The war in Ukraine has marked an ominous year for Europe, which has felt the fragility of its energy supply and lost ground in its efforts to face the climate crisis. After two years of pandemic, the weakening of logistical networks has made globalization recede, and the geopolitical fracture caused by the conflict has curbed commerce and prosperity even further. As France’s President Emmanuel Macron has pointed out, “the era of abundance is over.” This decline, which is accentuated now but began with the 2008 crisis, and which has triggered populist movements on the continent, affects even more dramatically a large part of Africa, where a food crisis and a demographic boom has brought on uncontainable migration flows, America has had its own problems, with the political and economic instability of Latin America and the deep social divisions of the United States, still recovering from the toxic impact of Trump’s presidency, while in Asia China has experienced a lower growth trend partly as a consequence of the isolation imposed by its zero-Covid strategy, and India has tackled its population explosion with ethnically and religiously divisive policies...[+]