More Thoughts on the Future of the World

We inhabit an increasingly interconnected world, yet too often policymakers and advisors view each issue in a vacuum, focusing primarily on short-term impacts. All of us – policymakers, citizens, and local and global communities – must begin to consider how the major trends that shape our world are likely to develop, and how they will intersect and influence one another. This volume is designed to explore and discuss correlations between these global trends, or megatrends: Global Governance, Demographic Change and Migration, Energy and Natural Resources, Global Security, Biodiversity, and Economic Globalization. The book’s primary focus is to provide a qualitative overview of the trends, and to analyze their intersections and interdependencies in the 21st century. The authors hope it will help define some of the complex challenges and exciting opportunities to shaping a world of sustainable economies and societies.

In this paper, I mean to focus on a single such problem: the proliferation of technologies that increasingly puts the kind of destructive power traditionally limited to states into the hands of ever-smaller groups. The second half of the 20th century saw a remarkable decline in major state-to-state military confl icts. At fi rst, this was decline caused by nuclear deterrence and the stability imposed by a world dominated by two superpowers and, later, by the combination of a superpower security umbrella, globalization and worldwide economic interdependence. Yet this trend coincided with an augmented ability of relatively small, non-state groups to wage asymmetric confl icts against powerful states. The groups in question have been growing smaller, more diffuse and looser-knit, while technology has been both facilitating this development and dramatically increasing the ultimate lethality of these groups.