Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals for political and geopolitical risk of interest to private and public actors.
Editorial: Increasingly one may wonder about the relevance of the idea of ‘weak signals” in our world: if you take our featured piece (the reality of the MIT/Club of Rome 1973 foresight on the sustainability of our world – see The Weekly below), then, can we truly still dare to say it is a weak signal regarding the impending – already present – global disaster in terms of sustainability? In 1973 it was a weak signal, but now? Yet, as nobody truly pays attention, as awareness is obviously not there, as a result, do the dire warnings still qualify as weak signal? How strong does a signal need to become to be taken into account as signal or even better warning? Part of the answer may be in the idea of timeliness, but if nobody wants to truly do something, does timeliness also become obsolete?
Find out more on horizon scanning, signals, what they are and how to use them:
“Horizon Scanning and Monitoring for Anticipation: Definition and Practice“.
Read below our latest complimentary Weekly horizon scanning. This is a semi-edited issue (data are sorted out, and categorised, but are not organised in the featured area to tell a story about word politics and geopolitics).
Each section of the scan focuses on signals related to a specific theme: world (international politics and geopolitics); economy; science; analysis, strategy and futures; AI, technology and weapons; energy and environment. However, in a complex world, categories are merely a convenient way to present information, when facts and events interact across boundaries.
As polarisation rises, not only internationally but also domestically within many countries, weak signals are not only “direct”, describing facts, but also, increasingly, “indirect”, i.e. perspectives on reality providing more indications about the positioning of actors, the rising tension(s) and uncertainty, than about facts. The Weekly also aims at monitoring this rising tension to evaluate the possibility for future overt crises, and the underlying corresponding dynamics.
The Weekly is the complimentary scan of The Red (Team) Analysis Society. It focuses on political and geopolitical uncertainty, on national and international security issues.
The information collected (crowdsourced) does not mean endorsement but points to new, emerging, escalating or stabilising problems and issues.
If you wish to consult the scan after the end of the week period, use the “archives” directly on The Weekly.
Featured image: Antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two companion galaxies to our own Milky Way galaxy, can be seen as bright smudges in the night sky, in the centre of the photograph. This photograph was produced by European Southern Observatory (ESO), ESO/C. Malin [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.