Nils Gilman

The nation-state is an existential liability. Clinging to 17th-century borders while facing 21st-century biological collapse is a necro-political suicide pact. To survive, we must transition from Westphalian diplomacy to Planetary Realism.

Building on his 2024 book Children of a Modest Star, Nils Gilman's project at the IWM aims to describe a world order based on the principle of 'planetary subsidiarity' that treats the biosphere as a non-negotiable security domain. This framework proposes functionally specific governance authorities with mandatory, coercive jurisdiction over border-defying issues like carbon emissions, pandemic risk remediation, and space junk. These should not merely be advisory bodies; they should be institutional 'circuit breakers' designed to override national sovereignty when state actions threaten planetary persistence. This is not a proposal for a world-government utopia; it is a cold-blooded strategic pivot to create a sovereignty-overriding institutional architecture oriented toward biological survival.