Society of the Future

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu graduated in political science and has a PhD in Sociology (2004) from La Sapienza University, Italy. He has lectured in sociology, and the sociology of organizations at La Sapienza and Salerno University. Since 2009, he has been a researcher and lecturer in sociology at the University Niccolò Cusano in Rome. He was a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague. He has authored many scientific works on social theory, especially complexity theories, common goods, innovation theory and historical sociology. In the area of historical sociology, he has focused on epistemic problems and identity-building processes. Jiří Šubrt studied sociology and economics at Charles University in Prague. Since 1990, he has lectured at the Faculty of Arts there. In 2009, he founded, and has since stood as guarantor of the study programme of historical sociology at the Faculty of Humanities. He is the author and editor of many books published in Czech and English, mainly dealing with themes of contemporary sociological theory, particularly with regard to issues of action, structure and social systems. Over an extended period, he has given attention to issues of time and memory. In the area of historical sociology, he has focused on the problems of the civilization process, civilizational comparative analysis, social change, and modernization processes. Nicolas Maslowski (b. 1972) studied at the University of Saclay, at the Institute of Political Science in Paris (IEP), received his PhD from the University of Paris X – La Défense Nanterre in 2009. He worked at EHESS (Paris) at the CADIS research group on a project under the direction of Michel Wieviorka (2001-2003). He worked as a lecturer at Charles University in Prague, at Prague University of Economics and Business. From 2016 to 2022 he was director of the Center for French and Francophone Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw, this is a French-Polish Social Sciences and Humanities Center founded by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1958., then at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies of the same university. He was interim coordinator of the Franco-Georgian University (2024). He is co-director of the French Center for Human and Social Sciences in Vilnius, formerly the Franco-Belarusian Center for European Studies. He is interested in European and Central and Eastern European issues, International Relations, Collective Memory, and Historical Sociology.

• Introduction.- Images of time in the world: The culture of innovation.- Inventing the futures: The transformations of human ideas about the time to be.- Mysticism vs expert rational forecasting: the age old competition.- Something more than the here and now: Imagined futures. The Power of the Imaginary as an Informal Institution.- World politics and the future of the great powers’ games.- The future of World Politics and Geopolitics.- The macro regions in the future world and the shift of the world’s power distribution.- The Evolution of Supranational Entities in the Era of Global Order Restructuring.- Democracy in the Balance: The Impact of Populism and Autocracy on Global Power Dynamics.- World population and its development: Demographic trends and (bio)policies in a geographical perspective.- Understanding the Dynamics of Environmental Controversies: The Role of Peace.- Playing the Future: A Sociological Perspective on Gamification and Social Spaces.- Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Living: Between Social Innovation and the Risk of De humanization.- Where will we live tomorrow.- Great Barriers for Human Civilization in Space.- Navigating Emerging Challenges in the New Space Age: Planetary Defense, Space Sustainability and Global Governance.