Mapping The Global Future

Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project is the third unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view of the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next decade and a half to influence world events. Mindful that there are many possible "futures," our report offers a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss. As I used to say to my students at Princeton, linear analysis will get you a much-changed caterpillar, but it won't get you a butterfly. For that you need a leap of imagination. We hope this project, and the dialogue it stimulates, will help us make that leap --not to predict the world of 2020, which is clearly beyond our capacity-- but to better prepare for the kinds of challenges that may lie ahead. --- Robert L. Hutchings

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Takes a long-term view of the future. Offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next decade and a half to influence world events. Offers a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities. Builds upon methods used to develop two earlier studies, "Global Trends 2010" and "Global Trends 2015”. Employs a wide variety of innovative methodologies and approaches, including extensive consultations with a wide range of governmental and non-governmental experts. Includes a CD-ROM in a pocket which contains the entire text of the report. National Intelligence Council 2004-13.

From the visionary bestselling author of The Second World and How to Run the World comes a bracing and authoritative guide to a future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains, a world in which the most connected powers—and people—will win. Connectivity is the most revolutionary force of the twenty-first century. Mankind is reengineering the planet, investing up to ten trillion dollars per year in transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure linking the world’s burgeoning megacities together. This has profound consequences for geopolitics, economics, demographics, the environment, and social identity. Connectivity, not geography, is our destiny. In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle and the South China Sea to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets—a race China is now winning, having launched a wave of infrastructure investments to unite Eurasia around its new Silk Roads. The United States can only regain ground by fusing with its neighbors into a super-continental North American Union of shared resources and prosperity. Connectography offers a unique and hopeful vision for the future. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious transport corridors and power grids are unscrambling Africa’s fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource and trade routes across its war-torn landscape. At the same time, thriving hubs such as Singapore and Dubai are injecting dynamism into young and heavily populated regions, cyber-communities empower commerce across vast distances, and the world’s ballooning financial assets are being wisely invested into building an inclusive global society. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together. Praise for Connectography “Incredible . . . With the world rapidly changing and urbanizing, [Khanna’s] proposals might be the best way to confront a radically different future.”—The Washington Post “Clear and coherent . . . a well-researched account of how companies are weaving ever more complicated supply chains that pull the world together even as they squeeze out inefficiencies. . . . [He] has succeeded in demonstrating that the forces of globalization are winning.”—Adrian Woolridge, The Wall Street Journal “Bold . . . With an eye for vivid details, Khanna has . . . produced an engaging geopolitical travelogue.”—Foreign Affairs “For those who fear that the world is becoming too inward-looking, Connectography is a refreshing, optimistic vision.”—The Economist “Connectivity has become a basic human right, and gives everyone on the planet the opportunity to provide for their family and contribute to our shared future. Connectography charts the future of this connected world.”—Marc Andreessen, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz “Khanna’s scholarship and foresight are world-class. A must-read for the next president.”—Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense This title has complex layouts that may take longer to download.

There are now new experiences of space and time; new tensions between globalism and regionalism, socialism and consumerism, reality and spectacle; new instabilities of value, meaning and identity - a dialectic between past and future. How are we to understand these? Mapping the Futures is the first of a series which brings together cultural theorists from different disciplines to assess the implications of economic, political and social change for intellectual inquiry and cultural practice.

This book presents an alternative roadmap for a world characterised by geopolitical uncertainty. The surging expectations about a future world of democratic values and high economic growth, born out of superpower bonhomie at the end of the Cold War, did not lead to the promised outcomes. Instead we are faced with deeply destabilising challenges, like climate change, widespread state fragility, terrorism, arms race, disruptive newer technologies, global economic volatility, and ineffectiveness of multilateral institutions, old and new. The volume: surveys the intellectual discourse, the attempts to redesign the global institutions, and the geopolitical trends since the end of the Cold War for an understanding of the contemporary geopolitics, analyses the characteristics of the contemporary geopolitics, the seeming intractability of the global challenges, and the ongoing discourse about preventing their further deterioration, foregrounds the Gandhian praxis and IR theory for managing power transitions anchored in non-violent mobilisation of empowered masses, ensuring institutional resilience, and illustrates them through ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, outlines an approach, based on the Gandhian experience of managing political change, towards conflict, geopolitical uncertainties, and institutional ineffectiveness for securing a better future globally, including South Asia. Accessibly written, this volume will be indispensable for foreign policy experts, government think tanks, and career bureaucrats. It will also be essential for scholars and researchers of international relations, foreign policy, politics, and governance and public policy.

The third unclassified report prepared by the Nat. Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view of the future. The report offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next decade & a half to influence world events. Mindful that there many possible futures,Ó the report offers a range of possibilities & potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss. Contents: Methodology; Introduction; The Contradictions of Globalization; Rising Powers: The Changing Geopolitical Landscape; New Challenges to Governance; Pervasive Insecurity; & Policy Implications. Color illustrations. Includes a CD-ROM.