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There is a significant number of theoretical studies linking education and socio-political destabilization. At the same time, there is an almost complete absence of global quantitative cross-national studies analyzing the impact of education on the risks of revolutionary uprisings. This research is aimed to fill the existing gap. The existing literature shows that education contributes to the accumulation of human capital, develops a culture of discussion and tolerance, and makes people more susceptible to liberal democratic values. On the one hand, these factors raise the population’s expectations of and demands on the authorities. On the other hand, they increase the relative costs of participating in any type of demonstrations. In this regard, it is hypothesized that formal education enrollment: (1) will reduce the likelihood of armed revolutionary campaigns, which are associated with greater risks and uncertainty for participants, but (2) will be curvilinearly correlated to the risks of unarmed campaigns, since in the early and active stages of modernization there will be a positive relationship, while in the most developed countries it will be negative. Accordingly, it follows that education in general is negatively associated with any revolutionary actions. The analysis uses 10,350 observations (with 387 revolutionary events) from 1950 to 2019, based on extended-release NAVCO data and a combination of the Barro and Lee Education Research Project with information from the UNDP (with cross-validation on the basis of the authors’ own database). The main research methods were cross-tabulation and correlation-regression analyses with the construction of probability functions.

In the article, the authors pose and consider in detail the extremely topical question of whether capitalism has a future or will it be replaced by some new system. And if there is a future, then what kind of future is it? These are not new questions, but in the last few years they have acquired exceptional importance, since not only the left, but also representatives of the largest financial capital have started talking about the end of capitalism. The article deals with the following questions: what is capitalism as a way of life and as a system; what was the evolution of capitalism; what are his potentialities. In addition, various scenarios are considered and forecasts are given for the next 50–100 years. It is assumed that in the next few decades the development of capitalism may proceed differently in developed and developing countries, resulting in a complex continuum of types, transitions, combinations and forms of capitalism. The authors believe that capitalism will be inevitably transformed to one degree or another, but the degree of such transformation can vary greatly. Various scenarios for the future of capitalism are considered: from maintaining its leading role to reducing capitalism to one of a few socio-economic subsystems.

In this paper, we report the inverted U-shaped relationship between the regime type (on the autocracy — democracy scale) and the risks of revolutionary destabilization. Autocracies tend to be more vulnerable to revolutionary destabilization than full autocracies or consolidated democracies. We would also point at a strong positive correlation between the weakening of autocracies and the risks of revolutionary destabilization that exists among full autocracies. We also observe a certain asymmetry of the U-shaped relationship with full autocracies being far more vulnerable to revolutionary destabilization than full democracies, and with partial autocracies being far more vulnerable to revolutionary destabilization than partial democracies (with factional democracies being the most exposed type of partial democracies). We hence answer the question posed in the late twentieth century if the era of revolution ends with the spread of democracies. The analysis suggests that this will not happen in the foreseeable future. On the one hand, our analysis confirms that consolidated democracy is the most efficient mechanism preventing the emergence of any serious attempts to overthrow power via revolutionary means. However, on the other hand, less than a third of contemporary democracies are consolidated, whereas most of the twenty-first century democracies are partial (a third of which, in turn, are factional democracies); and, as our analysis suggests, revolutions are rather probable in partial democracies (and are even more probable in factional ones). In addition, full autocracies that start moving toward democracy and shifting to partial autocratic rule have increased risks of revolutionary destabilization, which explains why the contemporary global spread of democracy was associated with a rise — rather than a decline — of revolutionary activity. Also, as we find, revolutionary events, e. g., revolutionary movements without revolutions and analogues of revolutions, are quite possible in consolidated democracies. Finally, strong forms of revolutionary destabilization are quite possible in cases when consolidated democracy de-consolidates, which also suggests that the era of revolutions is not going to end in the foreseeable future.

The article aims to show the potential of the synthesis of Kondratiev’s concept of long cycles (waves), the theory of production (technological) revolutions, and the concept of the leading sectors and technological orders. Based on these theories, the article analyzes the contemporary cybernetic revolution that started in the 1950s and puts forward a prediction that the final phase of the cybernetic revolution will begin in the 2030s and that this final phase will merge with the sixth Kondratiev wave. The basis of the sixth technological order will be the complex of the leading technologies MANBRIC — medicine, additive technologies, nanotechnologies, robotics, IT, and cognitive technologies. Most of the technologies within this complex will be self-governing systems. One more important factor considered in the analysis is the global population ageing, which will have a significant impact on the development of technologies in the final phase of the cybernetic revolution and the sixth technological order. Global aging will spur the advancement of medical science and related fields and make medicine the most important integrating component of the emergent MANBRIC complex. It can be predicted that the upcoming final phase of the cybernetic revolution will be accompanied by the disappearance of K-waves and slowing down of the technological progress.

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to become one of the turning points in the transformation of the world order, as well as many political, social and other relations in the World System. Undoubtedly,...

One of the main accusations directed toward globalization is that it deepens the gap between the developed and developing countries dooming them to eternal backwardness. The article demonstrates that the actual situation is very different. It is shown that this is due to globalization that the developing countries are generally growing much faster than the developed states. The World System core starts weakening while its periphery gains strength. At the same time there is a continuing divergence between the main bulk of developing countries and the group of the poorest developing states. The article also explains why globalization was bound to lead to an explosive rise of many developing countries and relative weakening of the developed economies. In the forthcoming decades this trend is likely to continue (though, of course, not without certain interruptions). It is also demonstrated that this convergence constitutes a necessary condition for the ongoing and forthcoming change of political and power balance in the World System. We also show how and why it manifests itself in the US current and possible future policy.

Cyborgization is a hot topic these days. This is an intriguing process that is the subject of many futuristic novels and which at the same time takes place right before our eyes. In the present article we discuss the development of cyborgization, its place in Big History, its background and future directions, as well as the problems and risks of this interesting process. The authors are concerned about the question of whether the time will come when a person will mainly or completely consist not of biological, but of artificial material. The article also touches upon other problems and risks associated with future scientific and technological progress.

Previous studies have revealed a somewhat paradoxical strong positive correlation between per capita GDP and the intensity of anti-government demonstrations observed for the vast majority of countries (indeed, it turns out that the better people live, the more likely they are to join anti-government protests). The goal of this article is to identify possible causes of this unusual correlation. Our tests show that the processes of democratization and urbanization, as well as the expansion of formal education, are likely to be the main factors determining the positive relationship between per capita GDP and the intensity of antigovernment demonstrations, as urbanization, democratization, and expansion of education lead to an increase in the intensity of protests. Moreover, when controlling for these factors, the relationship between per capita GDP and anti-government protests becomes negative. Thus, high per capita GDP turns out to be a direct (proximate) significant negative factor affecting the intensity of anti-government demonstrations, but at thesame time it is an ultimate, even more significant positive factor in the intensity of protests. The growth of per capita GDP is quite naturally accompanied by an increase in the level of urbanization, democratization and education, which more than compensates for the direct inhibiting effect on the protests on the part of the growing per capita GDP (at least for low- and middle-income countries). In addition, the negative binomial regression model that we propose can explain not only the strong positive correlation between per capita GDP and the intensity of protests, which can be traced for a range of GDP per capita values of less than $20,000, but also the weaker negative correlation recorded for the range exceeding $20,000. The fact is that in rich countries urbanization, democratization and education indicators reach saturation levels and the vast majority of high-income countries have more or less similar levels for all three indicators. As a result, for a zone of per capita GDP values of more than $20,000, we are essentially dealing with automatic control of the correlation between GDP per capita and the intensity of protests for factors of democratization, education and urbanization, and, as our model predicts, the final effect of GDP per capita on the intensity of protests for high-income countries becomes negative, not positive.

Among many influences that the pandemic has and will have on society and the World System as a whole, one of the most important is the acceleration of the start of a new technological wave and a new technological paradigm in the near future. This impact is determined by the growing need for the development of a number of areas in medicine, bio- and nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and others, which we denote as “MANBRIC convergence”. It is shown that the experience of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed that the final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution will begin in the 2030s at the intersection of a number of medical, bio, digital and several other technologies, with medical needs as an integrating link. Among the multitude of self-regulating systems in the economy and life (which, in our opinion, will flourish during the Cybernetic Revolution) socio-technical self-regulating systems (SSSs) will play a special role. Thus, COVID-19 becomes a powerful impetus not only in terms of accelerating technological development and approaching the final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution, but also in changing sociopolitical (and socio-administrative) relations in the forthcoming decades.

Over a long period, the main intrigue within the current global contradiction has been the resistance of most of the world community to the growing egoism of the USA, which is not willing to consid...

In this chapter, we consider the process of technological progress presenting one of the options for measuring its speed throughout the entire historical process. We find that the general dynamics of accelerating technological growth over the past 40 thousand years can be described with amazing accuracy (R2 = 0.99) using the following simplest hyperbolic equation: yt = C/t0 − t, where yt is the technological growth rate measured as a number of technological phase transitions per unit of time. Although since 40,000 BP the speed of technological progress tended to generally increase, however, according to the theory of production principles on which we rely, the acceleration of technological progress had noticeable fluctuations. These fluctuations can be explained by the fact that technological development proceeded within the framework of super-long cycles. We show that, within these cycles, the phases of accumulation of basic breakthrough innovations are replaced by phases of rapid growth of improvements in basic innovations and their wide distribution. These fluctuations between cycle phases affect the pattern of acceleration of technological progress. Currently, there are a number of calculations of the point of singularity of the Big History and global evolution, which generally localize the singularity around the first half of the twenty-first century. The point of singularity in our calculations, if we rely only on historical time points, falls on 2018, that is, in principle, it fully fits the results of other studies. There is a fairly reasonable idea of slowing down a number of important social processes (such as demographic development, urbanization), including the speed of technological progress. Indeed, there are already some grounds for talking about signs of a slowdown in progress from the 1960 to 1970s. However, according to the theory of production principles, as already mentioned, there are strong fluctuations in the acceleration of technological progress. We assume that at the moment technological progress is in the fourth—the scientific and cybernetic—production principle. According to this theory, we expect a powerful acceleration of technological progress in the area between the 2030s and the 2070s. In this case, if we take into account the expected time points, the point of singularity, according to our calculations, is estimated to be around 2106. That is, with this method of calculation, we should first expect a new way of acceleration of technological progress, and then, its slowdown in the region of the end of the twenty-first century—the beginning of the 22nd. We also identify the social mechanism for such acceleration and deceleration: in the coming decades, the process of global ageing can cause technological acceleration first and change its direction, and then closer to the end of the present and the beginning of the next century, on the contrary, elderly society can be a brake on scientific-technological progress.

The present paper analyzes the evolution of technology from the beginning of human history. We introduce a new paradigm to analyze the causes and trends of the global evolution. We describe the direction of technological transformations and discuss and explain the present and forthcoming technological changes. We also present a detailed analysis of the latest technological revolution, which we denote as ‘Cybernetic,’ and give some forecasts about its development up to the end of the twenty-first century. It is shown that the expansion of various self-regulating systems will be the main trend of this revolution. We argue that the technological transition of the final phase of the Cybernetics revolution will start in medicine, which is to be the keystone of technological convergence forming the system of MANBRIC-technologies (based on medicine, additive, nano-, bio-, robotics, IT, and cognitive technologies). Today, we are at the threshold to the new era of unprecedented control of a human body, considerable life extension, organ replacement, brain–computer interfaces, robotics, genome editing, etc. The authors describe the mechanisms of technological development and discuss possible risks as well as the limits of post-human revolution.

The year 2017 marked not only the hundredth anniversary of the Revolution of 1917, but also the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation in Germany. It was just the Reformation that gave start to modern revolutions in Europe and the world. In the first part of the article we analyze the course of transformation of revolutions within historical process, in particular, how their world-historical role, the social bases, revolutionary ideologies, practices, and information technologies they applied have changed over the centuries. Then we show the important changes that occurred in revolutionary practice and the very understanding of the essence of revolution due to great revolutions. In the second part of the article we highlight some issues related to the theory of revolution, in particular, he defines the types of revolutions starting from religious to modernizing revolutions, and also points some important conditions for the revolutionary outbreak. In conclusion, we consider how and why the revolutions have been increasingly used as a geopolitical weapon.

The modern deflationary phenomena in the western and global economy are attributed to the fact that currently it is at the downward phase of the fifth long K-wave. Deflation has always been typical for the depressive periods in economy; presently it also manifests itself as the world economy has turned global, yet it lacks any control mechanisms. The authors suppose that a new economic crisis will break out in the western economy in the second half of 2018–2019 and that the depressive and deflationary trends will continue for another number of years.