as the world waited to see what potential new phase of war Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day speech might herald, the School of Security Studies at King’s College London (in partnership with Reaction) had the honour of welcoming a distinguished group of leading policymakers, strategists, military experts, diplomats, and academics to the ‘Defence of Europe’ conference to discuss key defence and security challenges in light of the war in Ukraine.
In the conversations that followed, it was clear that the sharp strategic shock of the February 24 invasion has begun to dissipate as the full reality of Putin’s miscalculation has become apparent. With the war then in its seventy-fourth day, the conversation returned time and again to the question of the future – specifically, the range of futures still possible given the current convergence of circumstances, and the grand strategic implications of those potential futures. Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UK, raised the question of how future regional order would be remade, and the possibility of innovating a new security architecture based upon a network of guarantees. Professor Beatrice Heuser of the University of Glasgow reminded us of the limited ability of western actors to influence Russian public opinion and worldviews, and our powerlessness to engineer our desired trajectory for that state. The Secretary of State for Defence, the Rt. Hon. Ben Wallace MP acknowledged the failures and negligence of the Russian military planning, but warned of the still “untested element” of Putin’s arsenal: the possibility that he might create a “battle-winning component” from brutal and systematic programmes of murder, rape, forced displacement, theft, and bombing of civilian territories; and what it will mean for future world order if Russia finds victory in breaching all human rights, all Geneva Conventions. Professor Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution foresaw a possible looming moment of “maximum danger” at which a cornered Putin might choose nuclear escalation over ignominious defeat.
Responding in his keynote address, Prof. Sir Lawrence Freedman warned against overconfident or excessively pessimistic predictions that overemphasise present (apparent) trends. He stressed the immense fluidity and uncertainty of the current moment. There is no reason to believe we are destined for a future in which this grinding phase of the war is “the new normal.” While Russia is unlikely to win this war, it has lost about a quarter of its fighting force, and it is entirely possible that Russia will lose, perhaps with dramatic collapse. As Prof. Freedman has reminded us in his 2018 The Future of War: A History, “the reason the future is difficult to predict is that it depends on choices that have yet to be made, including by our governments, in circumstances that remain uncertain…History is made by people who do not know what is going to happen next.”
In recent years, scholars have taken an increasing interest in understanding how images or assumptions about the future, formed by actors under conditions of deep uncertainty, can materially inform decision-making and shape outcomes. As Jens Beckert notes, while history matters, ‘the future matters just as much.’ For the decision-maker to invent and choose among policy alternatives, he must first engage in a process of constructing images of alternative futures. Military planners, diplomats, and politicians thus make decisions with long-term consequences based on their assumptions and assessments of how the future may pan out. Such expectations and images of the future can draw on systematic foresight methods, historical analogies, or be informed primarily by intuition; they can be laid out in detailed plans and formal documents or exist in the margins of decision-makers’ consciousness. To study how the future has been storied and framed in the context of global politics should, in our view, be a central concern for scholars interested in grand strategy, foreign policy and international affairs. To reiterate Beckert’s point: History matters, but the future matters too.
The Centre for Grand Strategy seeks to bridge this gap and increase the rigour with which academic and policy-world discussions engage with “the future” in the context of grand strategic thinking and international politics. In 2021, two members of the centre’s Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme, Malin Severin and Christian Marks, launched the “Futures Hub,” a new focal point and research cluster for future-oriented discussions about strategy, war, and world order. In 2021, the popular ‘Thinking in Time’ seminar series welcomed distinguished guest speakers including Duncan Bell (Cambridge University), David Edelstein (Georgetown University), Peter Scoblic (Harvard Kennedy School), Andrew Hom (University of Edinburgh), Kimberly Hutchings (Queen Mary University), Myriam Dunn Cavelty (ETH Zurich), Christoph Meyer (King’s College London), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (Kingston University London) and Andrew Monaghan (Kennan Institute). We are pleased to announce that the team has secured follow-on funding to continue the work of the Futures Hub through the 2022-23 academic year.
The next iteration of Thinking in Time will explore a variety of future-oriented themes, including how governments embedded in different cultural and regime contexts assess futures strategic trends; how legacies of war and collective memory shape foreign policy making; and the role that images of the future in the context of environmental governance. Details of the seminar schedule will be announced in early September 2022.