The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions

Globalization reflects the fundamental fact that the human journey, from our common roots in Africa until today, has always been a shared one. Our reality as a global species was not self-evident through most of our history, because life seemed to be local and because other tribes, races, and empires seemed to be implacable foes. Yet the great reli

The faith leaders and ethicists identified three moral precepts common to all of the world’s faiths. The first is the Golden Rule, the principle of reciprocity: Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you. The Golden Rule is found in the teachings of Confucius and of Jesus, in Hindu texts, and in Kant’s categorical imperative. The

The UN Security Council currently has fifteen members, the P5 plus ten rotating seats with two-year terms and no veto power. The rotating members are elected by five regional groupings: Asia (two seats), Latin America (two seats), Africa (three seats), Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) (two seats), and Eastern Europe (one seat). Thus, combinin

As of today, there are 193 UN member states, covering nearly the entire world population. Yet in important operational ways, the UN remains a twentieth-century institution guided by rules laid down by the United States in 1945. Most importantly, at the end of World War II, the five victorious allied powers (the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and Uni

The challenge of globalization from the earliest days of humanity has been the lack of consensus. Our species, exquisitely evolved for cooperation within our clan, is equally primed for conflict with the “other.” In a world that has the ability to “end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” as President John F. Kennedy eloquently

So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small pl

We are left, in the end, with a need, a hope, and a conundrum. The need is to steer the new age of globalization so that our energies are directed toward ending human poverty rather than human life. The hope is that across the world’s societies and religions there are common ethical underpinnings. The conundrum is how easily we nonetheless fall pre

The term United Nations was originally applied to the anti-fascist alliance in World War II led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. It then became the appellation for the successor body to the League of Nations. The new United Nations organization was established in 1945 under the UN Charter and assumed its home in New Y

8.10 Planetary Boundaries Source: J.