José Ramos and Sohail Inayatullah
Introduction
For eight decades, the global order has been defined by the architecture of the post-WWII Bretton Woods system and the presiding influence of American hegemony. Today, that foundation is fracturing under the weight of profound contradictions. From the rise of internal authoritarianism and economic isolationism to the genocide in Gaza, the invasion of Ukraine and escalating tensions with Iran, Venezuela and NATO, the United States is in a deepening crisis of legitimacy that will reverberate across the globe. This symposium, published in JFS Perspectives, seeks to situate these contemporary dynamics within a grander historical arc, asking whether we are witnessing the terminal decline of a superpower and / or transition to another world order.
We invited contributors to explore their diagnoses and the alternative futures emerging from the old system(s). Authors have applied a variety of forms of analyses to the challenge, macro-historical, gender based, narrative, causal layered analysis, decolonial, afrofuturist and others. This has been an effort to transform this historical moment into a space for imagination that can provide new and better pathways for our world; to move past the violence, discrimination and extractivism of the current era and envision a world that is peaceful, democratic, equitable and ecologically resilient; to render narratives of hope and collective action, offering a visionary, or just saner, roadmap for a global community in transition.
This collection brings together leading scholars in critical futures studies and practitioners grappling with concrete dilemmas related to US hegemonic decline and transition. In the tradition of futures studies the collection is inter- and trans- disciplinary, integrating geopolitical, cultural, mythic and narrative elements with macro-historical and ethnographic analysis. The authors bring their own ethnic, gender and geographic diversities to the subject. What emerges is a multidimensional and dynamic exploration that provides new spaces of insight, meaning and strategic imagination.
Articles
This symposium begins by grounding the inquiry in questions of violence, collapse, and the deep structures that shape collective futures. Ivana Milojević’s “Does Genocide Have Gender?” opens by showing how genocide is entangled with patriarchal gender systems, arguing that dismantling domination‑based hierarchies is essential for peaceful futures. Jim Dator follows in “Welcoming Collapse to Create Better Futures,” reframing systemic breakdown not as an ending but as an opening for imagination and renewal. Lonny Avi Brooks extends this opening in “From Collapse to Motherships: Afrofuturist Quantum Governance, Ancestral Intelligence, and AI Beyond U.S. Hegemony,” proposing an Afrofuturist governance model that integrates ancestral wisdom, relational technologies, and AI to co‑create liberated futures beyond imperial power.
The symposium then turns toward transforming institutions, values, and global consciousness. Sohail Inayatullah’s “The Futures of the United Nations: Changes in Structure, Changes in Collective Consciousness” explores how meaningful global governance reform requires shifts not only in structures but in shared worldviews. Bill Halal’s “Getting Past Doom to One World: Social Evolution, Digital Technology, and Global Consciousness” offers an optimistic vision in which technological evolution supports a more integrated and cooperative human society. Craig Runde’s “Sarkar’s vision of how changing values could transform current political and economic systems” grounds this optimism by demonstrating how changes in core social values can reshape political and economic systems toward greater equity and sustainability. Lichty et al. employ Johan Galtung’s analysis in “Galtung Revisited: Mapping New Contradictions of U.S. Hegemonic Decline” to explore the emerging horizons of structural contradictions, and the futures they potentiate.
The final contributions focus on culture, narrative, and the healing of historical and ongoing wounds. Martin Calnan and Thomas Mofolo, in “Exorcising Wetiko: A Diagnostic of Modernity’s Spiritual Sickness” call for new cultural rituals to heal colonial and extractive mindsets. Fadi Bayoud’s “Eschatology as Empire: A Causal Layered Analysis of U.S. Hegemony and the Palestinian Question,” followed by Kollo Lena’s “From Savage to Spring: a Causal Layered Analysis for Palestinian Liberation,” use Causal Layered Analysis to reveal how dominant narratives sustain conflict and how reclaiming story, sumud, and metaphor can generate regenerative futures. Steven Lichty’s “American Christian Nationalism: Dangers of Used Apocalyptic Futures” critically examines how recycled end‑times narratives erode democracy while implicitly pointing toward more ethical and plural futures. José Ramos’ “A Dialog of Civilizations in a Multipolar World” advocates for civilizational dialogue and plural futures as a hopeful pathway for cooperation and meaning‑making in an emerging multipolar world, and the symposium concludes with John Sweeney, Steven Lichty, and José Ramos’ “Three Funerals and a Trialogue: Grieving Fathers, Hospicing Empire,” which weaves personal grief and geopolitical decline into a generative practice of mourning that salvages ancestral gifts and cultivates fractal futures of community‑based healing, learning, and renewed imagination beyond empire.
Themes
The articles in this collection provide a broad vision of transformative potentials that exist in this moment of crisis. The following is a non exhaustive cross cutting of themes that run through this symposium.
Reframing collapse
In the articles collapse is reframed not as an ending, but as an opening. Jim Dator, in his article “Welcoming collapse to create better futures”, argues that the breakdown of failing institutions creates rare space to fundamentally rethink the purpose, values, and design of governance beyond outdated ideologies. In his view, this moment of disruption invites collective creativity and participation, offering hope that more adaptive, inclusive, and humane futures can emerge from what once seemed only loss. Meanwhile, Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis reminds us that crises invite us to look beneath surface litanies into “the worldview and, deeper still, the myths and metaphors” (Calnan & Mofolo) that anchor collective behavior. These deeper layers reveal why global challenges feel existential—and why they also contain seeds for renewal. As Halal observes, drawing on diverse sources of knowledge “increases clarity, understanding and agreement,” exemplifying the kind of communal and collective intelligence needed for a world “evolving through its own life cycle toward a higher state of Global Consciousness.” Likewise Ramos argues that this historical moment creates an opportunity to shift from a worldview of rivalry toward one of interdependence. Together, these texts highlight that collapse is never just an end point, but also moments which can catalyze new narratives, worldviews, and myths that shape how societies imagine their future and which can create spaces for new designs, projects of transformation, forms of agency and more hopeful planetary possibilities.
Looking Deeper
Across the papers, authors repeatedly show how myths, metaphors, and worldviews quietly script the futures societies imagine and the power structures they normalize. Inayatullah explains that competing worldviews shape global governance futures, urging integrative cultural, ethical, and spiritual perspectives to move beyond power politics toward inclusive, humane, and transformative planetary cooperation for all. Brooks contrasts collapsing, domination‑based worldviews with emerging, relational ones. Old systems center hierarchy, fear, and scarcity. New Afrofuturist‑inspired perspectives emphasize imagination, healing, interdependence, and collective care, reframing trauma as wisdom and positioning the future as something communities actively co‑create with hope and agency. Ivana Milojević links violence to dominant patriarchal masculinities and narrow worldviews. She argues peace requires transforming gender norms, valuing care, empathy, and plurality. Her solution centers on gender equity, celebrating multiple masculinities and identities, and cultivating everyday practices that replace domination with cooperation, nonviolence, and shared wellbeing for future societies. Calnan & Mofolo deepen this insight by showing that whiteness and ableism endure because they are rooted in a “deeper cosmogony,” where the constitutive myth has shifted modernity from homo logos to homo faber—a reality‑system that prioritizes domination through technè. Together, these papers show that futures are never neutral—they are downstream from the sacred stories, metaphors, and worldviews that shape who is valued, who is harmed, and what kinds of worlds become imaginable.
The Return of Eschatology
Across many of the works, eschatology emerges not simply as a theology of the end, but as a powerful political and cultural framework that shapes present action. Fadi Bayoud shows how Zionist and Christian Zionist eschatologies translate prophetic belief into statecraft, transforming territorial expansion, militarism, and suffering into sacred necessity. In these narratives, history is read as a divine script, where Palestinian pain becomes instrumental to a foretold redemption and compassion is subordinated to prophecy. Steven Lichty, in his article on American Christian nationalism, extends this critique, demonstrating how apocalyptic futures fuel dominionist politics, legitimise exclusion, and recast democratic struggle as cosmic warfare. Eschatology here offers certainty in an uncertain world, providing moral closure while justifying violence, hierarchy, and imperial ambition. At the same time, several authors insist that eschatology is not inherently destructive. In each of their papers, Bayoud, Inayatullah and Ramos argue that end-times imagination can be reclaimed as a horizon of ethical responsibility rather than annihilation through futures thinking and narrative reframing. Alternative eschatologies emphasise dignity, interdependence, and collective liberation, locating the sacred in everyday acts of justice rather than final catastrophe. Taken together, these works reveal eschatology as a contested terrain: capable of sustaining empire and oppression, yet also of inspiring moral awakening, shared stewardship, and hopeful futures grounded in human solidarity.
Transforming Gender Power for a Post‑Violent Future
A central challenge identified by Milojevic is the deep entanglement between patriarchal gender systems and cycles of violence, war, and genocide. Gender here is not treated as a peripheral issue but as a structural force that shapes identities, hierarchies, and moral justifications for domination. Rigid and hyper masculinities that equate power with violence, control, and sacrifice are shown to harm not only women but also men, especially those whose identities fall outside hegemonic norms. We have seen this unfolding before our eyes across many countries, Vladimir Putin’s shirtless stunts and wrestling bears (deepfakes), Peter Hegseth’s “male standards” of physical strength / performance and rebranding the Department of Defense the Department of War, and Jair Bolsonaro’s strongman and finger gun gestures, to name just a few. Yet the analysis is not fatalistic. It points toward transformation. The dismantling of patriarchal power relations, flattening gender hierarchies, recognising a plurality of genders, and cultivating non‑violent masculinities alongside empowered, non‑subordinate femininities open space for reimagining social value – where care, refusal of violence, and relational strength are honoured rather than shamed. Milojevic shows that by transforming how gender is lived, narrated, and institutionalised, societies gain one of their most powerful tools for breaking entrenched cycles of violence and creating futures grounded in dignity, equality, and peace.
Epistemic Justice
The articles offer a reimagining of how knowledge, power, and futures might be shared more equitably in a rapidly changing world. Rather than treating the decline of U.S. hegemony as purely catastrophic, several contributors frame it as an opening for counter hegemonic knowledge. Epistemic justice in futures studies means including the perspectives, visions and dreams of the marginalised and oppressed, and including a plurality of perspectives that potentiate futures for the common good rather than narrow interests. Milojevic begins this by shining the light on gender and providing a feminist futures critique of power and its alternatives. Fadi Bayoud and Kollo Lena in separate articles surface Palestinian perspectives, experiences and visions as resources to imagine post apartheid, post genocidal futures. Calnan and Mofolo reinforce the significance of epistemic justice by calling for the decolonization of American history in order to better understand the ways in which hegemony is an extension of US settler colonialism. Halal highlights the power of collective intelligence as a form of planetary cognition, reminding us that “beneath the surface of current disasters, long-term forces drive progressive change.” Sohail Inayatullah’s work on global futures and governance emphasizes that structural reform must be accompanied by inner and ethical transformation. Sustainable futures, he argues, require changes in collective consciousness as well as institutional innovation, underscoring the importance of wisdom and moral leadership. Lichty et al in “Galtung Revisited: Mapping New Contradictions of U.S. Hegemonic Decline” frames planetary, digital, and epistemic contradictions as fertile sites for justice-oriented futures. And Ramos’ call for a dialog of civilizations invokes a multitude of visions and voices from every dimension of human cultures. Through the articles epistemic justice is not only a critique of dominant knowledge systems, but an affirmation of multiple ways of knowing and being that offer hope that the unraveling of old hegemonies can create space for a pluriverse of knowledge futures grounded in dignity, diversity, and collective wisdom rather than domination.
Interdependence and the Planetary Commons
The articles here recognize that humanity exists in a vast interconnected system whose futures depend on collective care for the Earth and all its life. Across the papers, planetary survival is framed not as a zero-sum competition among states, but as a shared responsibility rooted in interdependence. As Ramos states, “if common planetary needs (planetary commons) aren’t addressed and protected as a global community, every country will suffer.” He calls for moving past the binary of “man versus nature” toward “a worldview of interdependence,” advocating a “dialogue with the non-human” that includes rivers, ecosystems, and other species. This insight transforms vulnerability into solidarity: protecting the commons becomes both an ethical imperative and a shared self-interest. Several authors expand on this. In Lichty et al. “Galtung Revisited” this interdependence is grounded in planetary science and moral imagination. The authors argue that global crises can catalyze renewal, envisioning futures where governance is “focused less on geopolitical borders and more on stewardship of the Global Commons (atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere).” Similarly, Halal affirms that a “Global Consciousness… understands the world as a fragile, complex, and interdependent single system.” These works offer a hopeful message: by recognizing interdependence and safeguarding the planetary commons, humanity can transform crisis into a foundation for shared flourishing. These reframings invite humility and care, positioning humanity as a participant within Gaia rather than its master.
Digital Power and Surveillance
While we now live in a world of tech bro oligarchs, mass state surveillance and digital borders, in this symposium digital power is seen not just as a warning, but as a field of genuine possibility. Digital systems are described as double-edged: they function today as instruments of domination while simultaneously carrying the seeds of new solidarities. Lichty et al in “Galtung Revisited” captures this tension by describing the U.S.-anchored platforms as “planetary infrastructures” that enable both “surveillance capitalism” and unprecedented forms of global resistance. The same networks that centralize power also “erode [imperial]capacity, [recentreing]narratives, borders, and social cohesion,” revealing cracks through which alternative futures can grow. Rather than surrendering the digital realm to extraction and control, several authors argue for reclaiming it as a commons. The authors propose the creation of “wisdom infrastructure – AI and data systems designed explicitly for planetary health and social equity,” replacing profit-driven surveillance with relational and regenerative technologies. This is echoed by Halal, which describes the global digital layer as a “living overlay of thought—the noosphere,” capable of nurturing a higher “Age of Consciousness” rather than mass manipulation. Similarly, Ramos emphasizes that network technologies can enable “regional, transnational, and planetary formations” grounded in collective intelligence rather than empire. While information warfare and algorithmic control threaten democracy, the papers here insist that the digital domain is not predetermined – and it should not be disowned. It must be a contested terrain where new social contracts can be imagined—ones rooted in participation, plural knowledge systems, and care for the commons. In this view, digital power does not have to entrench domination; it can also help humanity learn new ways of governing together.
Transformative Agency Beyond the State
The articles in the symposium do not reject the state, but argue for an expansion of where meaningful power resides and how it is exercised. Social movements, communities, and hybrid institutions are repeatedly identified as critical agents of change, yet the state is also portrayed as potentially constructive when aligned with wisdom, citizen needs, and planetary health. Inayatullah argues that state power must evolve to become inclusive through new institutional forms—“a house of citizens,” “a house of nature,” and cooperative governance—where states become enablers of trust and collaboration. While the current UN is described as “a referee with a small whistle,” it can evolve from managing conflict to “coaching nations how to live on this planet,” restoring legitimacy, wisdom, and shared planetary responsibility. Rundle argues that transformation requires inner change, futures literacy, and ethical leadership, but also institutions capable of translating values into policy, writing that even “naiveté with some passion can change the world,” when supported by structures that serve rather than suppress human creativity. Ramos argues that while the nation‑state has historically functioned as a “totalising force,” it can also become a partner within “regional, transnational, and planetary formations” enabled by network technologies and collective intelligence. Rather than monopolising authority, the state can help convene, protect, and scale these emergent forms of agency. Echoing Gramsci’s insight that “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” these works collectively suggest that states need not disappear; instead, they must evolve—partnering with social movements, enabling cooperative economics, and embedding wisdom and care for life at the heart of governance
Conclusion
Together, the papers in this collection invite readers to move beyond fatalistic narratives of inevitability and instead see the current global moment as one of profound possibility. Drawing on traditions such as Johan Galtung’s analysis of structural contradictions, Causal Layered Analysis, macrohistorical thinking, decolonial, gender transformative, collective intelligence and dialogical approaches across civilizations, the authors in this symposium collectively show how today’s crises, geopolitical fragmentation, ecological stress, digital transformation, and epistemic justice are interconnected symptoms of a world system in transition. By situating present turbulence within longer historical arcs and deeper cultural stories, the articles help us to understand what new forms of order, meaning, and agency are struggling to be born.
Importantly, these papers do not treat the waning of U.S.-centric hegemony as a singular endpoint or a simple replacement by another dominant power. Instead, they explore a plural landscape of futures: multipolar arrangements, reformed and newly imagined institutions, dialogical relations between civilizations, and transformative pathways centered on planetary stewardship, justice, and human wellbeing. Across diverse methodologies and perspectives, a shared insight emerges: enduring solutions arise when analysis reaches beneath surface-level events to engage systems, worldviews, and myths. At these deeper layers, space opens for ethical leadership, narrative renewal, and integrative approaches that include voices long marginalized in global decision-making.
Ultimately, this collection offers more than critique. It provides critical sensemaking, imagination and analysis as well as a hope springing from the fissures between the contradictions of our world. By treating the present as a “field of possibility,” we affirm that history remains open, shaped by choices, values, and collective imagination. In emphasizing dialog, foresight, and inner as well as structural change, we encourage readers, scholars, practitioners, and citizens to see themselves as participants in co-creating post-hegemonic futures that are more just, resilient, and life-affirming.
