The Age of Unpeace
by Mark Leonard
ISBN 13: 978-0552178273
Book description

A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR'Compulsively readable... An essential course in geopolitical self-help' - Adam Tooze'Full of fresh - and often surprising - ideas' - Niall Ferguson'Extraordinary... One of those rare books that defines the terms of our conversation about our times' - Michael IgnatieffWe thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart.In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been working to create a connected world. They've integrated the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope of making war impossible. In doing so, they unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of warfare.Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to full-blown war in eastern Europe. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US, Russia and China; an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change and pandemic response; and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as the theatre of conflict expands to include sanctions, cyberwar and the pressures of large migrant flows.A leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard lays out the ways that globalization has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, and explores how we might wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.


Recommended on 1 episode:

Putin May Not Like How He’s Changed Europe
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed Europe within a matter of weeks. A continent once fractured by the refugee crisis is now taking in millions of refugees. Countries such as Germany have made considerable pledges to increase military spending. The European Union said it would cut off Russian oil and gas “well before 2030” — a once unthinkable prospect. The European project seems more confident in itself than at any other time in recent history. But some European countries are also seeing trends in the opposite direction. This month in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s nationalist government won re-election easily. The far-right leader Marine Le Pen lost this past weekend’s French presidential election to the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, but secured a significant 41.5 percent of the vote, up from 33.9 percent in 2017. And nationalist movements — Brexit in Britain, the Five Star Movement in Italy and others — have become potent political forces in recent years. So what’s next for Europe? Will Putin’s invasion reinvigorate the collective European project? Or will the continent revert to its preinvasion path of fracture, division and nationalism? Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria and the author of numerous books, including “After Europe” and, with Stephen Holmes, “The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy.” He’s also one of my favorite people to talk to on the subject of Europe, liberalism, democracy and the tensions therein. We discuss how European identity went from revolving around war to being centered on economic trade, why Europe has treated the Ukrainian refugee crisis so differently from previous refugee crises, how the West’s overly economic understanding of human motivation blinded it to Putin’s plans, what the relative success of politicians like Le Pen and Orban means for the future of Europe, how fears of demographic change can help explain phenomena as different as Putin’s invasion and Donald Trump’s election, whether Putin’s invasion can reawaken an exhausted European liberalism and much more.
by @zachbellay