So many of us seem to be scrambling to understand where the world is heading. Decade-old certainties seem to crumble before our eyes. Perhaps we are reaching the moment that Karl Marx predicted when all that is solid melts into air. But don’t panic. In their brand-new podcast, Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett are seeking out some of the brightest minds on the planet to help you navigate your way through this uncharted ocean. We will learn whether technology really can prevent climate change, whether the current economic headwinds are temporary or structural, whether Russia and China are forever friends, and whether social media are turning us all into zombies. But unlike many podcasts, we will also be looking for answers. After almost a century of steady progress in health and prosperity, people no longer expect their lives to be an upgrade on that of their parents. Misha and Eva will be asking guests whether such trends can be reversed or whether we will sink into another period of conflict both within and between states. Things may look bleak on the surface, but around the globe, human ingenuity continues to draw on diverse traditions to create systems that will overcome or circumvent the political, social, and economic dangers that are all too visible.
Our hosts: Misha Glenny is the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences and one of the BBC’s most distinguished correspondents, as well as the presenter of the highly-praised podcast How to Invent a Country. Eva Konzett is a renowned editor and reporter for Vienna’s leading news magazine, Falter.
About our show: Future Discontinuous: Smart Talk with Smart People is a co-production of Falter and the IWM Vienna.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
So many of us seem to be scrambling to understand where the world is heading. Decade-old certainties seem to crumble before our eyes. Perhaps we are reaching the moment that Karl Marx predicted when all that is solid melts into air. But don’t panic. In their brand-new podcast, Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett are seeking out some of the brightest minds on the planet to help you navigate your way through this uncharted ocean. We will learn whether technology really can prevent climate change, whether the current economic headwinds are temporary or structural, whether Russia and China are forever friends, and whether social media are turning us all into zombies. But unlike many podcasts, we will also be looking for answers. After almost a century of steady progress in health and prosperity, people no longer expect their lives to be an upgrade on that of their parents. Misha and Eva will be asking guests whether such trends can be reversed or whether we will sink into another period of conflict both within and between states. Things may look bleak on the surface, but around the globe, human ingenuity continues to draw on diverse traditions to create systems that will overcome or circumvent the political, social, and economic dangers that are all too visible.
Our hosts: Misha Glenny is the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences and one of the BBC’s most distinguished correspondents, as well as the presenter of the highly-praised podcast How to Invent a Country. Eva Konzett is a renowned editor and reporter for Vienna’s leading news magazine, Falter.
About our show: Future Discontinuous: Smart Talk with Smart People is a co-production of Falter and the IWM Vienna.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett are joined by international relations scholar Ayşe Zarakol to rethink where global order comes from—and why it may now be coming apart. Drawing on her book Before the West, Zarakol challenges the familiar story that modern international politics begins with Europe and the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, she traces earlier Eurasian world orders built around empires rather than nation-states, focusing on the Mongol and Chinggisid models of sovereignty that organized power around rulers, households, and fluid realms rather than fixed borders. The discussion explores how these Eastern orders structured political competition across Asia, how their influence reached Europe through rivalry with the Ottomans, and how ideas of centralized authority took hold long before the modern state system.
Shifting the conversation to the present, the trio examines how stigma and hierarchy continue to shape the behavior of both rising and declining powers, from China and Russia to Europe and the United States. Are today's turbulences best understood through familiar 20th-century analogies, or do the upheavals of the 17th century—marked by climate stress, technological disruption, and prolonged instability—offer a more unsettling parallel? As strongman politics resurges and the nation-state itself comes under pressure from digital platforms and concentrated private power, the episode asks what kinds of order might emerge next and how long we may have to navigate a world without one.
Ayşe Zarakol is a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge. The main themes of her research are East-West relations and social hierarchies in world politics, problems of modernity and sovereignty, and rising and declining powers. She is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which has won six prestigious awards. In 2024, Zarakol was elected to fellowship in the British Academy and the Academia Europaea.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.