ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. This book aims to rethink the future as a historical category, and set the searchlight on the emergence of particular forms of future knowledge that set the future as a distinct temporal field in the post-war period. The Cold War competition was central to the development of futures research and forms of prediction. The book draws on the emergent developments and examines the idea of the future as a highly complex and often times contradictory notion that is inherently involved with power and with the claim, from a wide set of arenas, to control social futures. The act of integration in ways of imaging the future that Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin refer to is also visible in the way that forms of prediction were used to build bridges between different scientific disciplines, governmental sectors and, ultimately, between East and West.
