The Age of Unpeace

How Connectivity Causes Conflict

De: Mark Leonard

Narrado por: Mark Leonard

Brought to you by Penguin.

We 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 integrating the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope that it would make war impossible. In doing so, they have unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of conflict and the motivation to keep fighting. Rising tensions in global politics are not a bump in the road - they are part of the paving.

Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to stand-offs between nation states. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US and China, an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change or pandemic response and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as overseas troops are replaced by sanctions, cyberwar and the threat of large migrant flows.

As a leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard's work has taken him into many of the rooms where our futures are being decided at every level of society, from the Facebook HQ and facial recognition labs in China to meetings in presidential palaces and at remote military installations. In seeking to understand the ways that globalisation has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, Leonard explores how we might wrestle a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

©2021 Mark Leonard (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Insightful

This book was delightful. It altered my thinking on how the world is reshaping and the forces behind those changes.

Easy breakdown of geopolitics a new world order of connectivity

Really enjoyed listening to this book and broken down complex geopolitical factors into east to understand concepts.

Gripping Account of Fallout from Globalization

The Age of Unpeace is a book about big ideas, most important among them the turmoil that has been generated by global interconnectivity. Its thesis is that interconnectivity was expected to bring us all closer together, but in so doing it has generated a multitude of conflicts. Unfortunately, the thesis is often submerged in the stream of these endless challenges, which range from populism to asymmetrical warfare, inequality to the competition for geopolitical power. The book does a great job of bringing readers up to date with the global challenges it elaborates on, and it does so with an easy going flare that many readers will find appealing, but it touches on them in such a cursory manner that most readers will probably forget many of them as soon as they move on to the next. Unfortunately, the author often fails to make a link between the issues he is raising and his central premise, which he often fails to back up with solid arguments. 



For instance, readers are told about a rightwing populism that has plagued every major region of the world, which is linked to interconnectivity. Yet, there is little effort to get at the nature of their relationship. Has interconnectivity caused inequality or just made it more apparent, and is the rightwing populism a reaction to inequality or globalization? If it is a reaction to inequality, what does that have to do with globalization, and if it is a reaction to globalization, why are some people reacting with nationalism and others with greater openness? The answers to these sorts of questions are hinted at but never answered or elaborated on with much depth, and the end result is a well written book grappling with important global challenges that all too often feels sensationalistic. 



The style will be familiar to readers of Thomas Friedman’s classic, The World is Flat—a caricatured book that was actually packed with a multitude of great ideas. But while its racy style is similar to many of the globalization classics from around the turn of the millennium, this book is in many ways a sequel to the era that might have been titled “The Morning After Globalization.” The problem is that whereas these early texts brought to globalization a naive optimism, The Age of Unpeace all too often seems to counter it with a naive pessimism. It is not the kind of cynicism that one often finds on the far-left, and the author does not shrink from offering a range of intelligent solutions in the final pages of the book. But all too often, the book seems to lack moral purpose. 



Like it or not, we are all now living in a globally interconnected world many of whose greatest challenges are global. And meeting these challenges will require global thinking, global commitments, global institutions, and probably some measure of global identities. Meanwhile, as it has been repeatedly shown in one study after another, the supporters of rightwing populists are all too often not the losers of the new global economy but rather its winners bent on holding onto their privileges. In this way, the author seems to yield too much to the anti-globalists, that is until the final pages of the book, where he leaves the reader with a brilliant series of solutions.



Perhaps the best that could be said about this book is that, while serious commentators the world over have been grappling with the nationalist reaction to globalization in recent years, few have been so explicit in seeking an explanation in interconnectivity itself. And this makes what might otherwise appear an uneven work, which is at one and the same time well written and cursory, an important meditation on our times. I say this as the author of a trilogy of books on globalization, who has struggled in each book to contain the immensity of its subject matter. Hence, it is good to read a book like this in dialectic with other recent works coming to terms with the fallout from globalization, like Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger; Hassan Damluji’s The Responsible Globalist; Ivan Krastev’s The Light That Failed; Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; and Peter Singer’s One World.



~ Theo Horesh, author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind

Great central insight, backed with nice overview

It is illuminating, broad in scope, up to the minute (OK, some of the very latest 2022 stuff is not here), and well-paced. A person diligently following current events and thinking a lot about it could get this overall view, but I find this author's recap of it all helpful. There is a good mix of leader portraits, history, law and technology. This viewpoint is very timely, and deserves a hearing. There is enough historical perspective to make a lot of sense of things -- worrying as they may be. It helps to coolly consider all views and voices in the conflicts breaking out.