Facing the future : time for the EU to meet global challenges

There is a clear and growing need for the capacity to anticipate change to be embedded in policy. This is critical not only to be able to respond and adapt to new situations before they occur, but also to shape the future, building upon mutual understanding and common visions to be jointly pursued. For policy responses to address all the pressing current global challenges, especially when these are seen separately from one another, is clearly a demanding task. Institutions face greater complexity and difficulty in providing solutions in due time. In particular, this is true when the policy focus extends beyond the challenges that societies face today, seeking to anticipate future challenges and transform them into opportunities. This is the rationale for the report “Facing the future: time for the EU to meet global challenges” based on a study carried out in the course of 2009 by the Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC-IPTS) for the Bureau of European Policy Advisors (BEPA) of the European Commission. The aim is to provide a comprehensive picture of the main trends ahead and possible future disruptive global challenges, and to examine how the EU could position itself to take an active role in shaping a response to them. The work described in this report brings a fresh perspective, by linking widely accepted quantified trends towards 2025 and beyond with experts’ and policy makers’ opinions on the likely consequences of these trends and wild cards

Facing the future : scanning, synthesizing and sense-making in horizon scanning

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenen (http://www.nationallizenz.ch)In this paper, we discuss key issues in harnessing horizon scanning to shape systemic policies, particularly in the light of the foresight exercise ‘Facing the future: Time for the EU to meet global challenges’ which was carried out for the Bureau of European Policy Advisors. This exercise illustrates how horizon scanning can enable collective sense-making processes which assist in the identification of emerging signals and policy issues; the synthesis of such issues into encompassing clusters; and the interpretation of resulting clusters as an important step towards the coordinated development of joint policy measures. In order to achieve such objectives, horizon scanning can benefit from methods of multi-criteria decision-making and network analysis for prioritizing, clustering and combining issues. Furthermore, these methods provide support for traceability, which in turn contributes to the enhanced transparency and legitimacy of foresight

Love in Egyptian Cinema

Love has always played a central role in Arab cultures, whether idealized/Platonic (as in the story of Majnûn and Laylâ) or earthly/carnal (as in the well-known Dove Ring. About Affinity and Friends by Ibn Hazm al-Andalûsî [993-1064]). Today love is still dealt with by many Arab philosophers and poets, especially Egyptian. This article intends to show the ways in which love has been represented in Egyptian cinema during the last fifty years, through four different categories of love: physical love, Platonic love, fatherly love and love between husband and wife. This essay demonstrates that contemporary Egypt’s conceptions of love are still very much the same as in the classical era, though contemporary cinema adds the support of the moving image to our understanding of this feeling