Strategic Foresight & Early Warning ･ Political & Geopolitical Risk · Scenarios
Riots and protests have been progressively, and in an accelerating way, occurring in many countries. Starting with France in 2005, they spread throughout most of the world, from the Arab Spring to Thailand through Hong Kong, the U.S. or, more recently Venezuela, Algeria and France, again, with the Yellow Vest movement at the end of …
Continue reading “Foreseeing the Future of the Modern Nation-State: the Chronicles of Everstate”
Everstate is an imaginary state in our contemporary world of the beginning of the 21st century, created to identify and imagine various futures. It will be used to represent all states and each state. Everstate is thus an ideal-type state. It is also a shorthand for the model that was constructed to represent the dynamics …
The initial variables chosen to start building our scenario are the five most important variables of our model, according to Eigenvector centrality, as explained in the article “Revisiting influence analysis”. We shall now choose values for each criterion. Consistency is then checked, but only for the variables that are linked. As we aim at finding …
Everstate is an ideal-type for our very real countries created to foresee the future of the modern nation-state. In the case of this specific scenario-building, we are setting the stage for Everstate, by attributing values to key influencing variable to be able to develop the scenarios. The explanations regarding the methodology used to develop the narrative is explained in …
The Everstatans: the citizens (including companies), the people, the Nation Everstate’s central governing bodies or political authorities: the government, Parliament, the national representatives, the civil servants constituting the formal and rational modern bureaucracy. Everstate’s regional and local governing bodies: elected representatives at town, department (or county) and region level. Everstate’s political parties: Two major parties (loosely …
(This article is a fully updated version of the original article published in November 2011 under the title “Creating a Foresight and Warning Model: Mapping a Dynamic Network (I)”). Mapping risk and uncertainty is the second step of a proper process to correctly anticipate and manage risks and uncertainties. This stage starts with building a model, which, once completed, will describe and explain the issue or question at hand, while allowing for anticipation or foresight. In other words, with the end of the first step, you have selected a risk, an uncertainty, or a series of risks and uncertainties, or an issue of concern, with its proper time frame and scope, for example, what are the risks and uncertainties to …
Continue reading “Modeling for Dynamic Risks and Uncertainties (1) : Mapping Risk and Uncertainty”
The dreadful burning alive of the captive Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State and its video broadcast by Al-Furqan Media Foundation, as well as the reactions it succeeded in eliciting, such as Jordan’s retaliations (e.g. ISIS Study Group, 3 Feb 2015; BBC News, 6 February 2015), show once more the crucial importance to fully consider the Islamic State psyops as they are completely part of the war it wages and of the order it thus aims at establishing. These psyops, beyond the influence they aim at generating (see “A Framework“), offer us a way inside the Islamic State and its Khilafah’s worldview. Understanding the latter is crucial is we want to fight the Islamic State victoriously, because its belief system and induced actions impact all other actors, be …
The war in Syria has now become fully internationalized, after its expected regionalization, notably favoured by the failure to stabilize Iraq after its state was destroyed by the 2003 US-led Iraq war. The two, initially unrelated wars have morphed into a war against one of the fighting actors on the Syrian battlefield, the Islamic State, originally born from the Iraqi …
Continue reading “Monitoring the War against the Islamic State or against a Terrorist Group?”
What are the numerous movies, novels, TV series and video games declining the implacable struggle between human survivors and proliferating populations of zombies really about? These “chronicles” of the worldwide zombie invasion are so pervasive in our twenty-first century global culture, and they have reached a status of such importance that they have even inspired an actual training plan by the US Department of Defence in 2014, as well as a very real military training session in 2012. What is the strategic issue played out through the very complex zombie charade in our contemporary framework, when socio-environmental changes are also strategic changes? In other terms, what are the existential, political, geopolitical and military dimensions of the zombie invasion? Furthermore, is …
Continue reading “Invasion Z: Zombie Wars or Resource Wars?”
Editorial – Gilman’s Plutocratic Criminal Insurgency and Current Wars – We have been monitoring and analyzing how the current paradigm is shifting, while wondering what could be the future of political authorities, both elements being absolutely crucial if we are to provide pertinent strategic foresight and warning analyses. In this framework, the article by Nils Gilman, associate chancellor at …
