Beyond Nation-States: A New Reading List for Understanding Global Politics Today

This summer offered snapshots of a world in turmoil. OpenAI models escaped their test environment and hacked into a rival company’s server. President Donald Trump launched a trade war with Canada while continuing to threaten to seize Greenland. Wars in the Middle East, Sudan, and Ukraine raged with no end in sight. July was the hottest month on record.

This is a moment of escalating global upheaval and uncertainty. The alliances and institutions of the international order built and led by the United States after World War II are unraveling in real time. More of the world is at war than at any point since 1945. And planetary-scale disruptions—climate change, artificial general intelligence, and zoonotic diseases—pose existential risks for humankind.  

Despite all this change, mainstream world politics education remains stuck in the theories and mental models of the mid-20th century. For the most part, students are still taught that nation-states are the predominant, often sole, actors that matter in global affairs; that power is primarily a function of GDP and military strength; and that foreign policy is guided by rational national self-interest.  

I think about this often, both as visiting faculty at Arizona State University and Oxford and as co-lead of a growing global network of scholars and practitioners working to revitalize world politics instruction for the twenty-first century. We need fresh ways of thinking about power, governance, and international relations—not just for understanding the reality of the world today, but also to reimagine an international system that could actually advance peace, prosperity, and human flourishing.

With school back in session, here is a reading list of six essential texts for the student of world politics today. 

A Logic for the Future: International Relations in the Age of Turbulence
Stephen Heintz

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence itself; rather it is ‘acting with yesterday’s logic,’” writes Heintz in this report. After unpacking the assumptions and practices of today’s system of international relations, he presents the elements of a new logic, one rooted in a pragmatic idealism: Human survival depends on recognizing our deep interconnectedness with one another and with the planet. In proposing pathways for applying this new logic, such as reforming how diplomats are trained, Heintz’s report is also a call to action, opening with a quote from the German philosopher Hannah Arendt: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it.”

The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection for a Networked World
Anne-Marie Slaughter

Starting from a young age, we are taught to see a world of countries—maps with neatly drawn boundaries. But Slaughter notes that there is also a world of increasingly numerous and complex networks: financial markets, flows of data and information, migration routes, international NGOs. Understanding and operating in today’s world, she argues, requires a dual perspective, being able to see the competitive chessboard of state-based international politics, as well as this dense web of nonstate actors.

After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order
Rana Dasgupta

A world organized under nation-states is a new phenomenon. In 1900, most people lived under an empire, city-state, principality, or some other political arrangement. Dasgupta makes the case that not only is the nation-state system impermanent, but it is also failing. Nations are suffering crises of legitimacy and state power is declining relative to private interests. Massive technology companies have emerged as powerful new geopolitical actors. Rich in its diagnosis of the current order, Dasgupta’s book is less robust in its prognosis for what should come after nations. 

The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence
edited by Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Abraham L. Newman

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S.-Israeli attacks on the country, it exposed a deeper truth about how power flows in our densely globalized world: less as a function of raw military or economic strength, and more so about the ability to control the networks of finance, energy, and technology upon which modern societies depend. This collection of essays—spanning theory and case studies of how states weaponize interdependence—is essential reading for understanding conflict and competition today.

Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises
Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman

The world is facing unprecedented threats—viruses, climate change, AI risks, and beyond—that transcend national borders. And yet managing these problems is up to national governments, whose authority and interests are limited to their geographic boundaries. In this important volume, Blake and Gilman call for global governance based on “planetary subsidiarity,” the idea that a problem should be managed at its appropriate level: local matters handled locally, national problems by the nation-state, and planetary problems, like the atmosphere, oceans, or the internet, managed by planetary institutions. The authors acknowledge that national leaders are unlikely to cede authority to higher bodies anytime soon. But without a governance system fit to planetary realities, human existence will be precarious. 

The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Dipesh Chakrabarty

This ambitious work of history and philosophy argues that climate change has forced the collapse of the distinction between human history and natural history—one that underpins our conception of world politics and economics. Humans are now a geological force, reshaping the atmosphere, oceans, and entire ecosystems; and “the planet” is not just an inert backdrop for human affairs but an actor in its own right. Acknowledging our planetary reality means rethinking not only international relations, but our fundamental ideas about human progress and agency.