Author: Dr. Faridul Alam

For decades, the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit has presented itself as the nerve center of global governance — a rarefied stage where political leaders, corporate magnates, technocrats, and intellectuals converge to “improve the state of the world.” In its self-imagination, Davos has served as both a mirror and a motor of the liberal international order, diagnosing crises, narrating futures, and forging elite consensus. Its authority has depended less on formal mandate than on performative legitimacy, sustained by the belief that proximity to power, expertise, and capital can substitute for democratic accountability. Yet the contemporary moment reveals a harsher truth:…

At first glance, the phrase, “history of the present,” appears oxymoronic. History implies distance; the present seems too proximate, unsettled, and unfinished to be rendered historical. Yet for Michel Foucault, this apparent contradiction names the very task of critique. A history of the present does not proceed chronologically, narrating events in linear succession. It works genealogically, tracing how contingent practices, power relations, and regimes of knowledge have sedimented into what now appears natural, necessary, or inevitable. The question is not simply what happened, but how the present has been organized as it is — as a happenstance rather than a…

Since the end of World War II, the United States has presented itself — and cultivated a modest popular perception — as the self-styled arbiter of the global order, a nation that underwrites a rules-based system of diplomacy, trade, and security, even as the invocation of American exceptionalism — with its ideological throwback to Manifest Destiny — routinely exempts it from the very norms it claims to defend. Through the exercise of this postwar dominance, often described as Pax Americana, the United States has projected itself as guarantor of global stability while shaping international norms to align with its strategic…

We stand at the threshold of a transformation as profound as the Industrial Revolution — a moment that once tethered citizenship, dignity, and social belonging to participation in industrial labor. Today, we confront what might be called the Great Unbinding: a systemic rupture in which the moral, civic, and institutional frameworks linking work, value, and social cohesion are unraveling under the weight of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this new era, we are moving toward a post-labor economy, where machines and algorithms increasingly perform cognitive, administrative, and creative work once assumed to be uniquely human. Economic productivity is being decoupled from…

For much of the post–Cold War era, Africa occupied a paradoxical space in global discourse: hyper-visible in humanitarian imagery, policy briefs, and development reportage, yet absent from the geopolitical imaginary. Its visibility was shaped by the racializing, touristic gaze bell hooks critiqued in the Writing Culture cover — one that aestheticized Black and non-Western subjects while preserving Western epistemic hierarchies. Popular media such as National Geographic reinforced this optic, exoticizing landscapes and peoples into consumable images rather than political interlocutors, staging Africa as an object of administration and pity rather than as a site of thought, contestation, or strategy. This…

The architecture of global power, painstakingly constructed in the post-World War II era, is fracturing under the weight of its own contradictions and the rise of new aspirants. At the epicenter of this seismic shift stands BRICS+, an expanded coalition of emerging economies that is no longer content with merely participating in the existing system but is actively engaged in its recalibration. From its origins as a dialogue forum for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, BRICS has metamorphosed into BRICS+, welcoming Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. This strategic enlargement is not a simple arithmetic…

NATO finds itself at a rare strategic inflection point — not on the brink of spectacular collapse, but teetering on the edge of a slow and insidious drift that, if left unchecked, could hollow out its purpose and reduce it to a relic of a bygone civilizational project. This drift does not appear as a dramatic rupture or overt irrelevance; it emerges through incremental recalibrations of commitment, subtle rhetorical downgrades, and strategic retrenchments that cumulatively threaten to transform a once-cohesive alliance into a contingent arrangement of convenience. Alliances on NATO’s scale rarely collapse abruptly. They erode gradually, almost imperceptibly, yet…

The United States’ latest National Security Strategy (NSS) portrays Europe as facing a “stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. This characterization reads less like strategic analysis than a deliberate invocation of alarm, designed to conjure anxieties at variance with empirical evidence. Why does Washington need Europe to appear imperiled to reveal its own position in the world? Why must Europe be cast as fragile, a perennial “other,” to reinforce America’s self-image as indispensable? This rhetoric signals a profound shift in American strategic discourse — from sober geopolitical assessment to civilizational melodrama. The story it tells is not about Europe but about America’s psychological…

The paradox of contemporary geopolitics is that Russia — weakened by sanctions, demographic decline, and a grinding war it cannot decisively win, much to its own mounting chagrin — has nevertheless emerged as one of the most effective provocateurs of American primacy. Putin’s Russia succeeds not through the glow of conclusive victory but through the grind of effective attrition, converting setbacks into leverage rather than strength into success. In this sense, Russia is winning by losing: its failures expose the fragility of American hegemony, the exhaustion of Western political will, and the erosion of the epistemic foundations that once sustained…

The concept of a “post-American world” is no longer a clever moniker or a provocative book title — it is fast becoming a lived global reality. From wars Washington cannot decisively win to alliances it can no longer easily marshal, the once-unipolar world is giving way to fragmentation, recalibration, and the steady erosion of American primacy. Jeffrey D. Sachs, leading economist and professor at Columbia University, characterizes this transformation as the outcome of “strategic overreach and structural blindness” — a pattern he has documented extensively. His argument is simple yet powerful: American power faltered not only because rivals rose, but…