Author: Dr. Faridul Alam

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…

The accelerating rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is more than a technological shift — it is a civilizational paradigm shift without historical precedent. Much of today’s debate focuses on economics: which jobs will disappear, which new ones will emerge, and how productivity gains might be distributed. Yet the deeper story is sociological. AI does not merely change what we do for a living; it reimagines the very meaning of work, solidarity, and social identity. Obviously, work has always been more than survival; it has been the medium through which people find dignity and social belonging. To appreciate the…

When the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, they embodied a rare global metanarrative, infused with the Enlightenment ambitions of reason, progress, and moral responsibility. Seventeen goals, 169 targets — poverty eradicated, inequality reduced, the planet saved — promised measurable solutions through collective effort. They offered not just technical benchmarks but a sweeping story of shared purpose, a belief that globalization could inspire cooperation across borders to deliver a fairer and more sustainable world. A decade later, that story has begun to fray. The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 hastened the…