This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies. Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies, we have curated a Special Issue examining the challenges facing global politics for the next 50 years. IR has regularly turned its attention backwards towards its historical origins. Instead, we look to the future. In this Introduction, we start by outlining four traditions of future-oriented thinking: positivist, realist prediction; planning, forecasting, and scenario-building; utopian dreams of an ideal political future; and prefigurative thinking in activist politics. From these traditions, we learn that thinking about the future is always thinking about the present. We then outline four themes in the Special Issue articles: How do we think about the future at all? How do we think about imperial pasts and the ongoing questions of colonization and racialization in the present? How will technological change mediate and generates geopolitical change? How are socioecological crises, and in particular climate change, increasingly shaping how we think about the future of global politics? Overall, these provide us with a diverse, stimulating, and thought-provoking set of essays about the future of global politics, as both discipline and set of empirical problems.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give us an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the transient sky at radio wavelengths. In this paper we present VAST, an ASKAP survey for Variables and Slow Transients. VAST will exploit the wide-field survey capabilities of ASKAP to enable the discovery and investigation of variable and transient phenomena from the local to the cosmological, including flare stars, intermittent pulsars, X-ray binaries, magnetars, extreme scattering events, interstellar scintillation, radio supernovae, and orphan afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. In addition, it will allow us to probe unexplored regions of parameter space where new classes of transient sources may be detected. In this paper we review the known radio transient and variable populations and the current results from blind radio surveys. We outline a comprehensive program based on a multi-tiered survey strategy to characterise the radio transient sky through detection and monitoring of transient and variable sources on the ASKAP imaging timescales of 5 s and greater. We also present an analysis of the expected source populations that we will be able to detect with VAST.

This article examines the nature of the destruction of built environments. Such destruction should be seen as a distinct form of violence: urbicide. This violence comprises the destruction of shared spatiality which is the condition of possibility of heterogeneous communities. Urbicide, insofar as it is a destruction of heterogeneity in general, is thus a manifestation of a ‘politics of exclusion’. However, this account of the destruction of the built environment is not only an insight into a distinct form of political violence. Rather, an account of urbicide also offers a metatheoretical argument regarding the scholarly study of political violence: namely that destruction of built environments contests the anthropocentric frame that usually dominates the study of violence.