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Introduction. The purpose of this article is to return the concept of ultra-long military cycles (hereinafter referred to as ULMS) by Russian political scientist, philosopher and philologist Vadim L. Tsymbursky (1957–2009) to the methodological toolkit of modern political science and use it to identify potential key threats to the modern international security system.

Methods and materials. The article makes a hypothesis about the early termination of the last of the ULMS selected by V.L. Tsymbursky, which began with the invention of a nuclear weapon in 1945 and was characterized by the predominance of possibilities of destruction over mobilization – the so-called "depressed" ULMS. This type of ULMS is characterized by the absence of large-scale long-lasting wars, the stability of the world political system.

Analysis. The author of the article argues that under the influence of scientific and technical discoveries in the field of armaments (high-precision weapons combined with low-yield nuclear warheads, "swarm weapons", cybernetic weapons, biological weapons, the global missile defense system) and socio-political technologies (manipulating flows of refugees, "hybrid war", global weakening of national identities and social stratification of nations with the formation of "international elites"), the great powers are able to overcome the "nuclear impasse" and the world political system may enter the phase of increased risk of developing a full-scale world war.

Results. In the coming decades, the world may enter the stage of an "expansive" ULMS, characterized by the return to the rate on mobilization resources as the main factor in the military-political confrontation. According to the author, one of the most effective ways to peacekeeping is the development of public diplomacy, multilateral international contacts at the level of non-state actors.

The article discusses the evolution of theories of social revolution from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The author analyzes the basic concepts of theorists and practitioners of the armed revolutionary struggle - from the founder of the classical Communist theory of Karl Marx to the Mexican guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos. The author focuses on the analysis of changes in the understanding of the subject ("driving forces") of the left political revolution, as well as the strategy of armed revolutionary struggle. The author comes to the conclusion about the historical evolution of the subject of the revolutionary struggle from major sustainable macro-groups ("classes"), targeted at the armed struggle, to self-born (by the network principle) unstructured protest groups, situational leaders, mild forms of the revolutionary struggle, which minimize the armed violence, though do not eliminate it completely. The author substantiates the conclusion about the absence in the modern protest movement of social forces, able to become the subject of revolution socialist orientation. This increases the danger of dominance of the social protest of extremist nationalist and religious political spectra. The author offers two models of response to this threat: the growing influence of the reigning centre-right conservative parties of Russia; return to center-left positions of the social democratic movement of the countries of the European Union.