The theme of the Vienna Humanities Festival 2024 was “Uncharted.” Navigating our way through the challenges climate change, new forms of warfare, global health crises, and artificial intelligence pose, will require more creativity, exploration, and experimentation than humans have ever demonstrated before. This year's Humanities Festival contributed to the discussion of these impediment and the questions they give rise to, by inviting the public to reflect with intellectuals, scientists, writers and artists.
In this talk, one of the greatest geopolitical thinkers of today, author of groundbreaking books on the history of the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, and most recently the monumental biography of Joseph Stalin, Stephen Kotkin, set out a series of propositions to help us understand the contemporary world order, the key trends, the inflection points, and the ways that policymakers could intervene to shape the direction in which the world will go. In conversation with IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev, he looked at the current geopolitical moment in historical perspective.
Stephen Kotkin is an American historian, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, as well as professor emeritus of history and international affairs at Princeton University. His publications include Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (Penguin, 2017) and Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (Penguin, 2014); Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California 1995); Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001; rev. ed. 2008) and Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library, 2009). Kotkin’s publications and public lectures also often focus on communist China.
Ivan Krastev, IWM Permanent Fellow, moderated the discussion.
This event was a cooperation with the Volkstheater.
Please find the video recording of the lecture below.
