Strategic challenges
Information strategies can bring one or another future closer to the country. Information strategies can create appropriate virtual platforms to facilitate the transition from the present to the future.
Why do you need to know your own and someone else's future? For example, Finland once set itself a clear task of how to survive a small country in today's complex world. Finland has relied on a knowledge-based economy and has formed its own vision of the future, where the task is to enter the top three economically most powerful countries in the world. By the way, every newly elected Finnish MP must attend the course "Principles of Economics", without which he cannot become a deputy.
1. Today, all countries are engaged in trends and megatrends that are expected in many years. Here are just some examples.
The Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom began a study of the period 2015-2030 at the beginning of the century. The US military has long completed the "study" of the 2025 war. By the way, these studies are interesting precisely because of trends, which allows you to distract from the specific content of future objects. Every year, the National Defense University issues strategic assessments of the situation, but almost all of them are focused on future development.
Russia does not have such common strategies, however, it should be recognized that various non-governmental foundations and institutions in Russia have reached the appropriate level of both strategic thinking and the corresponding foreign language, creating the necessary expert potential. 2. What tools allow you to operate with categories of the future? Planning should be done under conditions of uncertainty.
This justifies the rejection of the old scenario approach, since it is based on a specific threat variant. Today it is impossible to determine the threat of 2030, so this approach only creates the illusion of the country's security. Therefore, planning moves to another level when protection mechanisms are prepared not for a specific threat, but for a series of threats, of which it is unknown which one can be implemented. Among the more formalized approaches, the theory of chaos and complex adaptive systems should also be mentioned. "Planning in conditions of uncertainty”, "Result-oriented operations" are the types of intellectual work carried out by the US Department of Defense today. This is a new kind of analytics that we also need to study and know.
3. The modern world has moved into the next phase of development, when small events can have big consequences. The war of 1914 began with a small event. The collapse of the USSR as a big event has a consequence of various "small events" in many republics - Vilnius, Tbilisi, Riga, the "GKChP", the shooting of the parliament by Boris Yeltsin. But these events did not cause such consequences. In Romania, the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime began with an elementary refusal to familiarize themselves with the demands of strikers in a small town. In Ukraine, the events began with the dispersal of the student Maidan by law enforcement agencies. And although it was later shown that in fact there were practically no students on this Maidan, but there were people trained to resist the police, who provoked a violent crackdown, but in the information space of Ukraine and the world this event sounded like a signal of a "blatant" violation of human rights by the authorities.
Such situations make it possible to create variants of national tragedies in the modern world that lead to regime changes.
4. A country that is not working on shaping its identity, its future, may face the threat of losing them.
Ukraine is now facing the threat of losing its identity. Ukraine did not work on creating its own "soap operas" or bestsellers, which did not make it possible to crystallize its own idea of the world.
If you can't create your own picture of the world, you just have to use someone else's.
Russia has been actively engaged in the recent revival of its own production of films that positively demonstrate life in its country, but their influence mainly covers the middle and older generation. But young people are still more oriented towards Western culture, hence the admiration of young people for the ideals of the West, agreement and support for its policies, including very aggressive towards Russia.
As a possible reaction, you can create a defense against a specific unexpected object. But it is more interesting to go to the lists of not negative, but positive objects, the development of which can allow the country to move into a more favorable state, the signs of which are:
an innovative economy;
GDP growth;
overcoming poverty;
democratic development;
good relations with strategic partners;
the welfare State;
stopping epidemics.
The choice of tools for the implementation of such facilities is the principal task of the state.
5. Strong countries explore the future in order to actively shape it. Since the late 1990s, the United States has been engaged in the so-called "environment-shaping", which makes it possible to create an international environment that is safe for the United States, avoiding the use of force. They believe that they should actively shape their future, and not sit around waiting. Based on this, each country, if it wants to count on success, must also model and form types of relations with its strategic partners. This is the direction of "designing the future".
Having our own set of similar positive/negative determinants, we can plan our further actions.
6. Globalization also has significant consequences in the information space. Five consequences can be formulated that significantly change many other characteristics:
the disappearance of filters of information flows (ethnic, moral, political, state, interstate), which previously significantly shaped the information space (recall how much the Soviet Union spent on "silencing" foreign voices);
the emergence of important informational, political, and economic interactions between states, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. In this new system, of course, strong players, for example, the United States, Russia or China, feel better compared to weak states;
as a result of these influences, cultural norms and behaviors that are alien to the consumer of information are spreading, while those who adhere to the old norms do not benefit, but those who adopt new ones faster;
New political and information players are emerging, an example of which is Al-Qaeda, a variant of a network organization that was able to act against a powerful power in the world;
It is thanks to information interaction that small events have big consequences.
The information space has become multidimensional and dialogical, so there is a need for new ways of analyzing it.
7. Chaos theory will help you understand future situations. After all, the era in which we live is filled with situations that contradict each other.
Controlled chaos has become one of the topics that is of interest to both politicians and scientists. We must understand the new situation we are in as early as possible. She is fundamentally different. The American scientist J. Rosenau focuses on the change of the state, the erosion of the concept of state sovereignty. The Russian scientist O. Nekless, for example, emphasizes the emergence of the phenomenon of the deformation of power, the reduction of the role of public policy and representative bodies, the expansion of the zone of informal decision-making procedures.
In general, quite serious scientific research is devoted today to topics that can be considered as the introduction of a country into chaos in order to achieve a transition to some other level. B. Luttwak, who is considered the "father" of geo-economics, wrote research on the theory of coup at the time. J. Sharp worked a lot on the problems of nonviolent resistance, and his tools were used in Poland, the Baltic States, and Yugoslavia.
The USSR and the USA actively studied revolutionary situations, which are also options for the transition to a new state of the system. It is the nonlinearity of these transitions that is of interest today.
Geopolitics is being implemented today in geo-economics and geoculture. Those very active aggressive impulses enter new types of spaces, shaping them according to set standards.
Today, what can be called geoinformation forces are also being implemented - these are the information capacities of a particular region that have an impact on other countries. Ireland, for example, operates in the mode of full coverage of its territory by the United Kingdom. The United States is a strong state that creates its own picture of the world in other countries, which is done both at the expense of journalism and mass culture. In this case, the absence of their own protective filters prevents the development of their own picture of the world, the generation of a variant of their identity, and this is an obligatory element of every nation.
