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

The global outlook in 2025 is bleak. Ploughshares are being turned into swords as development spending is cut and defence budgets increase. Are we now living in a world of crisis, competition and conflict? A context in which collective international action on global challenges is further away than ever? What lessons are there from the past about the world we have tilted into – and can we escape our present generational bleakness?

Join Robert Kaplan, one of the leading international thinkers on global affairs and author of Waste Land, for a wide-ranging and timely discussion. This event will be chaired by Alexander Evans, Associate Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy.

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 author

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’.