Category Archives: Global and Civilisational Futures

Featured book: Asia 2038 (2018)

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Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything

By Sohail Inayatullah and Lu Na

Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, Tamsui, 2018

Using insights from hundreds of foresight workshops in Asia, ASIA 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything explores ten key disruptive emerging issues. These include:

  • The rise of Asian women;
  • The new extended Asian family;
  • The end of the God King and the Big Man;
  • New facilitated models of learning and teaching;
  • The wandering societies of Asia;
  • Climate change leading to institutionalized foresight;
  • The great migration to Asia;
  • Towards an Asian confederation;
  • Asia leading in the transition to a spiritual post-capitalist society; and,
  • An Asia that says yes to itself.

Along with an analysis of these disruptions, stories are used to illustrate these new futures.

Inayatullah and Lu Na argue that Asia is in the midst of a major and foundational shift. The shift is not only related to the spheres of economy, technology and geo-politics; equally important are current and coming social and cultural changes.

But this book is not just about what is likely to happen, it focuses more on using the future to create desired visions, since what we can foresee and imagine, we can also create.

Asia 2038 highlights ten interrelated emerging issues or disruptions that point towards multiple possibilities for Asia. The book intends to provide a working map of the nature of both the disruption and the many possibilities ahead, so that wiser decisions can be made as we create futures. In addition to these many possibilities the book also outlines a number of shared desired visions for Asia 2038, based on decades of conducting workshops and interviews with a range of people across the region.

Emerging issues are credible, potentially high impact occurrences which may be of low probability at the time they are identified. However, if and when they become the new norm, they ‘change everything’. What appears impossible can suddenly become the plausible.

Certainly, in the next twenty years and beyond, many things will remain stable. At the same time, we can also expect dramatic changes. As to which Asia actually emerges, while there are signs enabling “Continued Asian Miracle” and flatter, greener, more transparent, equitable and confederate Asia, other futures, such as “Asia in Decline” or perhaps “Fortress Asia” are equally possible. Whichever future results, the emerging issues and trends suggest more, not less, disruption in the decades to come.

However, Asia 2038 is thus not only about emerging trends and disruptions to come or about possibilities and scenarios for the future. It is also about imagining the best version of Asia, an Asia that continues to innovate and flourish in ways that benefit current and future generations. In sum, Asia 2038 as it could be.

Length: 142 pages

Purchase: PDF or Paperback

Global Transformations and World Futures (Book Info, 2009)

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Global Transformations and World Futures: Knowledge, Economy and Society, Vol 1 and 2 | Edited by Sohail Inayatullah | Oxford, EOLSS Publishers, 2009 | ISBN: 978–1–84826–666–7 (hard copy) | ISBN: 978–1–84826–216–4 (Adobe e-book Reader)

The overall structure of this Book is divided into three areas: (1) Global transformations in Knowledge: Social and Cultural issues. Issues such as the nature of global science, the challenge of building real communities in a virtual world, and the transition from an information economy to a communicative economy are explored. (2) The Global Economy. In this area, alternative definitions of globalization are developed – globalization as if the entire globe mattered – and the role of large players such as multinational are explored. Furthermore, globalization and development are linked, and the prospects for development in the South are evaluated. (3) World Futures. In this area, the theories and methods of the emerging discourse of Futures Studies are explored, particularly as applied to issues of gender and world futures; sustainable education; and, the futures of the United Nations.

The purpose for the development of this book has not changed over the past few years. Indeed, continued global transformation have made the analysis and articulate of world futures even more important. Most of the authors in this Book make the argument that humanity is at a juncture. While there are macro patterns that define what is possible in the next fifty or so years – trends in technology, structure of world power, for example – through human agency, transformations can be steered. Agency is possible and desirable. To discern how and where to influence the world system most wisely, maps of the future are required. My introductory chapter essentially maps the futures of humanity. The map has four dimensions. The first dimension is globalization. The second dimension is focused on foundational transformations in nature, truth, reality and Man. The third dimension develops scenarios of the future. These include the Globalized Artificial Society; the Communicative-Inclusive; The Continued Growth Business as Usual, and the Societal Collapse. The fourth dimension is an exploration of a preferred future – a post-globalization future.

Chapters:

  • Global transformations and world futures : knowledge, economy & society
  • Global transformations in knowledge : social and cultural issues
  • Global science
  • Non-Western science : mining civilizational knowledge
  • Global management of knowledge systems
  • Tranformations of information society
  • From the information era to the communicative era
  • Building “real” and “virtual” human communities in the 21st century
  • Navigating globalization through info-design, an alternative approach to understanding cyberculture
  • The global economy
  • Multinational corporations
  • Global movement of labor
  • The internet and political economy
  • Economics of transition
  • Global business ethics
  • Globalization as if the entire globe mattered : the situation of minority groups
  • Strategies to eradicate poverty : an integral approach to development
  • North-North, North-South, and South-South relations
  • World futures : trends and transformations in state, education and cultural ecology
  • Epistemology and methodology in the study of the future
  • The grand patterns of change and the future
  • Multilayered scenarios, the scientific method and global models
  • The futures of the United Nations and the world system
  • Globalization and information society-increasing complexity and potential chaos
  • Globalization, gender, and world futures
  • Neo-humanism, globalization, and world futures
  • Sustainable education : imperatives for a viable future
  • Financial resources policy and management : world economic order
  • International commodity policy : a new concept for sustainable development
  • Global sustainability : rhetoric and reality, analysis and action : the need for removal of a knowledge-apartheid world
  • Economic assistance to developing countries and sustainable world population
  • Capacity development and sustainable human development.

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UNESCO in partnership with EOLSS [Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems]

 

Using the Future to Explore Visions of Globalization (2008)

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By Sohail Inayatullah

This essay reviews globalization and its alternative futures. It does this drawing from the epistemological and methodological focus of futures studies. Thus the futures is visited in a disciplined fashion the hope of moving away from idiosyncratic “how I see the future” discourses. This means seeing the future not only in temporal space as forward time, that is, we are unable to remember the future, as we can the past, but to see the future as an asset, a resource.