The Case for Process-Centered Foresight

There is a strong demand for qualitative approaches which yield process-focused scenarios about the (de-)escalation of international conflicts. Yet, compared to flourishing quantitative research on forecasting, qualitative approaches to foresight have received less scholarly attention. While there has been great progress in small-n methods which are suitable for the future-oriented study of conflict escalation, these have mainly been used to study causal processes of the past. Our project advances qualitative foresight by taking causal process-tracing to scenario-building.

Our Methodological Intervention

Combining best practices from scenario-building and process-tracing, we conceptualize a novel "paths projections" approach.

Paths projections offer theory-based, process-centered, and contingent scenarios of future pathways, which allow for the continuous updating of expectations about the future in the future. 

Paths projections are oriented towards informing political action and sensitive to its own performative effects.

Application: US-EU-China Power Rivalries

We probe the analytical usefulness of this methodological innovation in three sets of case studies: