New Cold War at Sea?
About the Seminar: For centuries, the world’s dominant power has been the state that wielded the world’s dominant navy. More recently, globalization has been remade, as a sea-based trade—85% of all global trade moves by sea. As does nearly 2/3rds of the world trade in oil and gas, while 93% of all data in the world moves along undersea cables that line the ocean floor. The oceans are vital, too, to our changing climate. All of which highlights the drama of China’s return to the high seas, and its rapid maritime and naval build-up. The net result: a new arms race, centered in the Western Pacific but reaching out into the Arctic and the Indian Oceans, and pulling in Russia, India, Japan and Europe. Bruce Jones, author of To Rule the Waves, will explore how our security, our prosperity, and our environment are being reshaped by the dynamics of sea power.
About the Speaker:
Bruce Jones is a senior fellow and director of the project on international order and strategy at the Brookings Institution. The author or co-author of several books on international order, his most recent work is “To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers”.
Online, via Zoom.
There are several considerations of the papacy’s vision of what global politics should be like. There are, however, few mappings of the papacy’s actual concept of global politics, of how it evaluates the current state of global politics, understood as global political, social, and economic trends, patterns, actors and their relationships. This article delineates Pope Francis’ conception of global politics and contextualises it within the papacy’s trajectory of participating in global politics. Attending to a particular concept, of how the pope thinks about global politics, helps to better understand and place the papacy in the study of global politics. The article shows how Francis conceptualises global politics from below, from the periphery of society and politics, which leads him to unmask global inequalities. In particular, the article illustrates that Francis contests widespread assumptions of central hierarchic interstate relations and individualism, dominating the conceptual discourse about global politics.
