ABSTRACT
Whether s/he is aware of it or not, one always has some ideas about the future that inform his/her practices. For instance, those who think that the future will be no different from the past shape their practices based on this premise, which constitutes some kind of knowledge based on one’s understanding of what the past was like. Students of Cold War approaches to security, who conceived world politics as an endless process of balancing and bandwagoning in the struggle for power expected the future to be more of the same. The point being that we all operate based on our (often unthinking and unquestioned) knowledge about the future. This is because, as Kenneth Boulding (1995: 1) wrote, ‘unless we at least think we know something about the future decisions are impossible, for all decisions involve choices among images of alternative futures’ (see also Bernstein et al. 2000).
