"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Where is the world heading? What choices need to be made to help humanity to thrive? These questions are more acute than ever in a context of growing inequalities, populism, social disorder, environmental challenges, and global health threats.The Future of the Global Order explores the six fundamental transformations ahead that will define the future of the world in the next three decades. Each chapter provides a unique and fact-based analysis of the situation at hand, reviews underlying uncertainties, and studies their inter-dependencies. As a tool to trigger debate, the book provides possible evolutions in global activity with four baseline scenarios, grasping the key issues which will shape the global order to 2050.Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the massive forces of global change at play and the key decisions facing the future of humanity and the world.

"In The New World Order contributors discuss an alternative value system to that of the market-led corporate global agenda. This system does not directly challenge corporate globalization but operates in parallel with it, creating new possibilities. The authors expose the threats posed by the New World Order and propose a more positive way of dealing with the future." -- BACK COVER.

A sweeping account of the rise and evolution of liberal internationalism in the modern era For two hundred years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism’s long journey from its nineteenth-century roots to today’s fractured political moment. Creating an international “space” for liberal democracy, preserving rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence—these are the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry argues that in a twenty-first century marked by rising economic and security interdependence, liberal internationalism—reformed and reimagined—remains the most viable project to protect liberal democracy.