89 Seconds to Midnight: Where Next For The World?

Advancing a New Paradigm for Global Politics in the Anthropocene

Contemporary (geo)politics have taken on a new existential flavour; indeed, our’s are uniquely perilous times characterised by a multitude of converging crises. The context of global politics has thus degenerated into an acutely unstable and impotent concert of actors, institutions and interconnected problematics that threaten the order of the world that we have become accustomed to. That very order – of ecological stability, economic growth and great power peace – is visibly decaying and on the verge of collapse. 

Between the dawn of the new millennium and the present, a series of blunders have extinguished the optimism that inaugurated the new millennium: the revival of Cold War-era tensions, wherein Western and Eastern blocs are squaring off in contest of the hegemony of the world’s political-economic architecture, with worrying trends for multilateralism; unprecedented economic degenerations, which have produced a crisis of democratic legitimacy, the (not coincidental) rise of fascist ideology and the fraying of the social contract; the emergence of AI and the associated redundancy of the international community to regulate it; and climate change, “the defining challenge of our time” (Ban Ki-moon, 2014). Seen in this comparative light, the first 25 years of the new millennium have been disastrous; the global political arena has atrophied to become more hostile, uncooperative and impotent. We have blundered our way back to an existential inflection point. 

These issues are often conceptualised as being mutually exclusive and isolated phenomena, constituting a failure to adequately portray their fundamentally interconnected nature and the way they manifest as crises. The world has evolved apace, but our theories have been inert; we are thus viewing world politics through antiquated lenses that blind us to the perils of the present and near future, preventing us from internalising the necessary urgency to address them. It is now incumbent on the epistemic community to develop a theoretical paradigm that accords with the evolved nature of global politics and the attendant existential crises facing it. We must, moreover, turn back time on the Doomsday Clock. 

The Revival of Geopolitics? Framing the World

‘Geopolitics’ is a term familiar to all students of politics, comprising one of the various fields of study relevant to the discipline. It has not, however, been a mainstay; its relevance has fluctuated in confluence with global events. It saw it heyday after both WWI and II, where geopolitics – along with realism – were the primary theoretical lenses through which the world was conceptualised. Coined by Swedish social scientist Rudolf Kjellen in 1900 and elaborated in his 1917 work Der Staat als Lebensform (The State as a Living Form), geopolitics refers “to the way geographic factors and the uneven allocation of natural resources around the world affect global politics” (Almqvist & Linklater, 2022: 9). 

Contemporarily, we are witness to an explicit revival of geopolitics and realism as a useful lens, despite the supposed eternal triumph of liberalism following the Cold War. The evidence for geopolitics constituting a critical pillar of statecraft is increasingly visible. The United States, for instance, has mused about annexing Canada, Greenland and Panama, the logic of which is solely strategic. Meanwhile, the audible backdrop of the drumbeat of war has returned, wherein states and broader alliances are warring increasingly, mainly through proxies – see Ukraine-Russia and the Middle East. The pre-eminent currency of world politics has thus once again devolved into states and alliances fighting to shape the order of the world along political, economic and military lines. 

Despite many parallels, this is not the geopolitics arena of the Cold War; it has mutated and exists in a context with unique crises and idiosyncrasies. While the revival of geopolitics as a lens provides utility, it cannot be employed as it was during the twentieth century. The advent of new phenomena without precedent – climate change, the crisis of political legitimacy, economic stagnation, major technological ruptures – makes the contemporary context acutely dangerous and demanding of an entirely new theoretical paradigm.

Refocusing Priorities: Incorporating The Climate Crisis

Previously, conceptualisations of international relations and global security matters have been largely impervious to environmental and climatic considerations. This is fundamentally arbitrary: the climate crisis constitutes an unparalleled existential challenge that is to inaugurate a new geological epoch; an effective paradigm must, therefore, expand its ontology to address this. 

Currently, climate and environment have been peripheral to the global political agenda and largely to academia, illuminating a source of dereliction with enormous implications for the practice of politics. If we are to meet the challenges of the present and future, we must make the climate crisis a foundational pillar of our politics. Failure to do so will see the Doomsday Clock tick closer to midnight.