This is to be the first in a short series of posts reflecting on the peculiar, and often neglected, relationship between security studies and the future. 

“I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.”
Henrik Ibsen (Shuman, 1997)

“The politics of catastrophe is turned towards an unknown future, which must be imagined and inhabited in order to be made palpable, knowable and actionable
(Aradau & Munster, 2011)

“It is always profitable to recall that the ways in which states prepare and organise themselves for war, and the ways in which their societies problematise security, directly reflect the forms of life that they enact.”
(Dillon & Reid, 2009)

The Future in (and of) Security Studies

The great paradox of the future is that it is perennially immanent. It is a destination at which, by its very definition, we can never arrive. Even…