The Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) delivers teaching and high-level training in the methods, knowledge, skills, and practice of governance beyond the state. Based within the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, the STG brings the worlds of academia, business and policymaking together in an effort to navigate a context, both inside and outside Europe, where policymaking increasingly transcends national borders.
This event welcomes students in Florence with an interest in the STG’s activities and academic offer.
How is policy conducted when the inventions of science fiction are quickly becoming reality? What will global politics look like a century from now?
The European Commission’s service dedicated to foreign policy, that is the European External Action Service, has a unit for Policy Planning and Strategic Foresight. In its words, Foresight is the disciplined analysis of alternative futures. In effect, it wants to predict the future to understand what it should do in the present.
At its best, science fiction writing does much alike. It has predicted an astonishing number of contemporary technologies. Its utopias and dystopias reflect the political issues of their time and of today, and throw up stark warnings about where our future might be heading. Science fiction uses the present to extrapolate futures and tell stories, and stories are a powerful tool in politics. Foresight work and science fiction share common ground, and one can contribute to the other.
Foresight work and science fiction share common ground, and one can contribute to the other.
What is the boundary between strategic forecasting and science fiction? How plausible are their respective imagined futures? What do both tell us about global politics and issues for Europe today?
This event aims to explore these questions, using the recent publication of The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century as a starting point.
The Handbook’s editor Prof. Roskilde will introduce its premise and content, touching on the interconnections between political science and science fiction.
Its contributor Mr. Giuseppe Porcaro, of the Policy Planning and Strategic Foresight unit of the EEAS, will then present the practice of forecasting within the EEAS, as a European institution of limited but growing means that must finely balance the interests of member States, and lead a conversation on what science fiction can contribute to forecasting with the STG and Florence’s student community, moderated by the STG’s Chair in Global Affairs Prof. Nicolaidis.
This event will conclude with refreshments taking place in the STG’s historical Palazzo Buontalenti, which was once a Medici laboratory for alchemy: the fiction of the Renaissance that gave rise to science.
Please note that the event will be hybrid and open to online participation.