Author: Dr. Faridul Alam

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…

The takeaway from the COP 30 UN Climate Conference is stark and unsettling. While the world celebrated a geopolitical pivot — a redistribution of global influence toward the Global South — it simultaneously capitulated to a planetary crisis it consistently refuses to confront. Concluding in Belém, Brazil, on November 22, 2025, COP 30 was hailed as a moment for the climate conversation to return to the Amazon, the lungs of the planet. Yet beneath this rhetoric lies an unambiguous truth: global pivoting is not the same as planetary protection. The tension between these narratives reveals the profound failure of contemporary climate governance. This…

The G-20 Summit convening in Johannesburg marks more than a shifting diplomatic geography; it represents a radical redrawing of the world’s political cartography. For over a century, global power has been mapped — literally and metaphorically — through an epistemology anchored in the United States and Western Europe. The cartographic imagination that once naturalized the idea of “America’s backyard” now falters. A polycentric world is emerging, driven not by a singular hegemon but by multiple overlapping sovereignties, histories, and trajectories. South Africa’s leadership of the G-20 symbolizes this transition: a repositioning of global coordinates in which the United States is…

The United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) 30, currently convening in Belém, Brazil, from November 10 through 21, without the United States — the world’s largest cumulative emitter and a historical pivot of climate diplomacy — signals more than a diplomatic rupture. It exposes a structural disorientation: the institutions, frameworks, and economic logics underpinning global climate governance remain misaligned with the planetary realities they aim to regulate. COP 30 thus becomes not merely a summit missing a hegemon but a site in search of a new conceptual and political center. Brazil, eager to assert environmental stewardship and Global South leadership, may…

The public sphere is more than streets, parks, or university halls — it is the stage upon which democracy’s vitality is displayed. Jürgen Habermas’s seminal concept of the public sphere frames it as an autonomous domain where citizens engage in rational-critical debate, forming public opinion independent of both state coercion and market manipulation. In Habermas’s vision, democracy’s legitimacy rests on the “unforced force of the better argument,” where truth emerges not from power but from reasoned deliberation. The public sphere is not merely a forum for expression — it is the moral and intellectual foundation of democratic life, a site…