Amidst a deepening sense of uncertainty and polycrisis, how do international organizations (IOs) relate to the future? This article explores the politics of speculative foresight as a pervasive but sparsely researched and undertheorized form of future-oriented expertise in international institutions that taps into eclectic knowledge genres – such as art and literature, management philosophy, geopolitics, and esotericism. First, I examine how foresight is created and validated as a bundle of epistemic practice in contemporary IOs. As a way of knowing, I find that foresight is authorized through claims to innovation, imagination, pluralism, and methodological correctness, challenging established understandings of IO expertise as based on bureaucratic rationality and scientific objectivity. Moreover, I argue that foresight differs from more well-researched future-oriented practices, like risk technologies, forecasting, and anticipatory modeling, by imagining the future as contingent, plural, and unknowable. In a second genealogical move, I illustrate how this specific rendering of the future was made possible historically through the establishment of futures studies as an activist, utopian, and aesthetic counter-project to ‘scientific’ Cold War futurology. The article mobilizes performative thinking in social theory and STS and builds on a transversal analysis of IO documents, digital platforms and archives, futurist writings, and historical literature.

John Dewey holds that uncertainty is a central feature of the concrete interaction between organism and environment, and he mobilizes this diagnosis to explain both the emergence of inquiry and the persistence of speculative and abstract philosophies. However, we show that material reality is not uncertain and that the quest for certainty cannot explain the flight from the concrete, but should explain a return to it. Drawing on historical, philosophical, and sociological sources (most notably Edgar Zilsel’s thesis and the embodied knowledge of artisans) we invert Dewey’s interpretative framework: epistemic uncertainty arises not from material reality, but from theoretical abstraction. This reinterpretation enables a reformulation of Dewey’s critique of dualism and provides the basis for a pragmatist epistemology grounded in the relative stability of practical experience. Finally, it opens the way for a reconsideration of the foundations of democracy from a non-relativistic perspective.

To mitigate uncertainty, it is often assumed that governments negotiate ample flexibility provisions when entering new international treaties. Yet, the case of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) suggests that governments prioritize the more stringent commitments when faced with uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate the effects of uncertainty spikes occurring during negotiations on the design of 251 bilateral PTAs. Our theory proposes that sharp increases in uncertainty make governments more prone to signing deeper PTAs to emphasize their commitment to liberalization. In doing so, governments cater to firms’ demands for institutions protecting investment, upholding intellectual property rights, and promoting regulatory harmonization. We find robust evidence that PTAs are deeper when the contracting parties are faced with uncertainty spikes during negotiations. However, we do not find equally consistent evidence that countries also make PTAs more flexible. While much of the rational-design literature has focused on flexibility as a tool to cope with uncertainty, our findings suggest that countries rather tend to tighten their international commitments in turbulent times.

Authoritarian incumbents routinely use democratic emulation as a strategy to extend their tenure in power. Yet, there is also evidence that multiparty competition makes electoral authoritarianism more vulnerable to failure. Proceeding from the assumption that the outcomes of authoritarian electoral openings are inherently uncertain, it is argued in this article that the institutionalisation of elections determines whether electoral authoritarianism promotes stability or vulnerability. By ‘institutionalisation’, it is meant the ability of authoritarian regimes to reduce uncertainty over outcomes as they regularly hold multiparty elections. Using discrete‐time event‐history models for competing risks, the effects of sequences of multiparty elections on patterns of regime survival and failure in 262 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010 are assessed, conditioned on their degree of competitiveness. The findings suggest that the institutionalisation of electoral uncertainty enhances authoritarian regime survival. However, for competitive electoral authoritarian regimes this entails substantial risk. The first three elections substantially increase the probability of democratisation, with the danger subsequently diminishing. This suggests that convoking multiparty competition is a risky game with potentially high rewards for autocrats who manage to institutionalise elections. Yet, only a small number of authoritarian regimes survive as competitive beyond the first few elections, suggesting that truly competitive authoritarianism is hard to institutionalise. The study thus finds that the question of whether elections are dangerous or stabilising for authoritarianism is dependent on differences between the ability of competitive and hegemonic forms of electoral authoritarianism to reduce electoral uncertainty.

This article argues that process tracing is a viable and suitable methodological alternative to probe the implications of formal models specifying how the dynamics of belief formation may systematically cause bargaining failures under uncertainty. I illustrate the argument with a brief case study of the failure of the European Defence Community in postwar Europe.

The aim of the present work is to provide evidence for two debates in the formal literature on evidentiality: (i) whether the evidential content of evidential elements is in the scope of (certain) operators, and (ii) whether the evidential content can be directly assented/rejected or challenged. We argue, based on the main semantic and pragmatic properties of the Basque reportative particle omen, that, on the one hand, evidential content can have narrow scope within certain operators, and, on the other hand, it can be rejected (contrary to what is claimed to happen crosslinguistically). Based on these conclusions, we contend that the role of omen is best interpreted as contributing to the truth conditions or the propositional content of the utterance, and not to its illocutionary force or as a presupposition trigger. We argue that, by using omen, speakers assert that the reported proposition has been stated (or written) by someone other than themselves. Omen has no other semantic meaning. In our view, the speaker's expression of uncertainty often attributed to omen, if it is present, belongs to the pragmatic content of the utterance and, more precisely, is a generalized conversational implicature of the omen-utterance. Grice's (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) cancelability ‘test’ and the data from several corpora support our conclusion. The speaker's expression of uncertainty is explicitly or contextually cancelable, and we found many examples in which the speaker's certainty about either the truth or falsity of the reported proposition is clear. In addition, inspired by Korta & Perry 2011a, we distinguish between three contents, or sets of truth conditions, involved in an omen-utterance, relative to the possible status of the original speaker. Moreover, the results of another test (which can be called the reportability test) show that speakers tend not to use omen to report nonliteral contents (particularized conversational implicatures and presuppositions, at least).

Few would underestimate the role of nondemocratic governments in controlling and steering NGOs. However, this article highlights that in hybrid regimes, the rules for NGO–government and interorganizational relations are not simply dictated from above but actively shaped and sustained by NGOs themselves. Building on data from two policy fields in competitive authoritarian Armenia, this article illustrates that the government sent ambiguous signals to NGOs, thereby cultivating divisions between them. It then shows that, surprisingly, NGOs themselves amplified these divisions. They did so by (1) avoiding confrontation with the government, (2) claiming ownership of their own policy initiatives or ties to government, and (3) distancing themselves from other NGOs. The article explains this behavior by focusing on the institutional environment and perceived uncertainty. In view of a worldwide trend toward increasingly contradictory policy environments for civil society, the approach and findings of this article are of relevance beyond Armenia and beyond competitive authoritarian regimes.

Time is among the most fundamental categories of political and, specifically, democratic life. While time in the sociopolitical world leaves traces in many (subtle) ways, we do not find it among the guiding concepts of democratic theory. This Special Issue, therefore, understands itself as part of a project that traces the centrality of time and temporality in democratic theory and practice. Our goal is to move toward an in-depth discussion of time in democratic theory by unearthing and systematizing the fragments of this emerging agenda. In this editorial, we deepen the status of time in democratic theory. We do this by discussing both the research that explicitly addresses the relationship between time and democracy and the many latent forms of how temporality shapes democratic thinking. Finally, we identify three dimensions of how time is relevant in and for democratic theory, and we locate the contributions to this Special Issue regarding these dimensions.

Many, if not most, phenomena faced by political elites are characterized by uncertainty. This characterization also holds for the concept uncertainty itself, with conceptualizations and operationalizations differing both across and within bodies of scholarship. The conceptual vagueness poses a challenge to the accumulation of knowledge. To address this challenge, we integrate and expand existing work and develop an uncertainty grid to map phenomena (e.g., Covid-19; digitalization) or aspects thereof (e.g., vaccines; generative Artificial Intelligence [AI]). The uncertainty grid includes both the nature of a phenomenon’s uncertainty (epistemic and/or aleatory) and its level and enables labeling phenomena as certain, resolvably uncertain, or radically uncertain. We demonstrate the utility of the uncertainty grid by mapping the development of uncertainty during the Covid-19 pandemic onto it. Moreover, we discuss how researchers can use the grid to develop testable hypotheses regarding political elites’ behavior in response to uncertain phenomena.