ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with two sets of scholarships to devise what do I mean by ‘futurist statecraft’ as a novel Christian post-colonial approach to global affairs: (1) Christian approaches to international affairs, (2) futurology.
In the first place, I will first engage with the latest scholarships in Christian approaches to international relations in the past decade. By seeing religion as the solution instead of the problem, I revisited the English School of International Relations to identify its theological ethics and its implication for futurist statecraft.
Secondly, my critique will be interwoven with the Old Testament prophet Elisa’s prophetic ministries during the reign of King Joram (circa 849-841 B.C.) as written in the Holy Bible. As these were the times when the ancient spirit of realism reigned, whilst I will tease out Elisha’s theological ethics, I aim to argue that realism is the key logic of the Powers, which futurist statecraft aims to witness.
Finally, I will engage with the key paradigms, theories and methodologies as well as reasoning logics of futurology in the past two decades. In formulating the new approach of futurist statecraft which is dubbed as ‘public intelligence’, I argue that futurist statecraft – as a prophetic science – is actually a pre-science in nature. By reformulating Foucault’s notion of ‘power/knowledge’ into the novel ‘power/data’ practice, I will establish the ontological foundation of such practice in light of the Christian ontology of ‘being in but not of’ this world.
