ABSTRACT
If Toffler recognized, back in 1970, the impossibility of overtaking what he perceived to be a swiftly catalysing technological surge propelling unprecedented cultural change, he could barely have foreseen just how much more indeterminate the world would become following the final exhaustion, at the end of the 1980s, of the US-Soviet conflict. The collapse in 1989 of a political entente premised on mutually assured destruction and the subsequent desegregation of a tenuous set of confrontational global alliances ultimately provoked severe and unpredictable reactions that led to the disintegration of an already fragile network of geopolitical relations. Released from decades of US-Soviet political and economic subjugation, numerous countries seized the chance to engage in a massive geopolitical correction. Political scores were settled, often through violent means; new political alliances were forged or old ones abandoned; governments were reversed if not otherwise deposed. And in the midst of all this thousands of refugees moved perilously across borders, waterways, mountain passes and war zones.
