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…

  • Close-up view of cracked, dried red clay soil with small green plant growing at the bottom.

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

  • A military fighter jet flying through the sky with clouds.

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

  • A large statue of a person with a stern face, holding a flag, in a park with graffiti on the base, trees, a tall residential building, and a cloudy sky.

    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.