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The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict by [Mark Leonard]

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Mark Leonard

The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict Kindle Edition

by Mark Leonard (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 83 ratings

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A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Compulsively readable... An essential course in geopolitical self-help' - Adam Tooze

'Full of fresh - and often surprising - ideas' - Niall Ferguson

'Extraordinary... One of those rare books that defines the terms of our conversation about our times' - Michael Ignatieff

We thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart.

In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been working to create a connected world. They've integrated the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope of making war impossible. In doing so, they unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of warfare.

Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to full-blown war in eastern Europe. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US, Russia and China; an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change and pandemic response; and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as the theatre of conflict expands to include sanctions, cyberwar and the pressures of large migrant flows.

A leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard lays out the ways that globalization has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, and explores how we might wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

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223 pages
Language

English
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Transworld Digital
Publication date

September 2, 2021
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1400 KB
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About the Author

Mark Leonard is the Director and Co-Founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a council of 300 European leaders including serving and former presidents, prime ministers, economics and foreign ministers, and the author of Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (2005) and What Does China Think? (2008). He lives in London and Berlin. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08GFFT7F9
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Transworld Digital (September 2, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 2, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1400 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 223 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #662,688 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #80 in Intergovernmental Organizations Policy
- #657 in International Relations (Kindle Store)
- #1,874 in Political Science (Kindle Store)

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4.4 83 ratings

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Hrvoje M.

Fascinating Insights Into the U.S.-China Relationship & Future of Globalization

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2021

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The author has written a timely and unique analysis of some of the key themes in global affairs today. That, as globalization and connectivity have progressed, there seem to be hostile differences which have slowed down global integration and are amplifying differences which countries and non-state actors are weaponizing against each other (e.g. internet, migration, economy, climate, health).

One of the most fascinating discussions in the book is that of the U.S. and China becoming ‘mimetic doubles’, copying each other, and actually converging despite the apparent frictions.

Though my personal philosophy and ideology likely differs from that of the author’s (e.g. internationalism), I find his observations very fair and analysis thought-provoking. The text brings me back to my days of studying diplomacy in Geneva and is written in a very digestible and enjoyable manner. I would highly recommend the book as others have (e.g. Niall Ferguson, Martin Jacques), it will give you a few ground-breaking insights and nuggets to chew on for a while.

8 people found this helpful

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Jay Batson

A current, compelling synthesis of the 2021 world order

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2022

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Tye world has (largely) enjoyed international peace - No military world wars - for half a century. Globalization has connected us all.

But the author’s synthesis of the current global national tensions - where the stem from, and where they might be headed - is unique, and I say compelling.

His RX for what to do is a little idealistic, but not a bad place to start thinking.

I’ll be recommending this to friends I know that like to read thought-provoking books.

3 people found this helpful

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Jose Cheng

Excellent summary.

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2022

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Great concise read of a good summarized status of digital transformation of global geopolitics, notwithstanding some shallow analyses of the BRICS spheres of influence.

One person found this helpful

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Theo Horesh

Gripping Account of the Fallout from Globalization

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2022

The Age of Unpeace is a book about big ideas, most important among them the turmoil that has been generated by global interconnectivity. Its thesis is that interconnectivity was expected to bring us all closer together, but in so doing it has generated a multitude of conflicts. Unfortunately, the thesis is often submerged in the stream of these endless challenges, which range from populism to asymmetrical warfare, inequality to the competition for geopolitical power. The book does a great job of bringing readers up to date with the global challenges it elaborates on, and it does so with an easy going flare that many readers will find appealing, but it touches on them in such a cursory manner that most readers will probably forget many of them as soon as they move on to the next. Unfortunately, the author often fails to make a link between the issues he is raising and his central premise, which he often fails to back up with solid arguments.   

For instance, readers are told about a rightwing populism that has plagued every major region of the world, which is linked to interconnectivity. Yet, there is little effort to get at the nature of their relationship. Has interconnectivity caused inequality or just made it more apparent, and is the rightwing populism a reaction to inequality or globalization? If it is a reaction to inequality, what does that have to do with globalization, and if it is a reaction to globalization, why are some people reacting with nationalism and others with greater openness? The answers to these sorts of questions are hinted at but never answered or elaborated on with much depth, and the end result is a well written book grappling with important global challenges that all too often feels sensationalistic.   

The style will be familiar to readers of Thomas Friedman’s classic, The World is Flat—a caricatured book that was actually packed with a multitude of great ideas. But while its racy style is similar to many of the globalization classics from around the turn of the millennium, this book is in many ways a sequel to the era that might have been titled “The Morning After Globalization.” The problem is that whereas these early texts brought to globalization a naive optimism, The Age of Unpeace all too often seems to counter it with a naive pessimism. It is not the kind of cynicism that one often finds on the far-left, and the author does not shrink from offering a range of intelligent solutions in the final pages of the book. But all too often, the book seems to lack moral purpose.

  Like it or not, we are all now living in a globally interconnected world many of whose greatest challenges are global. And meeting these challenges will require global thinking, global commitments, global institutions, and probably some measure of global identities. Meanwhile, as it has been repeatedly shown in one study after another, the supporters of rightwing populists are all too often not the losers of the new global economy but rather its winners bent on holding onto their privileges. In this way, the author seems to yield too much to the anti-globalists, that is until the final pages of the book, where he leaves the reader with a brilliant series of solutions.   

Perhaps the best that could be said about this book is that, while serious commentators the world over have been grappling with the nationalist reaction to globalization in recent years, few have been so explicit in seeking an explanation in interconnectivity itself. And this makes what might otherwise appear an uneven work, which is at one and the same time well written and cursory, an important meditation on our times. I say this as the author of a trilogy of books on globalization, who has struggled in each book to contain the immensity of its subject matter. Hence, it is good to read a book like this in dialectic with other recent works coming to terms with the fallout from globalization, like Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger; Hassan Damluji’s The Responsible Globalist; Ivan Krastev’s The Light That Failed; Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; and Peter Singer’s One World.

  ~ Theo Horesh, author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind

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Pica seca

Muy buena propuesta.

Reviewed in Spain on December 19, 2021

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-- Arriesgada e inteligente propuesta la ofrecida por el autor en esta obra, llamada a allanar el camino para comprender el estado actual del mundo en la actualidad. Huelga decir que la tan cacareada globalización ha abierto unas grietas, o bien las agrandó en el tejido social de los países occidentales, incumpliendo las promesas de futuro utópico pronosticadas para el siglo XXI. Para el autor el problema reside en la conectividad en si misma, por la cual, y quizá, siguiendo el adagio que el hombre siente y luego busca razones para justificar esos sentimientos tal conectividad nos ha llevado al aumento de la envidia, rencores de todo tipo e identidades enfrentadas, las cuales, no dudaran en usar esa hiperconectividad como arma al resultar tan improductivo un conflicto nuclear o, directamente imposible acabar con hiperpotencias como EEUU en el plano militar.

-- Un aspecto a significar en el libro es la brillante descripción de los principales actores mundiales - EEUU, China e Europa- en cuanto a sus posiciones en el tablero internacional, sus amenazas, debilidades, y , como no, las conexiones entre cada una de ellas. Tampoco queda fuera del análisis, aunque sea de manera breve los vecinos a ellas sobre todo en el capítulo tercero. Tras la lectura del libro el lector tendrá una idea clara de los acontecimientos pasados, actuales y, por tanto, de los que pueden estar por llegar, pudiendo dejar de lado otros trabajos académicos que, solamente se dedican a explicar qué es una zona gris, quiénes la usan y cómo las usan.

-- Concluimos recomendando la obra a politólogos, militares, sociólogos y economistas, pues, en las tres partes que forman el libro, cualquiera de esas disciplinas disfrutará con la hipótesis expuesta en el libro. Disfruten,

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hblnk

Timely and thought provoking

Reviewed in Germany on October 4, 2022

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plenty of detailed insights in the great upheaval of our time: how internet communication aggravates inequality between and dominance over citizens.

Teddius

A simple premise which is both coherent and well argued

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2022

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A simple premise with well made coherent arguments. It's packed with a few nuggets to try make sense of the past 10 years at a national, trans-national and geopolitical levels. We tend to forget how different the pre Internet age social environment and news media landscape was ... More connectivity clearly doesn't equate to the peace, love and dope that the early Internet idealist hoped it would be. More connections = more opportunities for friction. Do we have a bug in a systems which relises on ever closer ties? Mark Lenoard certainly thinks so and it's hard to disagree.

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