A Political Epistemology of Prediction: Knowledge, Conflict and Humanitarian Foresight

Abstract

This thesis develops a political epistemology of prediction. It develops and discusses the historical roots of prediction in political philosophy, from Machiavelli’s empiricism to Gramsci’s view of prediction as the expression of a political programme with a clear objective. The thesis approaches prediction as a political-epistemic operation across theory and praxis, simultaneously understanding it as a practice and an epistemological category. Several epistemic concepts and processes are discussed that are central to predictive practices, including thresholds, events, veridiction, and objectivity. A dialectical understanding of prediction is developed and discussed through the empirical site of humanitarianism and scenes that describe predictive efforts in the humanitarian sector. By charting a history of humanitarianism and its roots in capitalist expansion, the rise of predictive practices in the sector is critically discussed as a form of quantification, knowledge extraction, and labor abstraction. This development is contextualized by highlighting the influence of cybernetic thinking in establishing commensurable, predictable conceptions of violence in peace research and humanitarian action, thereby enabling the development of metrics of conflict. The production of predictive knowledge and the work that prediction performs in the humanitarian sector is further assessed by discussing a case study where aid, in the form of cash transfers, was preemptively deployed before a disruption took place, in this case, monsoon-related flooding in Bangladesh. Based on this discussion, a preemptive rationality is discerned in contemporary humanitarianism. Finally, the thesis proposes a dialectics of prediction, where it is mobilized as a response to disruption while also shaping how disruptions are acted upon. Prediction functions not to preempt disruption, but to configure and maintain it as a constitutive component of order, in service of a specific political programme that seeks to establish permanence.