The liberal international order is dead—and no one should mourn its passing, for in so many ways it has revealed itself as unfit for the challenges of our time. While its present undertakers dream of recreating the old sovereigntist order of the 19th century, any functionally relevant successor must and will be a planetary order whose lodestars are ecological survival and planetary habitability. On the one hand, the computational base of this new order will be a mature global technosphere that both monitors biogeochemical cycles in real-time and links together a decentralized mesh of resilient local hubs. On the other hand, unsentimental bean-counters will hard-code planetary dangers into global credit risk and insurance premiums, regardless of the preferences of superannuated sovereigns. This combination of enforced transparency and decentralized economic coercion represents the material basis for a new global order based on a model of multiscalar governance that treats planetary stability as a non-negotiable security requirement.
Nils Gilman is an intellectual historian and futurist whose primary philosophical concern is our ‘planetary’ condition. After a career spent inside the engines of institutional power—from the senior administration of U.C. Berkeley to leadership of the Berggruen Institute—Gilman’s work now focuses on the present death throes of the nation-state, and what an adequate successor global order may look like. He is the author of the field-defining Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and most recently Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford University Press, 2024), which proposes a radical new architecture for global governance.
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will introduce the lecture and moderate the subsequent discussion.
