The World in 2025: Robert Kaplan in conversation w/ Alec Russell

We are entering a new era of global instability. The world is facing an era of war, climate change, great power rivalry and unprecedented technological advancement. On April 2, geopolitical expert and bestselling author Robert Kaplan comes to Intelligence Squared to analyse where the world is heading in 2025 and beyond. Drawing from the themes of his new book Waste Land, he will argue that history can help guide us through a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace.

Join Kaplan live in London for a bracing but hopeful glimpse into a future and ask your questions in the audience Q&A.

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.

About 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’.

Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor. He was the editor of FT Weekend from 2016-2023. During his tenure, it won a series of awards including European weekend newspaper of the year and UK weekend newspaper of the year. He also launched the FTWeekend festival in London and then in Washington.

He was previously the FT’s news editor and also the opinion editor. A long-time former foreign correspondent, he has reported from Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Washington, winning a number of awards. He has written three books. The latest is After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa.