Contours of Conflict in the 21st Century

ENGLISH LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVES: VIBRANT AND ETHNOCENTRICThe extensiveness of future conflict was widely discussed in the Englishforesight community with a majority of the sources focusing on regionalconflict oftentimes prompted by concerns over the supply of criticalresources. As Peters claims: ‘the struggle to maintain access to criticalresources will spark local and regional conflicts that will evolve into themost frequent conventional wars of the next century’. 84 A sizable fractionof the studies furthermore describes conflict at a global scale, as forinstance illustrated by the claim of the UK Ministry of Defence that ‘thebattle space will be global in both geographic and virtual space, andhighly congested’. 85 Surprisingly enough, conflict at the sub regional,national and domestic levels received less attention. The military focusesespecially on the global and regional dimensions.ImpetusFIGURE 27. ENGLISH LANGUAGE PARAMETERS: IMPETUS84 Ibid.85 ‘The Future Character of Conflict’ (Ministry of Defence of the UK, 2010), http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/00CD3C81-8295-4B79-A306-E76C370CC314/0/20100201Future_Character_of_ConflictUDCDC_Strat_Trends_4.pdf.76Contours of Conflict in the 21 st Century