Strategic imagination in developing new methods for political anticipation

The modern security environment has turned into a global security market, where the strategic contender has to blueprint new strategies, the opponent is not prepared to resist. The goal is to promote an academic discussion on changing nature of global processes, provide nonorthodox methods for advancing a qualitative security analysis and particularly focus on systemic changes that would be the most difficult to predict in political analysis. The need for seeking new qualitative methodological approaches is urgent. The strategic imagination method has been previously used to improve prognostic quality in business studies, but it is not limited solely to rational choice options. This makes it distinct from the reliance on “wisdom of the crowd” or “super forecaster” experts: how the actors expect to see the international system operating; how they promulgate policy changes; and by which patterns they identify themselves, their friends, and foes in the psychological warfare. Recently, international security is increasingly becoming a marketing issue, where the focus has been shifted to strategically shaped and disseminated narratives and illustrated by intensive campaigns to psychologically influence the target audience. Recent developments like COVID-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine have clearly demonstrated the global threats are hardly solvable solely by national efforts, but for the marketing purposes international system does not turn to rational anticipatory solutions. There is an ongoing nationalist and protectionist wave, in which political hollywoodization, diversionary politics and psychological warfare have had a large arsenal of strategic tools to engage target societies with ideological and psychological offensives. In this study, strategic imagination will be examined as a potential method of creative and critical assessment, which should help examine the short- and long-term effects of proposed security scenarios in the policy planning process by assuming that recourse to business methods can add a new qualitative effect to advance further research in security studies.