Sublime

We live in disturbed times. There are more people displaced than at any time since the Second World War. Most of these 65 million uprooted people remain within their own countries, but nearly a third – over 20 million – had no alternative but to cross a border. When they did, they became refugees.

(Saskia Sassen, Domus, 2011)

Le plus inquiétant est la tentative de mobiliser l’opinion en inventant le terme de « réfugiés climatiques ». Selon moi, le lien entre le changement climatique et les migrations est extrêmement faible. La notion de « réfugié climatique » est la plupart du temps une exagération délibérée, conçue pour canaliser la peur des réfugiés vers la peur du

Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those

State weakness and failure along with civil wars will remain relatively common given the many factors that bring about intrastate conflict and violence. Somalia remains a failed state thirty years after it collapsed, while over the past decade Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have all

And finally, an obvious consequence of all four is accelerating inequality between those who do and do not own capital, who are and are not able to get to front of the queue for artificial finance, and who do and do not make malinvestments in their own human capital on false price signals.

Even more, the imperative to collectively manage the regional and ultimately global commons – those resources of the world that are critical to life and over which no private body or nation can have exclusive ownership – is a more compelling reason to attend to these transnational efforts. Today regionalism can become an emergent, albeit unstable,