations of this new cleavage are still scarcely analysed. Therefore, this article aims to explore how the transnational cleavage relates to political opinions and choices at the local level, by uncovering connections between such cleavage and the characteristics of metropolitan places. What are the implications of living in different metropolitan contexts on citizens’ positions on the transnational cleavage? I answer this question by investigating how metropolitan contextual factors shape transnationalism attitudes and support for green-alternative-libertarian and traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties within London. Findings highlight that transnationalism attitudes and support for green-alternative-libertarian/traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties are statistically significantly related to contextual factors; among the latter, the boroughs’ housing conditions and ethnic structures are the best predictors of transnationalism attitudes and party choices; residents of disadvantaged metropolitan contexts exhibit lower support for transnationalism and green-alternative-libertarian parties.

This article examines the role of parodic humour in Boris Johnson’s populist communication. Populist parties and conservative politicians have increasingly drawn humorous connections to films and entertainment in their political communication. But, despite the increasing research on populism, the role of humour in political communication is not yet at the centre of populism research. The article shows how professionally designed humour can dominate discourses and bring immense amounts of media attention to specific details while distracting attention from other political issues. The argument of the article is illustrated by analysing humorous communication of the former British PM Boris Johnson in 2019 and 2020. Among others, Johnson compared himself to Marvel’s Hulk, a parody that echoed through the news media. The article provides a very specific and new insight into the means by which populist strategies make use of parodic humorous elements in their communication.

This article presents a ‘primacy of domestic politics’ interpretation of the Thatcher government’s main objectives in the negotiations of the early 1980s, which secured the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. In the immediate aftermath of the Falklands conflict, sovereignty issues were uppermost in public discourse and the government’s decision to cede sovereignty over Hong Kong seems inconsistent with other elements of Thatcher’s foreign policy. However, when placed in the context of domestic economic objectives it is clear that the liberalisation and deregulation agenda would be undermined by a lack of investor confidence in sterling overseas should business confidence be disrupted in Hong Kong with a potentially disastrous diversification out of sterling. The 1984 Joint Declaration secured special status for Hong Kong enshrining the independence of the currency and the Hong Kong banking system thereby averting a sterling crisis which would have had major implications for the City of London and Thatcher’s domestic policies.

Judging by its doctrinal publications, the UK Defence establishment stands poised to begin a process of unprecedented change. The language of ‘multi-domain’ thinking is prominent within this discourse and is identified as being a key vehicle via which UK Defence will deliver upon its programme of reform. This article seeks to offer an initial evaluation of these claims and to assess them in light of the burgeoning literatures on Western defence ‘transformation’ and military innovation that have emerged since the early 2000s. We argue that ‘multi-domain’ thinking reflects a form of ‘cosmetic’ emulation by the British Defence establishment and that its appearance within UK doctrine has been driven more by internal politics than by a clearly thought-through adoption of a new form of military practice.

Why do substate actors engage in foreign affairs even if endowed with limited formal powers? How are these activities institutionalised and legitimised? This article addresses these questions by examining a critical case: the rise of Scotland’s international development cooperation. The spotlight is put on the domestic sources of foreign policy formation. Our core argument is that the politics of nation-building underpins both the ambition and the increased distinctiveness of the Scottish approach to development. This nation-building effort is mainly reflected in the emergence of an assertive narrative: ‘Scotland as a good global citizen’. Another core insight is the strong articulation between domestic and international representations. The external projections of the Scottish Government mirror the domestic agenda. Our article places the striking Scottish case in analytical and comparative perspective.

Over the past 20 years, a number of political theorists have been focusing on the just political treatment of linguistic diversity in liberal democratic societies. This body of work, known as the ‘linguistic justice’ literature, has mainly examined two specific categories of linguistic groups: autochthonous linguistic minorities and immigrants. However, it has entirely neglected non-resident citizens, that is, citizens of a country who reside in a different one, and their distinctive language interests and rights. In this article, we address this gap by developing a theory of linguistic justice for non-resident citizens, using diaspora institutions as a case study. More specifically, we draw on the linguistic justice literature to outline two categories of non-resident citizens’ language interests and rights, that is, those related to opportunity access and to democracy. We finally suggest ways in which language-related diaspora institutions could be reformed in order to better fulfil non-resident citizens’ language interests and rights.

Social media communication makes visible the linkages between governments’ actions to diplomatic events and domestic audiences’ reactions. This study analyses tweets that discuss the recent diplomatic crisis between Japan and Korea. Through the detection of clusters of Twitter users and the content analysis of the tweets in the two countries, this study shows the public’s interpretation of a crisis widely differs by their stances towards their country’s government. The analysis finds that the clusters are aligned with their pro- and anti-stances towards the current government and that pro-government clusters tend to interpret the diplomatic crisis through a historical perspective, while anti-government clusters interpret it as a matter of present-day politics. Furthermore, we find strong negativity in the tweets discussing the opponent online groups, especially by the anti-government cluster against the pro-government online camp. These findings suggest that a diplomatic crisis may create or deepen domestic polarisation.

Rebel diplomacy in civil wars is an emerging research area, and we do not know the extent to which it contributes to the type of civil war termination. This article posits rebel diplomacy as the practices of communication and persuasion intended to generate external and internal pressures which make the government and rebel more amenable to each others’ demands. The implication of this theoretical argument is that the government and rebel groups would be able to find compromises and settle civil wars in a negotiated peace agreement. Findings from the analysis of 136 civil wars since 1950 support the theoretical argument. This finding is robust in alternative model specification and after modelling the endogenous effect of factors that explain the rebel use of diplomacy.