The true strength of nations lies not in their resources, but in their ability to imagine and boldly craft a different future. This statement reveals a lesson that resonates repeatedly in the political world. At first glance, imagination in international relations may seem detached from the harsh political realities shaped by interests, costs, and returns; yet imagination is a fundamental pillar, not only for contemplating alternative futures but also for dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity and confronting crises.
However, in today’s international relations landscape, both politicians and experts increasingly find themselves in a state of “Poverty of Imagination,” with a declining ability to think outside the box and to question what some view as inevitabilities or truths in interpreting reality or crafting policy alternatives. Instead of envisioning innovative solutions, we find many actors clinging to traditional models that have repeatedly failed to deliver positive results.
How do we explain then the serial failures to comprehend strategic surprises, the lack of preparedness for crises, and the quick resort to traditional tools like war and military escalation despite their often ineffective resource expenditures? The list is extensive, encompassing many manifestations of the constraints of the “policy box” that ensnares decision-makers, robbing them of the ability to initiate action.
Recycling Policies
In a world full of sudden changes and multidimensional problems, the global system suffers from deteriorating capability to innovate new and creative solutions to these rapid transformations, with manifestations of this chronic poverty of imagination leading to numerous complex issues.
Increased Exposure to Strategic Surprises: International actors have become vulnerable to being surprised by unexpected events and developments, whether within political interactions or amid intense military confrontations. Early warning operations and preventive security seem unable to foresee and address threats. For example, Hezbollah appeared not to imagine Israel’s capability to penetrate supply chains in a manner that led to the “Blasts of Al-Bijars and Wireless” on September 17 and 18, 2024. Subsequently, Hezbollah’s intelligence units failed to counter the organizational breaches and the targeting of its leadership, culminating in the assassination of the party’s Secretary-General at the fortified central command site underground, along with several other leaders on September 27, 2024. Prior to this, Israeli intelligence could not anticipate the “October 7 Attack” executed by Hamas or effectively manage its implications in a significant failure of early warning mechanisms in Israel.
Reliance on Traditional Military Solutions: In confronting most crises and challenges, states automatically resort to traditional military solutions as the first and most prominent choice, despite their limited effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine since February 2022 exemplifies mutual depletion and the futility of military escalation, a pattern seen in many protracted conflicts and civil wars. Despite evidence of these solutions’ ineffectiveness in fulfilling national interests in the long term, states remain attached to these traditional methods, reflecting a lack of imagination in envisioning alternatives to military force.
Failure to Anticipate Emerging Trends: A significant part of the imagination crisis lies in the inability of many states and institutions to foresee future trends and challenges. Rapid crises and transformations repeatedly surprise decision-makers who lack support from institutions and personnel capable of anticipatory thinking, resulting in delayed or inappropriate responses.
Struggles in Formulating Strategies and Long-term Planning: Short-term thinking and reactive, trial-and-error approaches have become prevalent in many states’ policies. This stems from a failure to devise long-term strategies or imagine alternative futures, with scenario-making by think tanks and consulting firms often skewed toward visions of maintaining the current state with simplified images of futures not much different from the present.
Increasing Societal Pessimism about the Future: A feeling of helplessness in the face of unforeseen transformations fosters widespread pessimism about the future among communities and individuals, with a prevailing sense of inability to influence the trajectories of significant events. This sentiment exacerbates the crisis of imagination, as thinking about innovative solutions becomes less significant with the growing conviction that change is impossible, and that survival and coexistence with reality is the highest achievable ambition.
Weak Roles of International Organizations: Since their inception, international organizations such as the United Nations have been crucial tools in conflict resolution and prevention. However, recent times have seen a sharp decline in their roles due to conflicts between their roles and the interests of major powers, as well as the bureaucratic stagnation that has hampered their ability to adapt and provide innovative solutions to international crises.
Decline in Multilateral International Cooperation: Generally, multilateral international cooperation is experiencing a continuous decline, as major powers prefer unilateral decisions or actions within narrow self-interested coalitions. Even international trade, which is beneficial to its parties, has become a source of sharp disputes, evolving into “trade wars” between major powers based on distrust and reciprocal economic isolation policies and sanctions against vital economic sectors. In this polarizing scene, creative visions for addressing common issues, such as climate change, economic development, and poverty alleviation, are notably absent.
Imagination in Literature
A review of what has been written about imagination in international relations brings us face-to-face with Thomas Hobbes and his pessimistic vision of human nature and the future of cross-border interactions as “war of all against all,” which strengthens a culture of fear, self-interest, and egoism in foreign policies, limiting any vision of a cooperative future based on common interests. It also drives nations to compete in military power, always considering the potential for aggression, enhancing what is known as the “security dilemma,” where states seek to build military strength to counter expected threats, even if these threats are uncertain.
In another vein, the limits of imagination are greatly shaped by prevailing cultural narratives. Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall affirm that culture and media contribute to shaping collective consciousness by entrenching fixed narratives, creating a mainstream that limits societies’ ability to conceive new and innovative scenarios.
Experiments in “social conformity” by Solomon Asch reveal how group pressure can restrict individual creativity. According to psychology literature, groupthink reinforces conventional and repeated ideas, reproducing visions, perceptions, and policies in a closed circle of dialogue among similar individuals, where alternative and non-conventional ideas are dismissed as deviant from the group’s accepted norms.
Benedict Anderson, in his famous book Imagined Communities, noted that national identity is itself a form of shared imagination. Modern literature in international relations builds upon this idea to highlight that identities and social systems are constructed on imagination and that this imagination can be a driving force for change. However, the intensifying current crisis is overshadowing this type of imagination in favor of more pessimistic and limited narratives.
Conversely, imagination is clearly reflected in Joseph Schumpeter’s vision of “creative destruction,” which indicates that innovation has the potential to bring about fundamental changes in economic systems. However, recent writings and current economic practices suggest that existing capitalist systems tend to prioritize short-term gains, reinforcing traditional models and restricting thinking about sustainable long-term solutions.
Naomi Klein’s writings on the “Shock Doctrine” and “Disaster Capitalism,” along with her recent works on “How to Change Everything” and “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” affirm that global environmental challenges require a radical reimagining of economic and social systems. Klein advocates moving beyond current models focused on capitalist consumption toward sustainable models based on innovation and a realignment of priorities.
In technological contexts, the concept of “surveillance capitalism” offers a perspective on how technology can become a double-edged sword, providing immense possibilities for collaboration and creativity while also potentially stifling critical thinking through reinforcing existing narratives and information filtering. The unprecedented abundance of information and information overload creates a dilemma of selection, choice, and exclusion in our interaction with reality, leading to varied representations and contradictory perceptions of the same event, which implies that our ability to understand reality, let alone imagine an alternative one, faces substantial challenges.
Why Don’t We Imagine?
If you study political science, you have likely heard of David Easton’s “Systems Analysis” approach, which sequentially coined the marvelous box termed “the system” using biological sciences. This system consists of inputs that include demands and support, processes of decision-making or transformation, and outputs in the form of decisions, policies, and feedback. This box contains numerous blind spots that have solidified the poverty of imagination among generations of analysts, as it considers decision-making to be a black box where its contents cannot be discerned. Everything outside the system is deemed as “the environment.”
Political science has surpassed this limited approach in both form and substance. In its streams flows a torrent of methodologies and analytical tools drawn from various schools of thought, yet Arab academic study has favored this approach, embedding in successive generations a disability in imagination and an inability to perceive realities of societal and political interactions.
Education and upbringing, therefore, serve as suitable starting points for understanding the crisis of imagination, as educational systems reliant on memorization and repetition diminish the new generations’ capacity for critical and creative thinking. These traditional educational systems are integral factors undermining collective imagination and contributing to the entrenchment of a monotonous traditionalist mindset in many individuals.
The other side of the equation is the increasing complexity of current international relations and the interconnectedness of its issues and recurrent crises unprecedentedly. This constant pressure and the overflow of new developments push decision-makers and those concerned with public affairs to seek a balance point and a recognized approach to dealing with rapid changes, away from the gamble of uncalculated risks. Many fail to realize that the challenges and issues of the present cannot be addressed through employing traditional tools developed in the past, as the world has irrevocably changed.
This relates to an important psychological aspect—the growing sense of helplessness and frustration stemming from a loss of control over fate and diminishing capability for action among many societies, especially in the Global South and among marginalized minorities and groups in developed societies as well. Dominant and unilateral policies, whether in the international system or regional structures, and the imbalance in the distribution of power and resources create a state of resignation to reality in order to avoid falling under the burdens of sanctions and being placed on blacklists for investment and trade, or categorized within “axes of evil” and “rogue states,” thus limiting opportunities to change the status quo.
The fourth dimension is the short-term cycles of electoral politics and the waning effectiveness of policy and the capacity for change. Elections in democratic systems entrench the functional nature of politics as a means for re-election to enact policies that hardly extend beyond a short electoral term. This tendency toward quick and temporary solutions undermines long-term ideas and strategies, excluding them from decision-making circles as “impractical” and not yielding immediate political gains, thereby postponing complex problems until they escalate and become intractable.
The fifth dimension of the imagination dilemma stems from a complicated relationship with “the legacy of history.” Renewal and imagination do not mean breaking away from the lessons learned from history to avoid repeating past mistakes and to benefit from previous experiences worldwide. Conversely, an immersion in history and an excessive focus on traditions and fear of change can lead to the calcification of institutions and policies, rendering them incapable of contemporizing present times. For instance, adhering to the role of the “Electoral College” in American presidential elections, or the right to bear arms, regardless of their negative repercussions on the state and society.
What Next?
What are the consequences of the absence of imagination from our political thinking? More of the status quo and more than we can imagine: endless conflicts erupting from a climate of mutual fear and the anticipation of inexplicable military maneuvers, absent settlements due to the loss of diplomacy’s effectiveness, leading to compounded suffering for civilians in conflict areas.
In this climate, violent polarization among international actors intensifies as disagreements among states widen due to the absence of shared visions for addressing global issues. As a result, the alternative is the extension of geopolitical conflicts among great powers and a race to achieve quick gains at the expense of others, accompanied by opportunism and a loss of faith in a shared human destiny.
This is linked to a complete failure to address major humanitarian crises, such as refugees, forced displacement, or environmental disasters, and to deal with climate change, global warming, and unknown future pandemics. In terms of international governance, organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank will gradually lose their rationale for existence due to stagnation, bureaucracy, and outdated institutional structures, in addition to the lack of effectiveness in addressing international crises.
This bleak scenario is compounded by the marginalization of civil society’s role in shaping global solutions. While civil society could potentially play a larger role in presenting innovative visions for crisis resolution, it is sidelined in favor of traditional governmental policies. This marginalization restricts communities’ capacity to participate in decision-making processes and reduces opportunities to arrive at more equitable and inclusive policies.
The absence of positive future visions reinforces feelings of pessimism and fatalism among individuals and communities. Studies indicate that individuals lose confidence in their ability to effect change within the global system, leading to declining political and social participation and, in some cases, fostering extremist tendencies.
Thinking Outside the Box
Escaping the grim scenario begins with education and upbringing, investing in a new generation with skills in innovation, creativity, experimentation, a spirit of adventure, and a tendency toward constructive future-oriented thinking. Simultaneously, there is a need for a comprehensive review of the established norms and assumptions in the academic study of political science and international relations, along with nurturing forums for open interdisciplinary dialogue among experts, researchers, and students about the state and future of political science.
In the realm of actual politics, escaping the shackles of traditional ideas and groupthink has become imperative through tactics of thinking and discussion that challenge the status quo and enhance critical perspectives within decision-making circles, such as roles for “Devil’s Advocates” and other intellectual practices designed to question the validity of existing policies and propose new alternatives.
This also connects to the restructuring of international institutions, especially the United Nations, to make them more inclusive and representative of the world’s nations, providing developing countries greater opportunities to participate in international decision-making, and enhancing innovation and future-thinking in addressing crises.
Confronting the constant tendency to deploy military force and drift toward armed conflicts also requires expanding global political circles to become more supportive, thus enhancing the roles of societal actors and individuals in proposing new visions and ideas for the future of the world.
Utilizing artificial intelligence and new technological breakthroughs to enhance creative imagination can be beneficial by providing virtual environments that allow individuals and communities to conceive collaborative policies to tackle complex issues threatening humanity’s future.
In conclusion, there is no single correct answer or perfect solution to the issue of dwindling collective imagination in international relations. The door remains open to envisioning more ideas and propositions on how to restore our capacity for imagination and create a better future for our nations and humanity as a whole.
