Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis w/ Robert D. Kaplan & Jason Cowley

Join us for an exclusive Chalke Talk with renowned world affairs author Robert D. Kaplan, in conversation with esteemed journalist Jason Cowley. They will discuss Kaplan’s latest book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis – an urgent exploration of our turbulent global landscape. The conversation will be followed by a live Q & A.

In Waste Land, Kaplan examines how war, climate change, technological upheaval, and geopolitical tensions are reshaping our world. Drawing parallels to Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic, he questions whether stability, rather than mass democracy, could be the key to avoiding global collapse.

More about the book

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm; a deadly mix of war, climate change, great-power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, and the end of empire. In Waste Land, renowned world affairs author Robert D. Kaplan explains incisively how we got here and where we are going.

Kaplan’s trademark sweep of history, literature, politics and philosophy draws parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic. Today, too, every national disaster could spread across the world, given this century’s singular dilemmas—pandemics, recessions; urbanisation, mass migration; destabilisation under large-scale democracy and great-power conflict; and the intimate bonds forged by digital media. Could stability and historic liberalism, rather than mass democracy per se, save world populations from anarchic breakdown?

Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by twenty-first–century technology, but remarkably resonant with the past. The situation may be spiralling out of our control—unless our leaders act first.

The speakers

Robert D. Kaplan’s books include The Loom of Time; The Tragic Mind; and The Coming Anarchy. The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics, formerly a Pentagon and U.S. Navy advisor, and for three decades an Atlantic foreign affairs reporter, he twice made Foreign Policy‘s ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’.

Jason Cowley is an award-winning journalist and former editor-in-chief of the New Statesman. Cowley is a distinguished writer and commentator on politics and culture. His books include Who Are We Now? and Reaching for Utopia.