Globalization Backlash, the Anthropocene, and the Shifting Global Order

Note on currency and scope. This unit is the geopolitical and socio-environmental depth companion to the 21st-century overview in 32.26.01. It assumes that overview and concentrates on one argument: the post-Cold-War globalization consensus was broken by a financial crisis, destabilised by the geological reality of the Anthropocene, and overtaken by a shift to multipolarity. The history of computing is treated only as a political force here; the technical lineage of the digital revolution belongs to 33.07.01. Claims are dated to evidence available in early 2026 and will need revision.

Overview Beginner

The post-Cold-War world was supposed to be orderly. Liberal democracy and free markets had won; trade and technology would bind humanity together. This unit follows what happened to that promise. It traces three forces that converged to reshape the century: a financial crisis in 2008 that cracked the legitimacy of the globalised economy; the Anthropocene, the geological reality that human activity now drives planetary systems; and the shift from a world dominated by one superpower to a contested multipolar order. Each force is examined on its own terms and then in combination. The unit assumes the overview in 32.26.01 and goes deeper into the backlash against globalisation and the meaning of the Anthropocene.

The unipolar moment and the globalisation consensus Beginner

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States stood alone as a superpower. Scholars called the years that followed the "unipolar moment." American military power, American capital, and American cultural reach had no peer. Western leaders treated this not as luck but as a template for the world.

The template was called the Washington Consensus. Its recipe was familiar: open borders to trade, set capital free to move, privatise state firms, and let markets set prices. The European Union expanded eastward. NATO did too. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation, binding the world's most populous country into the same trading system. Tariffs fell, supply chains stretched across oceans, and the volume of world trade grew far faster than output itself. A ruling assumption took hold: history had settled the argument, and convergence on one model was only a matter of time.

The 2008 financial crisis: a hinge in world history Beginner

The assumption broke in September 2008. The American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, the largest bankruptcy in United States history. The crisis began in the US housing market, where banks had bundled risky mortgages into securities sold worldwide. When the housing bubble burst, those securities poisoned the global financial system. Credit froze. Banks that had seemed permanent failed or were rescued at public expense.

The damage was global because the system was global. European banks held the toxic assets. Trade finance evaporated, hammering export economies in Asia. The crisis destroyed a claim: that the Anglo-American model of lightly regulated finance was the mature endpoint toward which all economies would converge. As Adam Tooze argued in Crashed, the crisis revealed a transatlantic financial system so densely interconnected that an American policy choice became a worldwide emergency. The legitimacy wound was deeper than the economic one.

The backlash: populism, nationalism, and the revolt against globalisation Beginner

The years after 2008 produced a political consequence. If globalisation had promised shared prosperity, its costs were unevenly distributed. Whole regions lost manufacturing as production migrated to lower-wage economies. Workers in wealthy countries faced stagnant wages while capital and the highly skilled prospered. The "China shock," the rapid absorption of Chinese manufacturing into world markets after 2001, hollowed out industrial towns across the American Midwest, the English North, and the French rust belt.

A populist movement fed on this dislocation. Its argument was that distant elites had traded away ordinary people's security for an abstraction called global competition. In 2016 the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Months later the United States elected Donald Trump on a platform of tariffs, border control, and the slogan "America First." Across Europe, parties of the nationalist right gained ground. The backlash was not only economic; it was cultural, a defence of national identity against the perceived rootlessness of a globalised, networked age. This trend reshaped the politics of a decade.

China, multipolarity, and the end of the unipolar order Beginner

While the West absorbed the backlash, China's rise continued. By the 2010s China was the world's second-largest economy, its largest manufacturer, and the trading partner of choice across much of the Global South. The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, financed ports, railways, and power plants from East Africa to Central Asia. China offered something the Western-led institutions had not: infrastructure without lectures on governance.

This was more than commerce. It was the substance of a shift to multipolarity, a world in which power is distributed among several centres rather than concentrated in one. The BRICS grouping, expanded in 2023 and 2024 to include major energy producers, signalled that rising powers wanted institutions of their own. From the Western perspective, this challenged the rules-based order built after 1945. From the perspective of Beijing and its partners, the old order had never been as neutral as its architects claimed. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine hardened the contest, splitting much of the world into rival camps while many states refused to choose.

The Anthropocene: humanity as a geological force Beginner

While the political order shifted, a slower and larger transformation pressed in. The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proposed in 2000 that the Earth had left the Holocene, the stable epoch of the last 11,700 years, and entered a new one: the Anthropocene, defined by the fact that human activity has become the dominant force shaping the planet's geology and ecosystems.

The evidence is layered into the rock itself. Mid-20th-century nuclear weapons tests left radioactive isotopes that will register in sediments for millions of years. Plastics accumulate in ocean mud. Concrete, aluminium, and the nitrogen from synthetic fertiliser rewrite the chemistry of soils and water. The "Great Acceleration" of the 1950s, when population, output, fertiliser use, and carbon emissions all surged upward together, marks the moment human pressure overtook natural variation. Climate change is the most famous symptom, but it is only one of them. The Anthropocene reframes the environmental crisis: it is not a passing disruption to a stable background but a change in the background itself.

Planetary boundaries: the economy on a finite planet Beginner

A research group led by Johan Rockström framed the problem with the idea of planetary boundaries. They identified nine life-support systems, among them climate, biodiversity, ocean acidification, and the nitrogen cycle, each with a threshold beyond which the stable conditions of the Holocene cannot be guaranteed. Later assessments concluded that several boundaries had already been crossed. Biodiversity loss was judged the most severe.

The implication is direct. The economic model of endless expansion, the same model that drove globalisation, collides with a planet that does not expand. Where the 20th century asked how to grow, the 21st asks whether growth can continue without breaching the conditions that make civilisation possible. This is the environmental core of the century's predicament. It connects the financial crisis, a crisis of a system pretending risk had vanished, to the ecological crisis, a reality where the planet's limits cannot be waved away. The consequence of ignoring both is the same: the collapse of assumptions that once looked permanent.

The digital acceleration as a political force Beginner

The digital revolution is treated in 33.07.01 as a history of technology. Here its interest is narrower: how networks changed politics and the global order. Cheap communication let firms slice supply chains across continents, deepening economic integration. The same networks let capital move in milliseconds, transmitting financial shocks, as 2008 showed, at the speed of a margin call.

Digital platforms also accelerated the backlash. Algorithmic feeds rewarded outrage over deliberation, spreading disinformation and sharpening identity conflict. A handful of firms, most of them American and Chinese, concentrated control over the world's information flows. Surveillance became both a business model and a tool of state power. The network that was supposed to dissolve borders ended up giving new leverage to the states and corporations that owned its infrastructure. Connection and fragmentation arrived together, each amplifying the other.

Worked example: tracing one shock through the global order Beginner

Consider how a single event, the failure of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008, cascaded across an interconnected world.

Step 1, the trigger. Lehman's bankruptcy froze the market for short-term loans between banks. Without those loans, even healthy firms could not meet payrolls or settle trades.

Step 2, the transmission. European banks had borrowed heavily in dollars and now could not roll over their debts. The dollar shortage spread the American crisis to London, Frankfurt, and beyond. Trade finance collapsed, and export-dependent economies in Asia felt demand vanish within weeks.

Step 3, the response. Governments abandoned the laissez-faire stance of the previous decade. The G20, not the G7, became the crisis committee, a symbolic shift toward multipolarity. Central banks printed trillions to stabilise the system.

Step 4, the consequence. Public bailouts of private losses fuelled anger that became the populist backlash. Trust in expert management, the quiet foundation of the globalisation consensus, did not return. A failure in one housing market became a crisis of legitimacy for the whole order.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition: key analytical frameworks Intermediate+

The argument of this unit rests on a set of analytical frameworks. Each names a structural feature of the post-Cold-War world that recurs across the topics that follow. Defining them precisely lets us separate description, where claims can be checked against evidence, from interpretation, where reasonable observers disagree.

Hyperglobalisation and Rodrik's trilemma

Dani Rodrik defines hyperglobalisation as the ambition to remove all barriers to the movement of goods, capital, and services, treating the world as a single integrated market. His "globalisation paradox," often stated as a trilemma, holds that a nation cannot simultaneously have deep global economic integration, democratic politics, and national sovereignty. At most two of the three are compatible. Choose hyperglobalisation and democracy, and sovereignty drains toward supranational rules. Choose hyperglobalisation and sovereignty, and democratic consent erodes as voters lose control over economic outcomes. The post-2008 backlash is, in this frame, the predictable return of voters demanding the sovereignty and democracy that hyperglobalisation had set aside.

The unipolar moment

The unipolar moment names the period after 1991 in which the United States held a concentration of military, economic, and ideological power without peer in the modern state system. It is an empirical description of a distribution of capabilities, not a policy. Its significance is comparative: against the bipolar balance of the Cold War and the multipolar order now taking shape, the 1990s appear as an exception. The moment shaped institutions, the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU, and expectations, the assumption that American leadership was the natural backdrop of world politics.

The Anthropocene and planetary boundaries

The Anthropocene, as proposed by Crutzen and developed by the Working Group on the Anthropocene, is a geological proposal: human activity has altered the Earth system enough to leave a stratigraphic signature, with the mid-20th-century Great Acceleration as the leading candidate for its starting point. Planetary boundaries, developed by Rockström and colleagues, translate the same concern into a management framework: nine Earth-system processes, each with a quantitative threshold beyond which the risk of non-linear, irreversible shift rises sharply. The two frameworks are complementary. The Anthropocene names the condition; planetary boundaries quantify the operating space humanity has left within it.

Populism and illiberal democracy

Cas Mudde defines populism as a thin-centred ideology that separates society into two camps, the "pure people" and a "corrupt elite," and claims to speak for the first against the second. Because it is thin-centred, populism attaches readily to a host ideology, usually nationalism on the right or socialism on the left. Levitsky and Ziblatt's account of democratic backsliding shows how elected leaders can hollow out democratic institutions while keeping their forms. The backlash of the 2010s was not a rejection of elections but a contest over who counts as the people and how much constraint the rules should place on a majority's will.

Comparative framework: 2008 read through three lenses Intermediate+

The same crisis admits different readings depending on the framework applied. Holding them side by side exposes what each reveals and what each misses.

The financial-instability lens

Through the lens of financial economics, 2008 was a classic boom-and-bust amplified by complexity. Decades of low inflation and steady growth, the "Great Moderation," encouraged investors to take on ever more leverage against the assumption that volatility had been tamed. Mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives spread risk so widely that no party could see where it concentrated. When US house prices fell, the architecture of assumed safety collapsed. Hyman Minsky's financial-instability hypothesis, which holds that stability itself breeds the conditions for the next crash, looked newly prophetic.

The political-economy lens

Through the lens of political economy, 2008 was a consequence of distribution. The gains from globalisation had flowed disproportionately to capital and to skilled labour in advanced economies, while the costs, lost manufacturing, weakened unions, regional decline, fell on a narrower and less influential constituency. The Anglo-American turn to easy credit after 2000 was, in this reading, a substitute for the wage growth that globalisation had suppressed. Households maintained living standards by borrowing against rising house prices. When the credit channel broke, the political settlement it had sustained broke with it.

The global-order lens

Through the lens of international order, 2008 was the moment the unipolar story frayed. The crisis originated in the United States but was managed by a G20 that now included China, India, and Brazil as principals. The Federal Reserve's dollar-swap lines, which lent dollars to foreign central banks to stop the global banking system from seizing, quietly acknowledged that American stability was a global public good and that no other state could yet provide it. But the symbolism was unmistakable: the committee that mattered had enlarged. The crisis did not end American primacy, but it dated the beginning of its erosion.

Case study: dating the Anthropocene Intermediate+

The Anthropocene is unusual among the frameworks of this unit because it turns on a stratigraphic question: is there a single, globally correlatable marker in the rock record that marks the boundary? The Working Group on the Anthropocene considered several candidate "golden spikes."

Radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing. Detonations from 1945, and especially the early-1950s thermonuclear tests, distributed plutonium, caesium, and strontium across the planet. These appear in sediments, ice cores, and tree rings as a sharp, synchronous, worldwide signal. This is the leading candidate and aligns with the onset of the Great Acceleration.

Plastics, fly ash, and concrete. Microplastics now appear in sediments from river deltas to deep-sea trenches. Spheroidal carbonaceous particles from coal combustion, and the sheer mass of poured concrete, the most abundant human-made material on the planet, leave durable stratigraphic traces. These markers thicken through the 20th century and confirm the human signature even where isotopes are ambiguous.

Carbon and climate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, now above 420 parts per million, exceeds any level reached in the last several million years. Unlike the stratigraphic markers above, the climate signal propagates indirectly, through warming, sea-level rise, and ecological shift, making it a context for the boundary rather than a single horizon line.

The case matters because the date chosen determines the story. A 1950s start frames the Anthropocene as the unintended consequence of post-war industrial exuberance. A deeper "early Anthropocene" or a colonial-era "Orbis spike" would frame it as the cumulative consequence of agriculture or of European expansion. Whichever prevails, the exercise shows how a technical geological question carries a moral and historical one: when did humanity become responsible for the planet?

Institutional analysis: the G20, BRICS+, and the post-Western order Intermediate+

The shifting order is visible in the institutions through which states coordinate, and in the new ones they have begun to build.

From G7 to G20

The Group of Seven, the wealthy industrialised democracies, was the informal steering committee of the late 20th century. The crisis of 2008 made it inadequate. The G20, which adds China, India, Brazil, Russia, and other large economies, was elevated to the leaders' level that year and became the crisis-management forum. Its Pittsburgh summit of 2009 designated it the "premier forum for international economic cooperation." The shift acknowledged a fact the G7 could no longer conceal: the largest problems, financial stability, trade, climate, could no longer be solved without the states whose weight had grown.

BRICS and its expansion

The original BRIC acronym described four large emerging economies expected to shape the century. After formal summits from 2009 and South Africa's addition in 2010, the grouping established the New Development Bank in 2014 as an alternative to the World Bank, without the structural-adjustment conditions historically attached to its loans. The 2023 Johannesburg summit and 2024 expansion added major energy producers, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Egypt. BRICS is not a bloc with a single policy; its members are democracies and autocracies, energy exporters and importers, rivals and partners. Its coherence lies in a shared insistence that the institutions of global governance no longer reflect the distribution of power and wealth they claim to represent.

Friend-shoring and the return of industrial policy

By the 2020s the logic had moved further. Supply chains built for efficiency were re-evaluated for resilience and for geopolitics. The United States imposed export controls on advanced semiconductors to China and passed major industrial-policy legislation to rebuild domestic manufacturing in chips and clean energy. The European Union spoke of "de-risking." Economists debated whether "slowbalisation" rather than full deglobalisation was the more accurate description: trade as a share of output had plateaued, even as the absolute volume of trade remained enormous. The trend was consistent: the single global market was giving way to a pattern of aligned but partially separated spheres.

Exercises Intermediate+

Competing perspectives Master

Was 2008 the moment globalisation broke?

The claim that 2008 "broke" globalisation admits three readings, each defensible.

The first holds that the crisis broke the narrative of globalisation. The Washington Consensus had presented lightly regulated, integrated markets as the rational endpoint of development. The sight of governments rescuing private banks at public expense discredited the claim that markets knew best. As Wolfgang Streeck argued, the crisis exposed a capitalism kept alive by state guarantees, its dynamism dependent on the very public authority it had spent decades denigrating. What broke was legitimacy, not trade.

The second reading holds that 2008 broke the mechanics of hyperglobalisation. Trade as a share of world output plateaued in the years that followed. Supply chains were lengthened no further. Capital flows, though large, became more segmented. On this view the crisis marked the top of an S-curve: the single global market reached its practical and political limits and began, slowly, to re-bundle into regional and political clusters. The word "slowbalisation" was coined to capture exactly this flattening rather than a reversal.

The third reading denies that globalisation broke at all. Absolute trade volumes remain enormous; the digital economy integrates services across borders as goods never could; financial markets are as interconnected as ever, merely re-routed. What changed was the rhetoric, not the structure. Each reading selects different evidence: narrative polls and trust surveys for the first, trade-to-GDP ratios for the second, absolute volumes and digital flows for the third. The honest conclusion is that globalisation changed character rather than disappearing, and that the label "broke" is a metaphor carrying more argument than it can bear.

The Anthropocene: geological epoch or political concept?

Whether the Anthropocene is admitted as a formal geological epoch remains contested within the International Commission on Stratigraphy. The debate is technical, but its stakes are not. Admitting the epoch formalises the claim that humanity is now a planetary force, with all the responsibility that implies. Resisting it preserves a cleaner boundary between natural and human history.

A further contest concerns the very name. Some scholars prefer the "Capitalocene," locating the driver not in humanity in general but in a specific system of capital accumulation and fossil energy. Others propose the "Plantationocene," tracing the transformation to colonial monoculture. These are not pedantic refinements. They answer a load-bearing question: is the crisis the work of the species, of a system, or of a history? Different answers point to different remedies. To name the driver "humanity" spreads responsibility evenly, perhaps too evenly, across those who contributed least. To name it capital or empire concentrates responsibility, and therefore obligation, on specific actors and lineages. The geological and the political cannot be separated, because the act of naming the epoch is itself a political act.

Advanced analysis: the coupling of globalisation, backlash, and the Anthropocene Intermediate+

The three forces of this unit are not parallel. They are coupled, each intensifying the others in ways that no single framework captures.

The globalisation-Anthropocene coupling

The same architecture that integrated the world economy integrated humanity's pressure on the planet. Global supply chains spread extraction across borders: the minerals for electronics mined in one region, the manufacturing emissions billed to another, the consumption occurring in a third. This geographic separation between cause and consequence is the structural form of the climate injustice examined in 32.26.01. The atmosphere does not record where a tonne of carbon was emitted on behalf of whom; it records only the tonne. Hyperglobalisation externalised environmental cost as efficiently as it externalised labour cost, and for the same reason: the price did not have to be paid where it was incurred.

The backlash-Anthropocene coupling

The political consequences of the Anthropocene feed back into the politics of globalisation. Climate policy requires coordination among states that do not trust one another and that bore unequal responsibility for the problem. When that coordination is perceived as imposing cost on ordinary workers in wealthy countries while exempting rising emitters, it becomes fuel for exactly the populist backlash that blocks climate action. The gilets jaunes protests in France against a fuel-tax rise, and the political fragility of carbon pricing in several democracies, illustrate the bind. The Anthropocene demands collective restraint; the backlash demands sovereignty and cheap energy. The two impulses collide directly, and the institutions designed to mediate between them are precisely those whose legitimacy the financial crisis eroded.

The multipolarity-Anthropocene coupling

Multipolarity complicates the Anthropocene further, because the largest future emissions, and the largest vulnerability to them, lie in states now contesting the order. China is both the world's largest emitter and its largest producer of clean-energy technology. India's development pathway will do more than any single factor to shape mid-century emissions. The states most exposed to sea-level rise are, with few exceptions, not those most responsible for the warming. A stable climate is a global public good, but the provision of global public goods is hardest precisely when power is fragmented and mistrust is high. The shift from one superpower to several did not make the Anthropocene easier to manage; it raised the coordination cost of every solution.

Why the coupling resists single-cause stories

The coupling is the reason no monocausal account of the 21st century survives inspection. The financial crisis was not merely a banking accident, because its political residue hardened the backlash that paralysed climate policy. The Anthropocene is not merely an environmental problem, because its solution runs through a global economy whose legitimacy is in question and an order whose rules are contested. Multipolarity is not merely a redistribution of power, because the new powers hold the keys to the planetary boundaries the old powers breached. To study one of these forces in isolation is to misdescribe all of them. The 21st century's defining difficulty is precisely that its crises are entangled.

Connections Master

• The 21st-century overview 32.26.01. This unit is the depth companion to the overview. Where 32.26.01 surveys the full field of the century, from the War on Terror to COVID-19 to the movements for racial and gender justice, this unit concentrates on a single argument about the convergence of financial crisis, Anthropocene, and multipolar shift. The overview supplies the wider context; this unit supplies the analytical spine and the worked frameworks, Rodrik's trilemma, planetary boundaries, the dating of the Anthropocene, that organise the detail.

• Globalisation and the neoliberal order 32.25.01. The consensus this unit describes in crisis was constructed in the decades covered by 32.25.01. The Washington Consensus, the freeing of capital, and the institutions of the post-1989 order were not features of nature but the products of specific policy choices whose consequences, the China shock, regional decline, the credit substitute, became the backlash examined here. Read the two units as cause and consequence.

• The digital revolution as a history of technology 33.07.01. This unit treats digital networks only as a political and economic force, the amplifier of both globalisation and its backlash. The technical lineage of computing, the semiconductor, the internet protocol, the operating system, the artificial-intelligence model, belongs to 33.07.01. The two units divide cleanly along the line between the history of the machine and the history of its effects on the world order.

• The Cold War and the unipolar moment 32.24.01. The unipolar moment that this unit dates to its decline was the direct inheritance of the bipolar order described in 32.24.01. The alliances, the habit of reading every conflict through a global ideological frame, and the assumption of American centrality were all forged in the Cold War and carried, at first uncritically, into the 1990s. Understanding what is now ending requires understanding how it began.

• The Industrial Revolution and the roots of the Anthropocene 32.18.01. The Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century that marks the Anthropocene's leading edge rests on a fossil-fuel economy whose origins lie in the industrialisation treated in 32.18.01. The cumulative emissions that have warmed the planet were laid down across two centuries; the stratigraphic signature is merely their sharpest expression. The Anthropocene is, in this sense, the geological ledger of the Industrial Revolution's success.

Historical and philosophical context Master

The end of the "end of history"

Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" argued that the collapse of Soviet communism left liberal democracy without a serious ideological rival ^{[Fukuyama 1989]}. The remaining struggles would be technical, not civilisational. The essay captured the mood of the unipolar moment so completely that its thesis became, for a generation, the unspoken assumption of policy.

The 21st century has not been kind to that assumption. The rise of an authoritarian-capitalist China, the democratic backsliding examined in 32.26.01, and the populist backlash against globalisation all suggest that ideological contest did not end so much as change form. Fukuyama himself later conceded that the demand for recognition, what he called thymos, could turn populations toward identity politics of a kind the original essay had underestimated. The end of the "end of history" is itself a historical development: the recognition that the 1990s were a specific conjuncture, the unipolar moment of American dominance, rather than a permanent condition.

The political trilemma recovered

Dani Rodrik's trilemma gave the backlash a coherent intellectual frame ^{[Rodrik 2011]}. By naming the incompatibility among deep integration, democracy, and sovereignty, Rodrik predicted that the political costs of hyperglobalisation would eventually be rejected at the ballot box. The prediction was made in 2011, before Brexit and Trump, and its subsequent vindication gave the framework unusual standing. Its philosophical interest lies in its refusal of a free lunch: every globalisation regime embodies a choice about whose preferences count, and that choice, once made, forecloses others. The trilemma is a reminder that economic integration is never merely economic; it is always, at the same time, a settlement about political authority.

The Anthropocene as a philosophical challenge

Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that the climate crisis collapses the old distinction between natural and human history ^{[Chakrabarty 2009]}. For the modern historian, nature was the stable backdrop against which human events unfolded. In the Anthropocene, the backdrop has become a character, reshaped by the very species whose story it was supposed to frame. This is not a small adjustment of method. It dissolves the boundary between the natural sciences, which study a world independent of human intention, and the human sciences, which study a world made by it. A species that alters the planet's carbon cycle, its coastlines, and the survival prospects of other life forms can no longer write its history as if it were enacted on a stage it did not also build.

The deeper philosophical question is normative. If humanity is now a geological force, what would count as acting responsibly at that scale? The institutions developed across the last few centuries, the nation-state, the market, the international order of sovereign equals, were built for a world humanity did not yet knowingly control. The Anthropocene asks whether those institutions are adequate to a responsibility none of them was designed to hold. Paul Crutzen's framing of the "geology of mankind" was meant to make that responsibility visible ^{[Crutzen 2002]}, and the visibility itself is part of the condition it names.

Bibliography Master

Primary sources and key scientific articles:

1. Crutzen, Paul J. "Geology of Mankind." Nature 415 (2002): 23.
2. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. "The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?" Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614-621.
3. Rockström, Johan, et al. "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity." Nature 461 (2009): 472-475.
4. Steffen, Will, et al. "Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet." Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 1259855.
5. Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. "The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Recommendations." Anthropocene 19 (2017): 3-4.
6. G20. Washington Summit Declaration. 2008; London Summit Final Communiqué. 2009.
7. BRICS. Johannesburg II Declaration. 15th BRICS Summit, 2023.
8. UNFCCC. Paris Agreement. United Nations, 2015.
9. IPCC. Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023.

Modern scholarship:

10. Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Allen Lane, 2018.
11. Rodrik, Dani. The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. W.W. Norton, 2011.
12. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard University Press, 2014.
13. Milanovic, Branko. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2016.
14. Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System. Verso, 2016.
15. Mounk, Yascha. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press, 2018.
16. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
17. Fukuyama, Francis. "The End of History?" The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.
18. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222.
19. Mahbubani, Kishore. Has China Won? PublicAffairs, 2020.