Paradoxes of global landscape

Letter October 03, 2020
As the populist leaders exploit the disillusioned by showing them the façade of “manufactured community”, coronavirus outbreak has made matters even worse

KARACHI:

Undeniably, the present era has been one of the most unsettling ones in the history of international politics. As states gathered for the 75th session of UNGA, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has stressed for the need to revive multilateralism and global cooperation more profoundly by reiterating the need to “repair broken trust in the broken world”. The quest to revive multilateralism has become far more challenging given the fact that the world remains divided, as regional powers start to rewrite the rules of global liberal order in turn leading to the erosion of peace.

Noreena Hertz in her recent book, The Lonely Century highlights the crisis of the contemporary era through illuminating the sharp paradoxes of the global landscape. The writer observes that the dynamics of the contemporary world order and concludes that even though the world is more interconnected than ever, it is also atomised. Although international solidarity is imperative to tackle non-traditional security threats such as climate change and the novel pandemic, unity remains elusive. Followed by the rise of right-wing populism, the writer reaches to the conclusion that two-thirds of the people living in democracies feel that their governments are not acting in their interests. Coupled with the anguish people feel due to social distancing measures and respective lockdown situations imposed because of Covid-19, the globalised world is becoming more disconnected with physical reality than ever before. Thus, the greatest irony or paradox lies in the fact that even in this global political economy where individuals’ lives and state affairs no longer reside within their territories, people find themselves isolated and lonely.

As the populist leaders exploit the disillusioned and the vulnerable by showing them the façade of “manufactured and branded community”, the coronavirus outbreak have made matters even worse by eroding the ties that bind the people of other states and governments from one other. Such conditions provide the platform for extremist leaders to govern global politics which end-results being destructive as politics of intolerance and bigotry will return more ferociously than ever.

Hadia Mukhtar

Karachi

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3rd, 2020.

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