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The aim of the article is to identify possible causes of future international conflicts and analyze the ways of their occurrence from a political point of view. The work is based on the application of political analysis and forecasting, which allowed us to consider various aspects of likely future international conflicts in order to improve their management. Modern international conflicts have changed. On the basis of which the article attempted to systematize the conditions and causes of their occurrence. The main hotbeds of tension in the world were also considered, grouped on a territorial basis, supplemented by a number of secondary conditions. The author comes to the conclusion that international conflicts of the future can be predicted and managed on the basis of a number of hypotheses of their development, which will prevail in the near future.

Scholars in comparative politics and international relations routinely evaluate causal hypotheses by referring tocounterfactual caseswhere a hypothesized causal factor is supposed to have been absent. The methodological status and the viability of this very common procedure are unclear and are worth examining. How does the strategy of counterfactual argument relate, if at all, to methods of hypothesis testing based on the comparison of actual cases, such as regression analysis or Mill's Method of Difference? Are counterfactual thought experiments a viable means of assessing hypotheses about national and international outcomes, or are they methodologically invalid in principle? The paper addresses the first question in some detail and begins discussion of the second. Examples from work on the causes of World War I, the nonoccurrence of World War III, social revolutions, the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America, and the origins of fascism and corporatism in Europe illustrate the use, problems and potential of counterfactual argument in small-N-oriented political science research.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in how International Relations theory can contribute to our understanding of the impact of technology on global politics, underpinned mainly by an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which international society shapes technology. Building on sociological and historical studies of science and technology, this article outlines one way through which international society has constituted technology by developing a synthetic account of the emergence of technological advancement as a 'standard of civilisation' in the nineteenth century that differentiated the 'society of civilised states' from non-European societies, with a particular focus on China and India. In doing so, this article also highlights how this process has had a powerful and enduring influence on Chinese and Indian conceptions about science and technology. Thus, by shifting the focus from how technology shapes global politics to how international society shapes technology, this article provides new insights into the relationship between technology, power, and modernity in an interdisciplinary context. It also offers a new way of thinking about the complex dynamics of today's global politics of technology.