ABSTRACT
Attempts to see what challenges and threats are ‘on the horizon’ are a vital characteristic of modern states and economies. This chapter argues that the contemporary focus on the future results from uncertainty about geopolitical transformation and on technological acceleration, on the ‘pace’ of change that impacts all aspects of society. In this time of geopolitical and technological uncertainty, concepts like ‘black swan’ or ‘anti-fragility’ are buzzwords in government and corporate worlds working on ‘futures’ thinking and there appears to be an interest in new approaches to ‘horizon scanning’ and ‘scenario planning.’ This chapter concludes with a number of questions that emerge from this interest in new techniques in the liberal world used to explore futures of security and war. But the chapter goes on to suggest that, in a multipolar world of new great powers and different types of global actor, the challenge for research is to get a deeper sense of the different emerging strategic cultures in global politics on future threats, tactics and geopolitical desires – either to learn from them or to see what problems we might have to confront in the future.
