Contours of Conflict in the 21st Century

ARABIC LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVES: POOR AND PRESENTISTOne author, generally favorable to futures studies, still argues that ‘thestudy of future was a Western product on the ground of its relationshipwith scientific and technological revolution whereas the main bodies thatwere firstly interested to explore this field were the military institutionsand multinational companies. This hence denotes their political andeconomical [sic] underlying purposes, as well as its strong connectionwith tactical and strategic studies.’ 165In describing the emergence of Futures Studies in the Middle East, WanFariza Alyati Binti Wan Zakari comes to the conclusion that ‘[c]omparedto their Western counterparts, the development of Futures Studies atthe institutional level is relatively much slower, as far as the Muslimcountries are concerned’ 166 and that ‘the significance of Futures Studiesis not widely recognized by the Muslim intellectuals, let alone the public,particularly in the Muslim world.’ 167Security Foresight in the Arab WorldIt may be both ironic and symptomatic that the region of the world thatabove all others has epitomized armed conflict in the past few decadespays so little attention to the future of conflict. Without claiming any deepknowledge on this field, this section would like to offer some conjecturesabout why this may be the case and suggest some courses of action toaddress the issue.Beyond the more general foresight specificities that we just described(which were essentially based on religious grounds and on the role thatreligion plays in the Arab world), we see at least 5 additional possiblereasons why there is so little security foresight:• Presentism. It is indeed intriguing that security foresight came tofruition during the Cold War, and then still primarily in the defenseestablishments in two main protagonists of that non-war – the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union. One of the historically quite uniquefeatures of this period is that it saw a relatively strong focus on defense165 Ibid., 201.166 Ibid., 204.167 Ibid., 208.HCSS Report 121