A World Run Aground
Reflections from The Ideas Letter
A discomfiting, heterodox response to our era of polycrisis, seeking to inspire questions and deepen our understanding of world affairs.
Description
Have we returned to a world where states have primacy, where ethnicity and ethnonationalism hold significant sway, and where global cooperation is being dramatically reorientated? The relative decline of America is a major factor in this dynamic, but so too is the renewed role of China, India and Brazil on the international stage.
Emanating from the Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundations, A World Run Aground brings together sharp, often heterodox analyses of pressing global issues. It covers a wide range of topics, including the current condition of global political economics, liberalism and democracy (and their future); the state of the Anthropocene; and the perils and contradictions of artificial intelligence. Rather than trying to convince readers of right and wrong, to push a particular policy position or ideological hobby horse, the contributors offer a big-tent set of perspectives and critical takes on contemporary issues—without demanding that readers take sides. In a volume that rejects politics based on divisive party lines, more questions are raised than answered.
With contributions from Quinn Slobodian, Iza Ding, Kaiser Kuo, Evgeny Morozov, Basharat Peer, Nesrine Malik, Ivan Krastev and others, this is a thought-provoking new look at today’s turbulent world.
Table of contents
AGAINST THE CURRENT
1. Human Rights on the Edge, Nicholas Bequelin
2. Is It All About Power?: A Response to “Human Rights on the Edge”, LuHan Gabel
3. Further Thoughts: A Rejoinder to LuHan Gabel, Nicholas Bequelin
First Principles, Aryeh Neier
4. The Moral Economy of the Far Right, Miri Davidson
5. The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn From China, Kaiser Kuo
6. A New Dependency Theory Moment, Marcos Nobre
7. Why Identity is Failing—and Can’t be Abandoned, Tessy Schlosser
8. Social Democracy After Class?, Bhaskar Sunkara
9. Social Democracy, Immigration, and the Working Class, Sohrab Ahmari
10. The 2024 Nobel Laureates Are Not Only Wrong About China, but Also About the West, Yuen Yuen Ang
11. Disaster Capitalism Revisited Isabella M. Weber
12. The New Legislators of Silicon Valley Evgeny Morozov
13. Intellectual Historians Confront the Present: An Interview with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Leonard Benardo
PLACES
14. An Inescapable Past Shehryar Fazli
15. Sudan and the Silence of the Activists, Nesrine Malik
16. Goodbye, Gibbon, Iza Ding
17. India and America: A Certain Ambivalence, Basharat Peer
18. Peronism Now, Jordana Timerman
19. Tunisia: When Obsolete Anti-imperialism Kills Democracy, Nadia Marzouki
MEDITATIONS
20. Flights of the Intelligentsia, Leonid Ragozin
21. My New York Intellectuals, Tomiwa Owolade
22. Writing from the Vortex of War, Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq
23. Lasching Out, Soli Özel
24. Rethinking Foreign Aid (From the Inside), Almut Rochowanski
25. Malaparte!, Gary Indiana
26. The Return of the Future and the Last Man: An Interview with Ivan Krastev, Carlos Bravo Regidor
Editor(s)
Leonard Benardo is Senior Vice President of the Open Society Foundations and Director of its Ideas Workshop. His intellectual background is in Eurasian geopolitics and society, though his interests span all continents. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and Prospect, among others.
Related books
