Conclusion

In our winding journey to celebrate the UN’s 75th anniversary in 2020 — an immovable feast amidst the year of the plague — we recently made an unexpected sojourn: Science fiction.

Yes, Science fiction (SF).

When you think about it, so much of the UN’s work has been aspirational, future-leaning, and perhaps even utopian: the project of an international community, the hope for global peace, and the protection and assertion of universal human rights.

Our principal aim during this sojourn was to generate new ideas of diplomacy and the role of the UN.

Our mission was to imagine what conflict prevention, peacemaking and peace building will look like 50 years from now. In other words, how might we re-think the signing of a peace agreement, or the act of shuttle diplomacy, or negotiations that lead to the end of a conflict in the future?

The following interview with Dofresh sheds some light on what our brief sojourn taught us about how to draw the future and re-imagine peace.

Right from the get-go, we had to contend with the fact that the future is often portrayed in a dystopian way. Science fiction traditionally highlights novel techniques for future warfare and the attendant potential for mass destruction. As the respective works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Franz Kafka attest, humanity seems to respond more intensely to fear than to joy. Reading dystopian SF, some might even find comfort in the present, and say, “hey, our lives are not so bad.”

But the truth is that the realities of our increasingly screen-mediated present include a global pandemic, climate change shocks and computer-generated mass confusion.

And so, it falls on us to try to find a way to balance hope and realism, if only as an exercise to cultivate alternative imaginaries and sincerely ask, along the way, what futures we might actually desire.

Dofresh puts it like this:

Napoleon Bonaparte said 200 years ago that “a good sketch is better than a long speech.” Visual design can help translate complex concepts and spark new ideas. We turned to illustrative SF to trigger dialogue about the UN at large and our work in sustaining peace specifically. Re-imagining the future without visual support would be difficult, if not impossible.

We asked Dofresh about this:

Re-imagining peace means a conversation between the past, present and future. The boundaries of constructing fiction seem to depend on the usefulness of the imaginary. It was important that we came up with proposals and suggestions that could potentially be implemented to support conflict prevention, peacemaking and peacebuilding efforts. The current movements in the public and private sector around design thinking, speculative design or foresight are leading this path.

In this vein, Dofresh shared with us:

There seems to be plenty of enthusiasm to re-imagine the future of war, but practice in the peacemaking world to radically redefine possibilities is scarce. We learnt from our efforts that SF can help ignite a broader reflection about the parameters of diplomacy, with a view to spark new and unexpected conversations. Some elements of “the future” will reach different parts of the world at different paces. Most of the presently imaginable futures might materialize in other forms and shapes — many might just remain bold dreams. If nothing else, a major lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is never too early to think about the unknown. Let’s make space for some positive thoughts about how to achieve a more peaceful world. The future is now.

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