The Age of Unpeace
How Connectivity Causes Conflict
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Narrated by:
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Mark Leonard
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By:
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Mark Leonard
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
We thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart.
In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been integrating the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope that it would make war impossible. In doing so, they have unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of conflict and the motivation to keep fighting. Rising tensions in global politics are not a bump in the road - they are part of the paving.
Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to stand-offs between nation states. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US and China, an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change or pandemic response and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as overseas troops are replaced by sanctions, cyberwar and the threat of large migrant flows.
As a leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard's work has taken him into many of the rooms where our futures are being decided at every level of society, from the Facebook HQ and facial recognition labs in China to meetings in presidential palaces and at remote military installations. In seeking to understand the ways that globalisation has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, Leonard explores how we might wrestle a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.
©2021 Mark Leonard (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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The End of the Asian Century
- War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World's Most Dynamic Region
- By: Michael R. Auslin
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Historian and geopolitical expert Michael Auslin argues that far from being a cohesive powerhouse, Asia is a fractured region threatened by stagnation and instability. Here he provides a comprehensive account of the economic, military, political, and demographic risks that bedevil half of our world, arguing that Asia, working with the United States, has a unique opportunity to avert catastrophe - but only if it acts boldly.
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Wake up Call
- By Daniel B. on 07-07-17
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Revolt
- The Worldwide Uprising Against Globalization
- By: Nadav Eyal
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Revolt is an eloquent and provocative challenge to the prevailing wisdom about the rise of nationalism and populism. With a vibrant and informed voice, Nadav Eyal illustrates how modern globalization is not sustainable. He contends that the collapse of the current world order is not so much about the imbalance between technological achievement and social progress or the breakdown of liberal democracy as it is about a passion to upend and destroy power structures that have become hollow, corrupt, or simply unresponsive to urgent needs.
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Good observations, very politically biased.
- By P. Bradley on 11-29-23
By: Nadav Eyal
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The Square and the Tower
- Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Elliot Hill
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It's about states, armies, and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?
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Not his best by a long chalk: Read Steven Pinker.
- By David on 02-05-18
By: Niall Ferguson
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The Weaponisation of Everything
- A Field Guide to the New Way of War
- By: Mark Galeotti
- Narrated by: Mark Galeotti
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Hybrid war, grey-zone warfare, unrestricted war: Today, traditional conflict - fought with guns, bombs, and drones - has become too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In an age when America threatens Europe with sanctions, and when China spends billions buying influence abroad, the world is heading for a new era of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared, and unending.
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Clear, concise, and thought provoking
- By Dad / Husband (who rarely reviews) on 03-08-22
By: Mark Galeotti
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A Brief History of the Future
- A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-first Century
- By: Jacques Attali
- Narrated by: Alan Robertson
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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What will planet Earth be like in 20 years? At mid-century? In the year 2100? Prescient and convincing, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future. Never has the world offered more promise for the future and been more fraught with dangers. In this powerful and sometimes terrifying work, Attali analyzes the past and pinpoints nine distinct periods of human history, each with its world center of power and prestige, and predicts what the tenth will bring by the end of this century.
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feels like a popular mechanics article
- By Robin on 07-11-17
By: Jacques Attali
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The Last President of Europe
- Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World
- By: William Drozdiak
- Narrated by: Paul Hodgson
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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A revelatory examination of the global impact of Emmanuel Macron's tumultuous presidency. In The Last President of Europe, William Drozdiak tells with exclusive inside access the story of Macron's presidency and the political challenges the French leader continues to face.
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Interesting but poorly read
- By Anonymous User on 05-12-22
By: William Drozdiak
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The Sovereign Individual
- Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
- By: James Dale Davidson, Peter Thiel - preface, William Rees-Mogg
- Narrated by: Michael David Axtell
- Length: 19 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Two renowned investment advisors and authors of the best seller The Great Reckoning bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century. The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization.
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Unfortunately distopian for mosty of humanity
- By Phil on 09-29-20
By: James Dale Davidson, and others
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The Russia Conundrum
- How the West Fell for Putin's Power Gambit—and How to Fix It
- By: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Martin Sixsmith - contributor
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Mikhail Khodorkovsky has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin. Once an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky spoke out against the corruption of Putin's regime—and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. Now freed, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile, Khodorkovsky brings us the insider's battle to save his country's soul. Offering an urgent analysis of what has gone wrong with Putin, The Russia Conundrum maps the country's rise and fall against Khodorkovsky's own journey.
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This should be required reading!
- By Jasmine J. on 10-29-22
By: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and others
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Disunited Nations
- The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
- By: Peter Zeihan
- Narrated by: Peter Zeihan, Roy Worley
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: it is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia.
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brilliant geopolitical primer re the future
- By Howard on 04-11-20
By: Peter Zeihan
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The Russia Trap
- How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe
- By: George Beebe
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Every American president since the end of the Cold War has called for better relations with Russia. But each has seen relations get worse by the time he left office. Now, the two countries are facing off in a virtual war being fought without clear goals or boundaries. Why? George Beebe argues that new game-changing technologies, disappearing rules of the game, and distorted perceptions on both sides are combining to lock Washington and Moscow into an escalatory spiral that they do not recognize.
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Too soft on Russia
- By Jim Flynn on 06-28-20
By: George Beebe
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How the World Works
- By: Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian - interviewer, Arthur Naiman - editor
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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According to The New York Times, Noam Chomsky is "arguably the most important intellectual alive." But he isn't easy to read...or at least he wasn't until these books came along. Made up of intensively edited speeches and interviews, they offer something not found anywhere else: pure Chomsky, with every dazzling idea and penetrating insight intact, delivered in clear, accessible, listener-friendly prose.
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Insightful Content
- By Amazon Customer on 01-30-21
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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Upheaval
- Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 18 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In his earlier best sellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in the final audiobook in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change - a coping mechanism more commonly associated with personal trauma.
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The Urine of the Earth in a Teacup
- By Marian on 05-12-19
By: Jared Diamond
What listeners say about The Age of Unpeace
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-19-22
Insightful
This book was delightful. It altered my thinking on how the world is reshaping and the forces behind those changes.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-28-23
Easy breakdown of geopolitics a new world order of connectivity
Really enjoyed listening to this book and broken down complex geopolitical factors into east to understand concepts.
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- Theo Horesh
- 02-15-22
Gripping Account of Fallout from Globalization
The Age of Unpeace is a book about big ideas, most important among them the turmoil that has been generated by global interconnectivity. Its thesis is that interconnectivity was expected to bring us all closer together, but in so doing it has generated a multitude of conflicts. Unfortunately, the thesis is often submerged in the stream of these endless challenges, which range from populism to asymmetrical warfare, inequality to the competition for geopolitical power. The book does a great job of bringing readers up to date with the global challenges it elaborates on, and it does so with an easy going flare that many readers will find appealing, but it touches on them in such a cursory manner that most readers will probably forget many of them as soon as they move on to the next. Unfortunately, the author often fails to make a link between the issues he is raising and his central premise, which he often fails to back up with solid arguments.
For instance, readers are told about a rightwing populism that has plagued every major region of the world, which is linked to interconnectivity. Yet, there is little effort to get at the nature of their relationship. Has interconnectivity caused inequality or just made it more apparent, and is the rightwing populism a reaction to inequality or globalization? If it is a reaction to inequality, what does that have to do with globalization, and if it is a reaction to globalization, why are some people reacting with nationalism and others with greater openness? The answers to these sorts of questions are hinted at but never answered or elaborated on with much depth, and the end result is a well written book grappling with important global challenges that all too often feels sensationalistic.
The style will be familiar to readers of Thomas Friedman’s classic, The World is Flat—a caricatured book that was actually packed with a multitude of great ideas. But while its racy style is similar to many of the globalization classics from around the turn of the millennium, this book is in many ways a sequel to the era that might have been titled “The Morning After Globalization.” The problem is that whereas these early texts brought to globalization a naive optimism, The Age of Unpeace all too often seems to counter it with a naive pessimism. It is not the kind of cynicism that one often finds on the far-left, and the author does not shrink from offering a range of intelligent solutions in the final pages of the book. But all too often, the book seems to lack moral purpose.
Like it or not, we are all now living in a globally interconnected world many of whose greatest challenges are global. And meeting these challenges will require global thinking, global commitments, global institutions, and probably some measure of global identities. Meanwhile, as it has been repeatedly shown in one study after another, the supporters of rightwing populists are all too often not the losers of the new global economy but rather its winners bent on holding onto their privileges. In this way, the author seems to yield too much to the anti-globalists, that is until the final pages of the book, where he leaves the reader with a brilliant series of solutions.
Perhaps the best that could be said about this book is that, while serious commentators the world over have been grappling with the nationalist reaction to globalization in recent years, few have been so explicit in seeking an explanation in interconnectivity itself. And this makes what might otherwise appear an uneven work, which is at one and the same time well written and cursory, an important meditation on our times. I say this as the author of a trilogy of books on globalization, who has struggled in each book to contain the immensity of its subject matter. Hence, it is good to read a book like this in dialectic with other recent works coming to terms with the fallout from globalization, like Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger; Hassan Damluji’s The Responsible Globalist; Ivan Krastev’s The Light That Failed; Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; and Peter Singer’s One World.
~ Theo Horesh, author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind
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1 person found this helpful
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- Philo
- 05-14-22
Great central insight, backed with nice overview
It is illuminating, broad in scope, up to the minute (OK, some of the very latest 2022 stuff is not here), and well-paced. A person diligently following current events and thinking a lot about it could get this overall view, but I find this author's recap of it all helpful. There is a good mix of leader portraits, history, law and technology. This viewpoint is very timely, and deserves a hearing. There is enough historical perspective to make a lot of sense of things -- worrying as they may be. It helps to coolly consider all views and voices in the conflicts breaking out.
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