This article examines Russian national future thinking during the war in Ukraine. It views future thinking as a form of mediated action that is dependent on narrative tools and explores the structure and function of various types of narratives that play a role, including schematic narrative templates and national narrative projects. The first section of the article goes into conceptual issues on plot, the sense of an ending and other features of narrative logic that assign meaning to events. The second part of the article goes into how these issues play a role in shaping Russian ideas about the war in Ukraine. Using sources such as Russian social media, we examine how the narratives used by Putin and widely accepted by the broader population have changed over the course of the war in Ukraine. After initially focusing on denazification and other issues specific to Ukraine, the Russian narrative has moved on to more established and general themes about existential threats from military threats and alien ideas from the West. To recognize what has changed and what has not, we harness the notion of a national narrative project, which is an underlying code in the form of a national autobiography for Russia. The sense of an ending for this national narrative template has religious overtones and a telos about redemption that follows suffering. It is narrative with a sense of an ending in the future, which means using it has the future and future thinking built into it.

British Cold War government bunkers were built to preserve state authority after a nuclear attack, but the catastrophe they anticipated never occurred. This article argues that they are infrastructures of suspended crisis: material systems organised around an event that did not arrive and therefore shaped by a temporality of the not yet. Drawing on Derrida’s hauntology, it reads the bunker as a site where an expected disaster remains active as a ghost, continuing to organise present perception and interpretation. These sites do not store memory of an actual catastrophe. Rather, they preserve the afterlife of institutional rehearsal, including plans, routines, and spatial arrangements designed for an imagined aftermath. Bringing futures studies into dialogue with memory studies, the article shows how bunkers can hold latent cultural memory and trauma-like orientations without an originating disaster. The argument is based on fieldwork at Kelvedon Hatch and Barnton Quarry, supported by 3D LiDAR scanning, point cloud processing, and visualisation. The resulting uncertainty images are treated not as neutral records or scientific revelation, but as practice-led critical media. Their continuity, occlusion, instability, partial viewpoints, and micro-temporality of capture register gaps in knowledge and the atmosphere of anticipatory governance. At a moment of renewed nuclear anxiety and resilience planning, Cold War bunkers return again as templates for imagining future crisis in public culture today. The article shows how collective future thinking can be organised around what never happened, and offers a practice-based method for demonstrating how unrealised threats still act in the present.

Rather than treating popular feature films as predictions of technological futures, this article approaches them as widely circulating cultural texts through which ideas about AI, authority, violence, memory, and evidence become available for public interpretation. It analyses films that place artificial intelligence (AI) in war, violent conflict, or post-conflict recovery, asking how such films shape what counts as memory and evidence in imagined futures. Using an IMDb search, we build a high-visibility corpus and select a balanced core sample of ten films with explicit rules on conflict salience, franchise concentration, and diversity. We code each title for: future configuration and normative closure, AI’s dominant role in conflict (belligerent agent, infrastructure, mediator, or victim), anticipatory mood and control imaginaries, and the memory practices foregrounded (archives and logs, biometrics, testimony, simulation, erasure, and mind upload). Most films depict dystopian futures, yet they often extend present-day security and platform arrangements rather than invent wholly new orders. Across the sample, AI most often appears as infrastructure, and control is repeatedly framed as control of the record: who can collect, authenticate, edit, and replay logs, surveillance feeds, biometrics, and synthetic reconstructions. These narrative choices reshape evidence, accountability, and the imagined conditions of repair after violence. Endings commonly restore governability through selective visibility and strategic silence, narrowing what must be publicly acknowledged. We argue that AI–conflict cinema links anticipation to struggles over proof, making certain forms of exceptional rule and post-conflict settlement feel plausible.

The End of History Illusion refers to a phenomenon where people perceive themselves as having changed in the past, but do not anticipate changing in the future. Does this illusion occur when people think about the groups they belong to? We had two samples of 1,000 Americans (in 2022 and 2025) rate how much either they or the United States has changed in the last 10 years or will change in the next 10 years. Additionally, participants rated how well things were going in their lives or in the country and how much conflict the United States was experiencing. In both samples, people displayed a collective End of History Illusion; they perceived the United States as having changed more in the past than it would in the future. Additionally, people who thought the country was in a good place anticipated less future change, and people who thought the country was experiencing high levels of conflict provided higher estimates of collective change in the past and future. Notably, participants perceived the United States to be experiencing more change in 2025 compared to 2022, but still showed a collective EOHI, suggesting the illusion is robust regardless of the sociopolitical moment. We suggest that both the personal and collective EOHI may be driven by fluency and self-enhancement tendencies that prefer how things are in the moment. Understanding how people perceive their nation’s tendency to change or not contributes to understanding collective memory and collective future thinking.