I was invited to contribute to Progressive Yearbook 2022 published by The Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), the think tank of the social democratic and socialist parties at the EU level. The text is a short overview of global developments analysed in classical Wellsian terms of our world ‘civilisation being in a race between learning and catastrophe’. The text makes an explicit reference to the scenarios I developed in the The Political Economy of Global Security (Routledge 2008), but some of these ideas I develop much further from a novel field-theoretical perspective in my forthcoming book The Three Fields of Global Political Economy (Routledge, March 2022). A new, slightly longer and up-dated version of the text written for the July 2022 conference “Unknown Wars” is available here.

The International Political Economy (IPE) section of the International Studies Association grants a couple of awards every year. One of them is the IPE Outstanding Activist Scholar Award. The panel honouring me was supposed to take place a year ago in Hawaii, but the conference was cancelled in the last minute. This year’s conference was set for Las Vegas, but travelling remains impossible. The panel was finally held yesterday (6.4.2021) remotely and included Hasmet Uluorta and Chris Chase-Dunn as chairs and Jim Mittelman, Milja Kurki, and Mustapha Kamal Pasha as discussants. Following some reflections on the occasion and expressions of appreciation and gratitude, here is the substance of my talk.

This is my response to Paul Raskin’s beautifully written essay Interrogating the Anthropocene: Truth and Fallacy. It seems that human activity has pushed Earth into a hostile new geological epoch, which scientists have christened “the Anthropocene.” This jolt to the planet also jolts the culture, sparking reconsideration of who we are, where we are going, and how we must act. The question Paul poses is this: “If we care about building a decent future, how should we think about the Anthropocene?”. How is “Anthropocene” related to Capitalocene and related alternative interpretations? This time I am on the different side than Richard Falk and some other people I greatly admire, arguing that “anthropocene” is a compelling narrative.

This short, partly biographical text was written for the February 2021 Newsletter of the IBHA (International Big History Association). IBHA publishes monthly something on how Big History is practiced around the globe, and this is my contribution.