The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

The system of nation-states is in convulsion. As American hegemony unwinds, anxious Western countries slide into xenophobia and debt. Liberal institutions are losing their prestige; autocracies like China, Russia, and the UAE are rising. The global political order offers human beings ever fewer securities, and ever more threats.

Award-winning novelist and commentator Rana Dasgupta joins us to explore the story of nation states, and share his insights into why they are failing today.

He will take us from the fall of ancient empires and the expansion of European concepts of money and law, right up to the emergence of twenty-first-century tech firms, which present formidable competition to nation-states, and the epochal restoration of Chinese power. And most important of all: he will share his ideas for what we need to do next.

Rana Dasgupta has lived in the United States, India, and France. His work includes Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of contemporary…