![]() Please tell us about Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Your first choice is a big-picture book by Robert Wright that was widely read in Washington during the dawn of the 21st century. What I’m focusing on is how you can have positive networks as well as negative networks – I’ll be looking at the upsides of interdependence. I think we’ve seen plenty of the negative side of globalisation. And with the financial crisis of 2008, we saw the disadvantages of global interconnectedness, where banks collapsing in one country pull the entire system down. ![]() We saw all the disadvantages of globalised criminal networks. The first decade of the 21st century, starting with 9/11, was about the negative parts of globalisation – terrorist networks and more broadly global criminal networks involved in narco-trafficking, weapons trafficking and human trafficking. In the 1990s there was a whirl of optimism about globalisation. ![]() But what about the downsides, like the proliferation of weapons technology and the spread of terrorism? In your writing and in the books you’ve selected, I detect an optimism about the upsides of globalisation and technology in the 21st century. ![]() We’ve moved from a world where the international system has a limited number of players to a networks world in which there’s an infinite number of combinations. States can be taken apart and combined and recombined with lots of social actors like non-governmental organisations or corporations or foundations or universities. In the 21st century states are still very important but they interact through their component parts – government agency to government agency, lawmaker to lawmaker, municipal government to municipal government. The main object was to avoid overt conflict with one another. ![]() So it was France versus the United States versus the Soviet Union. What I meant was that in the realm of international relations during the 20th century states mainly interacted like billiard balls – they were opaque and unitary. What did you mean, and how do you expect the 21st century world to differ? You called the 20th century “a billiard-ball world” in an article for Foreign Affairs. Foreign Policy & International Relations. ![]()
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