World order is often described spatially, as states defends borders, build spheres of influence, contest maritime zones, secure supply chains, and compete for institutional influence and positions. Yet, often underappreciated in international relations (IR), international politics are also organized temporally because categories such as order, power, crisis, and strategy depend on assumptions about political time, albeit those assumptions typically remain implicit (Hom 2020, 106–7; Hutchings 2008, 11–13). It is clear that political actors, whether states, multilateral organizations, or individuals, do not operate in the present irrespective of the future while passively awaiting it; they govern through expectations, warnings, deadlines, narratives, technology, and promises of renewal and progress.

This article argues that the future is not a neutral horizon besides or outside of international politics, but instead a means through which international relations are conducted. Future projections shape action by connecting inherited experiences of the past to expected possibility of the future, and, critically, “imagined futures” can even coordinate present behaviour under the condition of uncertainty in IR (Beckert 2016, 20–24; Mische 2009, 697–99; Koselleck 2004, 256–60). I argue that East Asia is a crucial site where global imaginaries, expectations, risks, hopes, and political struggles alike are observable today. What is at stake ultimately is which actor has temporal authority or the ability to define which futures count as legitimate, desirable, dangerous, or governable.

For simple reasons China offers the clearest case because its official and intellectual narratives pertaining to future range from national rejuvenation, to global governance, various future-facing initiatives, and ambition of technological preponderance (SCIO 2023; Callahan 2013, 1–8). But the other actors in the region – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – likewise indicate distinct modes of future-making through the use of strategic narratives and security adaptation, respective positioning under ongoing and intensifying great-power competition, as well as unresolved temporalities of sovereignty and political identity (Kang et al. 2025, 70–79; Yoshimatsu 2025, 374–76, 378–81; Cook et al. 2024, 1–10). East Asian Futures thus constitute a plural field where regional and global futures are imagined and contested, and the question is how actors in East Asia use the future to structure authority in the present. This matters for students of IR because a world order is defined not merely through institutions, alliances, or coercion, but also through claims about what type of future is desirable and legitimate, which is particularly salient as order in East Asia has long been hierarchical and contested (Goh 2013, 209–12; Duara 2013, 5–6; Cook et al. 2025, 24).

Time and International Relations

IR has often treated time and temporality as a given or implicitly as background. In most work, events occur in a chronological sequence with a given causality. For instance, wars begin and end, or states rise and then decline. But an emergent body of work on temporality posits that time influences IR through “timing activities” and “temporal assumptions,” making international politics possible in the first place. Narrative emplotment, too, is itself a timing activity through which various political events become subjects of IR. Theories of world politics similarly depend on contested assumptions about political time, including narratives of repetition, progress, decline, crisis, and transformation (Hom 2020, 2, 21; Hutchings 2008, 5–9). Naturally, the future, unlike forecasting, is central to the question of temporality in IR. Koselleck’s (2004, 256–57) classical work distinguishes between “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expectation,” explaining why futures are potentially powerful in how they affect politics, as states interpret the present by relating inherited pasts to projected possibilities of what is to come. Later literature specifies that future projections do not necessarily have to be accurate, they only have to shape how actors think, feel, organize, or act in the present. Additionally, fictional expectation and stories about uncertain futures have been proven to coordinate economic and institutional action (Beckert 2016, 23; Mische 2009, 699–701).

These insights affect IR because states often govern through future claims. For example, military modernization plans work by projecting danger, development strategies promise modernization and progress, climate targets bind present future to future catastrophe or security, and narratives of national rejuvenation instrumentalize unreflected history into a mandate for political action. Such claims define what should be accelerated or must be defended, and what can be sacrificed and given up. Yet, there are also issues with target objectives since modern states often create consequences with long temporal reach while their institutions only assign responsibility within short political and epistemic horizons. Besides, the capacity to aspire, or project imagined futures, is inherently unequally distributed. Some richer and privileged –........

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