Robert Muggah is a co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group and a senior adviser to the United Nations. Misha Glenny is a British journalist and currently serves as rector of the Institute for Human Sciences.
Polycrises are proliferating because the global order is undergoing a wrenching transition. The world is shifting from a unipolar world briefly dominated by the U.S. to a multipolar system where power is more distributed across states, companies and other non-state actors. In terms of spending, the U.S. remains by far the dominant military power, but slowly, political, economic and technological power is, namely to Asia.
The relationship between the U.S. and China will be decisive in determining what Gramsci’s new world order looks like when it finally emerges from the womb of history. The two countries arenot just for geographical but also technological supremacy. The prize is dominance in artificial intelligence. Both China and the U.S. are convinced, not unreasonably, that technological leadership will play a decisive role in determining who sets the global rules of the game.
Facing the prospect of a world at war, many governments are preparing for military confrontation. The international community has entered a new arms race, made all the more unpredictable by the emergence of new weapons driven by advanced robotics and AI. And despite the, there are no globally agreed guardrails on how this new generation of weaponry can be used or restrained. Meanwhile, U.S.