The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict

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A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR’Compulsively readable… An essential course in geopolitical self-help’ – Adam Tooze’Full of fresh – and often surprising – ideas’ – Niall Ferguson’Extraordinary… One of those rare books that defines the terms of our conversation about our times’ – Michael IgnatieffWe 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 of making 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 full-blown war in eastern Europe. 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 the theatre of conflict expands to include sanctions, cyberwar and the threat of large migrant flows.As a leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard has been inside many of the rooms where our futures, at every level of society, are being decided – 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 wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

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