When Imagined Futures Collide: Why Reimagining Tomorrow Cannot Heal Deep Conflict

Imagining the future can change the choices people make today. Over the past fifteen years, researchers in futures studies have built an influential body of theory around that idea: if communities and organizations can surface the hidden images of tomorrow that steer their decisions, and then deliberately reimagine those futures, they can unlock options that inherited assumptions had closed off. A new theoretical paper argues that this powerful idea has a hard boundary, and that the boundary is drawn wherever stakeholders’ underlying interests are structurally opposed.

The study, published as an open-access research article in the European Journal of Futures Research, is a theoretical-conceptual analysis by Adam Vigdor Gordon. It does not report new experiments or fieldwork. Instead, it works at the level of concepts, distinctions and arguments, using a well-documented historical episode, the South African transition to democracy between the 1970s and 1994, to illuminate a structural condition that the author believes anticipatory theory has overlooked.

The paper’s central move is a distinction between two kinds of situations. In co-positioned situations, stakeholders share a position in the underlying order: their values and interests are broadly aligned, so their disagreements are epistemic, about facts, means and methods rather than ends. In counter-positioned situations, stakeholders occupy opposed positions in which gain for one party typically means loss for another. There, disagreement is ontological and political, concerning values, ends and whose interests will prevail, and the imagined futures on each side are rival and often incompatible.

To explain why reimagination initiatives succeed in the first setting but fail in the second, the author borrows a well-known lesson from science communication: the information deficit fallacy. That fallacy is the assumption that resistance to an evidence-backed position must stem from a lack of information, so that providing more data or better explanations will change minds. Decades of research have shown this model fails, because opposition to evidence-based interpretation often arises not from cognitive gaps but from socially embedded identity, culture and sectarian interests, supported by alternative sources of trust and credibility. In some cases, deficit-based communication strategies have even been shown to intensify polarization when scientific claims become entangled with cultural or political identities.

The paper’s argument is that anticipatory imaginaries are, in this sense, vehicles of information. They are descriptions of situations that carry imagined futures back into the present, and they are therefore subject to the same fallacy. When facilitators treat contested futures as a shortage of imagination, something that more elicitation, more scenario workshops or more creative visioning can fix, they may be misreading a conflict of interests as a deficit of imagination. In counter-positioned settings, the parties are not lacking anticipatory awareness or imaginative range; they simply imagine different, opposed futures because their underlying interests differ. A reimagination process, the author argues, cannot manufacture a consensus for which there is no structural basis.

The paper sets this out in a comparison of the two situation types. In co-positioned settings, deliberation refines and aligns a held-in-common future, difference narrows, and convergence toward a workable shared imaginary is plausible; foresight operates generatively, exactly as anticipatory theory specifies. In counter-positioned settings, deliberation tends to entrench rival futures, difference hardens, and the likely outcome is persistent plurality and stalemate. Foresight remains bounded: it cannot dissolve a conflict whose root lies outside the process. Crucially, the author frames this as bounding anticipatory theory rather than invalidating it. Reimagination continues to work where interests are structurally aligned; it simply cannot redress underlying counter-positioning.

The argument is illustrated with the South African transition. In the late apartheid period, futures anticipation was acute and pervasive across the stakeholder spectrum: a numerically vastly outnumbered white community held the state’s financial, industrial and military resources, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, the African National Congress and South African Communist Party were banned, and neighboring countries had decolonized, largely into the Soviet orbit. Different interest groups held different, often irreconcilable anticipatory imaginaries, ranging from maintenance of the status quo to various forms of racial and economic inclusion, from market-led trickle-down restitution to direct restructuring and, for some, orthodox Communism. Even within the progressive spectrum, Mandela’s famous 1964 speech from the dock imagining a non-racial democratic future was one vision among several, not endorsed by the more hardline Pan Africanist Congress and only inconsistently supported by some communities with mixed loyalties.

Two formal anticipatory events did punctuate this period: the Anglo American corporation’s “High Road” scenario of 1985 and the Mont Fleur “Flight of the Flamingoes” scenario of 1992. The paper is careful about what these were. Neither was the product of a reimaginative process or an attempt to collaboratively invent a new future. Both presented prior, known imaginaries in unaltered form, articulating the political choices and trade-offs that would be required to reach them. What actually brought the apartheid state to the negotiation table in the early 1990s, where the blueprint for a democratic constitution was agreed, was instead the accumulated agency of the 1980s: street protests and clashes with police and the army, legal and organizational challenges, widespread divestment pressure, and a comprehensive sporting and cultural boycott. The non-racial democratic future, in the author’s account, was fought for and won in a contest of competing interests, and ultimately forged through negotiated compromise at the level of opposed positions, not through shared reimagination.

From this analysis the paper proposes a constructive alternative: futures agency. Closely related to the sociological concept of projective agency, the capacity to imagine alternative future possibilities and orient action toward them, futures agency adds the condition of structural antagonism. It is intentional action aimed at advancing a preferred future within a counter-positioned field, whether unilaterally or in pursuit of give-and-take resolution with opposed stakeholders. It may be exercised through negotiation, but it may equally bypass a negotiations process or seek to capture the institutions involved, and it need not take the form of political action in the narrow sense; technological innovation, cultural production and knowledge dissemination all qualify. What defines it is its structural aim and future-directed intentionality, not the arena in which it operates. The author distinguishes it from agonism, which offers a way of channeling conflict into legitimate contestation within shared rules, noting that the two are complementary: managed contestation may be the realistic best outcome precisely where no shared imaginary is reachable.

The practical upshot is a diagnostic question for anyone designing foresight or participatory futures work: are the stakeholders co-positioned or counter-positioned? Where interests and values align, surfacing implicit imaginaries and introducing alternatives can genuinely widen the repertoire of present choices, the terrain on which Futures Literacy and related methodologies have built their success. Where interests are structurally opposed, the same interventions risk being ineffective or even counter-productive, redoubling effort on an informational remedy for a problem that is not informational. In those cases, the paper suggests, the honest options are engagement at the level of positions themselves, through agency, contestation and negotiated trade-offs, or facilitation that illuminates the compromises required among non-reconcilable futures, as the South African scenario exercises attempted. The future, on this view, is not always held back by a shortage of imagination. Sometimes it is held back by the people who imagine a different future, and only action, not better imagining, can move it.

Subject of Research: Boundary conditions of anticipatory theory and reimagination in co-positioned versus counter-positioned conflict situations

Article Title: The limits of imagined futures in contested environments

Article References: Gordon, A. V. (2026). The limits of imagined futures in contested environments. European Journal of Futures Research, 14(1), Article 32. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-026-00279-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40309-026-00279-7

Keywords: futures studies, anticipatory theory, Futures Literacy, information deficit fallacy, counter-positioning, scenario planning, South African transition, futures agency, science communication, structural conflict, imagined futures, theoretical analysis