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Book Review Forum: A Response from Between the Past and the Future: On the Ethico-Political Notion of Collective Learning of Humankind

I am grateful to Tarak Barkawi, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Anna Leander for their insightful reviews of The Political Economy of Global Security (PEGS), not least since they provide me with an opportunity to clarify and further develop some of the key ideas of my book. I feel quite sympathetic to many of their critical points and remarks and in some cases I agree to a large degree. In this response, I first discuss issues of the past and the present and then move, via theories of political transformations, to the methodology and substance of futures studies. Barkawi provides a useful summary of the main plot and seems supportive of some of its basic tenets, yet he criticizes the book harshly for underestimating the importance of the so-called ‘war on terror’ and the role of Islamic movements. The Islamic forces ‘are more powerful than Patomäki’s favoured transformative agent, global civil society, a fact which does not bode well either for the reach of his analysis or its political hopes’. Barkawi also argues that I fail to appreciate the plurality of humanity and its many denizens, ‘those who live in different worlds, who have desires quite other than he or I may wish or hope’. These are serious charges given the attempt to tackle the key dynamics of global political economy and security. While it is true that I do not share the widespread opinion that the ‘war on terror’ emerged all of a sudden or that it has since been decisively important in its own right, my explanatory story of the recent past nonetheless categorizes the war as a potentially important nodal point in world history: