Visions of the Future-Overcoming Alienation

Contemporary geopolitics is marked by weakening multilateral institutions and renewed power politics, as major military states pursue territorial, economic, and strategic interests with little regard for international law, democratic accountability, or human security. Droughts, floods, food insecurity, resource conflicts, and destroyed livelihoods disproportionately affect populations already marginalized in the global economy. Climate-related displacement and migration are therefore likely to become central features of future global relations. Yet migration is increasingly framed as a security threat, fostering exclusionary border regimes, racialized hierarchies, and authoritarian responses.

From the perspective of alienation theory, these processes entail more than material deprivation. They alienate individuals and communities from the social, ecological, and political conditions necessary for self-determination. People are separated from secure livelihoods, collective institutions, meaningful political participation, and from the possibility of imagining a shared future. Ecological destruction further deepens alienation by undermining the material basis of social reproduction and by transforming nature into an object of extraction, control, and geopolitical competition.

This session aims to discuss possible future scenarios ranging from intensified global apartheid, militarized border regimes, and ecological authoritarianism to alternative forms of transnational solidarity, democratic ecological planning, and institutions of global care. It asks how sociological theory can understand these global crisis and imagine possible futures of resistance in which collective agency, ecological responsibility, and social equality can be reconstituted.