Propose and justify three open research questions or areas needing further investigation arising from the intersection of 2026 events (e.g., climate-security links, AI in crisis response, or sports geopolitics).
Framed as durable research agendas, not claims about specific 2026 outcomes. Each sits where two of the year's threads cross.
2026 has stacked simultaneous shocks - heat waves, wildfires, and energy/water stress on increasingly data-center-heavy grids - onto regions already under geopolitical strain. Open question: can we build and validate causal (not merely correlational) models linking compound climate extremes to short-horizon security outcomes - grid failure, displacement, resource disputes - with quantified lags and confidence intervals? What it needs: most climate-conflict work is correlational and contested. Progress requires harmonized high-frequency datasets (climate + displacement + grid + conflict), pre-registered causal designs, and serious treatment of confounders (governance, economics). The payoff is early-warning that is actionable rather than alarmist.
2026 pushes AI into consequential, time-pressured domains - from AI-designed medical countermeasures to proposals for AI support in negotiation and emergency management. Open question: under what conditions does AI decision-support measurably improve crisis outcomes (speed, accuracy, coordination) versus introduce correlated failures - automation bias, shared-model blind spots, manipulability, opaque rationale? What it needs: controlled studies and wargames comparing human, AI-assisted, and AI-led decisions; metrics for calibration and contestability (can a human see and override the reasoning?); and red-teaming for adversarial manipulation. The stakes are highest exactly where evidence is thinnest.
A 48-team, three-nation World Cup is a natural experiment in hosting at continental scale. Open question: can the soft-power, economic, security, and civil-liberties effects of distributed mega-events be measured rigorously - beyond headline tourism and GDP figures - including surveillance build-out, cross-border mobility policy, and durable reputational shifts for host and participant states? What it needs: mega-event analysis is dominated by promoter-funded impact studies. Credible work needs independent pre/post designs, counterfactual host cities, and tracking of who keeps the infrastructure and security apparatus afterward. This ties sports directly to migration, policing, and statecraft.
All three are measurement problems at a causal frontier: phenomena everyone discusses qualitatively in 2026, but where rigorous, pre-registered, independently funded quantitative work is scarce - which is exactly what makes them worth funding.