What are future threats?

A key purpose of the Lab is to develop and disseminate new methods and concepts for approaching the most serious threats to humanity and its habitats. We advocate a human-centred approach.

This means a commitment to investigating a broad range of threats to human life and communal existence, and interrogating those ideas and practices that seek to challenge or altogether remove the very concept of the human as a core category of threat survival.

This approach is distinct from state-centred and extinction-only approaches, which privilege the existence of status quo institutions and hierarchies, and focus on a narrow set of threats to humanity.

This approach therefore encompasses

  • Threats along an escalating spectrum of destruction, from the physical or cultural destruction of specific communities up to planetary extinction.

  • An innovative typology of threats, consisting of seven categories: environmental; biological; war and genocide; societal; technological; space and planetary; the unknown/unimaginable.

  • The ideas, ideologies, technologies and practices powering these threats as well as their underlying psychological mechanisms, associated discourses and political dynamics.

This approach generates a more comprehensive, inclusive, and ethical landscape of future threats, and draws upon wide-ranging expertise of scholars within War Studies and King’s College London.