Conversation

This Russia thing is going to be a decade-long mess at this rate. A second-order collapse echoing the 90s. 😬 In the short term, the fate of Ukraine is the urgent crisis. In the long-term the collapse of Russia is going to really muddy global affairs.
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Syria was 18m in 2017, and stressed “solution by migration” patterns. Ukraine population is 43m, already too big to handle as a migrant crisis. The population of Russia is 143m. There is no migration-based solution except as marginal palliative. Only fragmentation or revolution.
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I’d like to see a “geopolitical faultlines” map of the world. Likely lines of fragmentation and unbundling/rebundling under acute crisis stress (climate event, military adventurism, extreme weather, bottom-up ethnic strife).
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Replying to
As a first order derivative, to get a sense of aggregate trends, Huntington offered civilization' as the differentiator. But everything of interest lies in the second derivative space, which is harder to "see". This, for eg, is him on how E. Europe splits incl thru Ukraine.
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the level of resolution that maximally explains conflict itself changes over time. In the history of political Islam, for eg, in 1920s, (ottoman) empire became means of analytical coherence; by 1950s, it was post-colonial nation-state; by 2010s, subnationalisms rose.
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