European Scenarios for Future Conflicts

The final speaker in this final session at IAMCR 2024 is, appropriately enough, outgoing IAMCR President Nico Carpentier, whose interest is in expert imaginings of the future of conflict and communication technologies. He begins by outlining the patterns of conflict in a very broad sense. Such conflict can be agonistic or antagonistic, and towards the antagonistic side there may be increasingly violent grey zone conflicts, armed conflicts, or hybrid conflicts – and the latter then also move beyond the realm of democratically acceptable conflicts.

Media play a critical role in all such conflicts, of course; media and communication technologies are widely used in armed conflict, but also in official as well as crowdsourced or ‘democratised’ propaganda. Media also play a role in cyberwars, information wars, and propaganda wars; and of course media coverage itself can trigger democratic conflicts.

Nico now introduces the concept of futures studies, which explores how such conflicts might develop into the future; his project engaged in a Delphi+ study across several European locations to build scenarios for the future intersection of conflict and communication technologies. This produced six scenarios, some of which were highly dystopian.

Power might be usurped, armed conflict or democratic conflict may intensify, and environmental damage may accelerate; the intersections between media corporations and technological assemblages, as well as military and technological assemblages, were seen as key potential villains in these developments. Several typical concerns (algorithms, artificial intelligence, mis- and disinformation, political polarisation, disconnection from the natural environment, the militarisation of information) appeared prominently.

More positive scenarios, on the other hand, pointed to changes in cultural mentality that would lead to more constructive collaboration between people, as well as a greater role for supranational organisations (with a particularly strong role envisaged for the EU). Overall there were strong concerns about a further escalation of violence, and a strong presence of anxiety-triggering scenarios that might have captured the current European Zeitgeist – with strong concerns that Europe may either implode or be overrun.