Forward looking glodal trends analysis - A literature review

The Swedish Armed Forces aim to improve their foresight analysis within their long term defence planning. In order to achieve the objective, this study's ambition is to draw lesson from other actors who conduct foresight studies in the security field. For this purpose a literature review and an in-depth analysis of two selected foresight studies were conducted. Out of 50 identified reports and articles 19 fulfilled the set criteria. Most of the identified foresight studies were produced by governments in the West. This is of a particular interest for the Swedish Armed Forces since trends and challenges that affects European countries also directly or indirectly affects Sweden. However, this creates a risk of recycling of information. Another issue is that the studies rarely describe their methodology, making it difficult to evaluate the scientific grounds on which the analysis is based. These issues should be regarded in the development of future foresight analyses, as well as supplemented with other methods to collect additional information. The literature review and the in-depth analysis also show a large variation in both the work process and focus in the analyses. In the end, the level of ambition should be based on available resources (financial conditions, time, participants' methodological skills and subject knowledge). It is important to develop a systematic work pro