Sharpening the Tools of Foresight Analysis and Scenario Planning Through Engagement With Critical Security Studies

The methods of foresight analysis and scenario planning (FASP) are being applied in a wide range of use cases as institutions to plan for an uncertain future. Such efforts promise to mitigate future risk by informing action in the present. However, FASP approaches have failed to consider what lessons might be learned from the shortcomings of prior imaginative practices for risk mitigation. This article draws on work from Critical Security Studies to consider how FASP methods might be sharpened as tools for policy makers and academic researchers alike. In particular, we argue that FASP risks reproducing the very forms of overconfidence and epistemological closure that earlier risk management paradigms generated. By engaging concepts such as premediation, non-knowledge, and the politics of prediction, the article highlights how imaginative practices can both mitigate and manufacture vulnerability. A critically informed FASP framework therefore requires methodological transparency, epistemic humility, and explicit attention to the generative effects of imagining futures in the present.