Another Selective Look at Future Social Crises : Some Aspects of Which We Can Already See

W e know that the future is never the past or the present exactly repeated. Nevertheless, whatever social phenomena evolve over time, in whatever form they may present themselves, they do not come out of a void, suddenly appearing. The evolution is always rooted in past and present conditions. This is true of social crises. W e can grant that many crises which have been projected to appear in the 21st Century by many scholars and researchers as well as our self, wilt, differ in significant ways from those the world faced in the Century (for examples, see many of the articles in this very volume in which this paper wil appear; see also, Quarantelli 1996, 19%). They wil be different in important aspects from past and present crises. Nevertheless, those newer crises that are starting to appear in fuller and fuller form, can be seen to have predecessors of some kind in the past and in the present. There is not and could not be a sudden transformation of the characteristics of older crises into the features of the newer social crises. Given that, what can we say about the four questions that have been posed to us? I) What is the most likely scenaricr of a future crisis? 2) What are the most salient institutional constraint