Narratives of the “end of the world” are white delusions concerned NOT with the end of humanity itself but RATHER are concerned with the sustenance of whiteness as a cohering aspect of civil society – reject existential narratives of plan as “an existential shift in the status quo” in favor of the 1AC as an embodiment of BIPOC futurism which is able to create alternative worlds that allow us to imagine PAST white visions of “the end” – refuse to align yourself with the framing of black and brown reparatory imaginations as “intolerable threats”

Discourses on ‘global catastrophic risk’, ‘human extinction’, and similar large-scale threats are fundamentally apocalyptic: they see the collapse of currently-dominant power structures as the ‘end of the world’ and the extinction of ‘humanity’. This is a powerful and increasingly common way of conceptualizing the changing patterns of inter-relations between humans, ecologies, climates, and technologies addressed in this special issue, and it is a compelling narrative for many mainstream audiences. However, we have argued that what these discourses in fact worry about is not, in fact, the end of earth, but rather the collapse of whiteness as a formation of global power. The subjects whom they frame as under threat and as possible saviors reflect Euro-centric norms that have been conflated with ‘humanity’. Meanwhile, their underlying fears of reversal and decline, and the desire to ensure the smooth ‘forward’ trajectory of ‘human progress’ express their reliance on linear, Western time. What’s more, to protect the structures that sustain whiteness, and the powers and privileges it confers, these discourses seek to guard and impose stark racialized geographies and forms of control over Black and Brown bodies, which are viewed as drivers of ecological and social collapse. Since these discourses are designed to influence policy-makers and global publics through hegemonic cultural structures such as popular science and culture, they have the potential to exert profound influence on how ideas such as threat, risk, security, and survival are understood. As such, the next century of IR (and other) scholars and practitioners need to pay close attention to the assumptions they engender, the worlds they seek to protect, and those they work – intentionally or not – to preclude. Much of the power of white apocalyptic futurisms derives from their sense of urgency, and their assertion that there are no alternatives to ‘saving’ and/or regenerating existing power structures. To contest this assumption, we engaged with just a few contributions to the vast, multi-disciplinary sphere of BIPOC futurisms, focusing in particular on contributions to Afro-, Indigenous-, East Asian-, and Desi-futurisms. These narratives center diverse, plural forms of subjectivity attuned to other life forms and earth itself and work to create solidarities in the face of overlapping but distinct experiences of ongoing collective oppression. They embrace nonlinear and plural temporalities, making it possible to approach ecological crises as sources of open-ended renewal and regeneration rather than either decline and extinction, or the resurgence of whiteness. Further, many BIPOC futurisms embrace mobilities and geographies in which migration, nonlinear motion, adaptation and attachment to unique places crystallize in fluid, adaptive forms of community. In short, where white futurists foresee ‘the’ end of ‘the(ir)’ world, many BIPOC thinkers, makers and actors are already (and have long been) generating new worlds in the wake of the apocalypse of white domination. We need to be clear that we do not refer to the work of BIPOC futurists as resources for ‘saving’ or recuperating existing power structures. As mentioned above, our aim is not to instrumentalize these futures toward the project of ‘holding together’ IR or any other aspect of dominant power structures. On the contrary, we point to these works as evidence of the always-already active labor of world-building and flourishing that exceed the apocalypse predicted by white thinkers. As ecological crises intensify – and with them, radical right and ‘white nationalist’ movements – we urge the next century of IR scholars to interrogate the underlying anxieties that drive mainstream futurisms, and to consciously divest from systems of oppression affirmed by these imaginaries. We also encourage future IR scholars to work toward solidarities with the plural worlds that BIPOC are creating beyond ‘the end of the world’, without expecting or demanding to be ‘saved’ or even necessarily welcomed. And we urge the ‘next century’ of IR scholars to stop viewing the flourishing, resurgence, adaptation or even survival of BIPOC worlds as intolerable threats. Instead, white scholars working in this field need to begin imagining worlds beyond the apocalypse of whiteness – worlds not entirely ‘without us’, but in which oppressive constructs of ‘humanity’ are transcended, and in which other worlds can flourish.