Liberation Day was the day that disorder began. Donald Trump chose 2 April to present the new tables of Law, but his tariff commandments unleashed economic chaos and, like Moses upon descending from Mount Sinai, he was soon forced to break the tablet
The war warning of European elites has feet of clay. Robert Kagan coined in 2003 a metaphor that stuck: “On major international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” This was the opening line of his Of Paradise and P
appeasement The imperial presidency of Trump was inaugurated with a sequence of executive orders orchestrated like coups de théâtre, signed off with the bold strokes of a hyperbolic signature and exposed in performances worthy of an art biennia
Valencia’s ‘dana’ and Trump’s triumph set the coordinates of the year in Spain and the world. Just a week apart, the catastrophic flash floods of Tuesday 29 October and the landslide presidential election of Tuesday 5 November marked an inflection po
Blinded by the war flashes in Ukraine and the Middle East, we fail to see the agony of Sudan. The outcome of the conflict in Ukraine is very important for Europeans, and uncertain due to cracks in the support of the country in the East of the contine
First published in French, Le labyrinthe des égarés: L’Occident et ses adversaires (2023) and La défaite de l’Occident (2024) appear simultaneously in Spanish and present opposite versions of the decline of the West. Although both the Lebanese-born F
Marco Bellocchio released China Is Near in 1967, a satire of bourgeois decadence which mixed Catholic morals, electoral opportunism, and Maoist revolutionary dreams. The ironic proximity of China referred to its ideological influence on the young rad
The tragedy in Gaza is summed up in one image. The Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem captured with his camera the mourning of the world through two figures intertwined by pain: the 36-year-old woman Inas Abu Maamar embraces the body of her five
The 1914 sleepwalking elites are warmongers in 2024: Europe rearms in haste guided by leaders with no biographical experience of conflict. Those born after 1945 have lived on a continent that judged war on its grounds inconceivable, even if the disma
The year of artificial intelligence and of the war in Gaza has also been the one that has let the voices of the Global South be heard more clearly. After a year of universal use of ChatGPT, AI rises on the horizon as an extraordinary technological ad
Trade unites, and its paths weave a web that holds the world together. Faced with shrinking globalization, with many countries preferring geographical or ideological proximity in their exchanges, to defend the links created by commercial traffic is t
At the end of the past century, a world without walls seemed feasible; in the first decades of this one, walls spread without control. Many are physical, fragmenting the territory with inaccessible precincts; others are judicial, segmenting the popul
Like Samson in his captivity, Israel is eyeless in Gaza. Captured and blinded, the Israeli hero regained his phenomenal strength to tear down the columns that held up the temple and make his enemies perish with him. The Biblical story inspired a poem
This magazine has tried to cover the events that have marked our time, and so we did with the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers by the 9/11 attacks, the urbicide in the Balkan Wars, the lockdown during the pandemic, and the ongoing
After the worst part of the pandemic, the Ukraine war shook the world tracing an ominous geopolitical scenario, which only science advances seem to alleviate.
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford, and his works have a dimension commensurate with his planetary themes. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) was a bestseller which spread the world’s history onto zones like the C
Around 83% of global energy is generated by burning fossil fuels. So, the transition from our predominantly dirty production of energy to one which is clean is at the very heart of our combating global warming. There is also a moral dimension to the
Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, and Disorder gives a history of the 21st century where both the terms of her chair are interpreted from the prism of energy. As in her work of 2017, Oil and the Western Economi
While we discuss the price of electricity, the ghost of famine hovers over the world. It is energy we are talking about in both cases, but while exosomatic energy depends on social organization, endosomatic energy has biological boundaries. Alfred Lo
The eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands was the most dramatic image of a year of geopolitical mutations and pandemic recovery through vaccines.
The world has its eyes on the war waging in Eastern Europe, but the continent’s south has its own calamity: the tragedy of hunger, terrorism, and desolation.
Ukrainian Urbicide. Spurred by its journalistic spirit, Arquitectura Viva presents recent events and society's reactions to the war being waged on Ukraine through a semi-monographic issue that takes stock of its impact beyond the strictly architectur
Three decades ago the library of Sarajevo, disemboweled by shells, was the symbol of Balkanic urbicide, as documented in the 1993 article reproduced on page 24 of this Arquitectura Viva issue. Now it is a bridge outside Kyiv – blasted by the Ukrainia
Emmanuel Todd
Madrid 2024
Akal - 304 Pages
Amin Maalouf Occidente y sus adversarios
Ramón González Férriz Por qué la política se ha vuelto radical
Peter Turchin Élites, contraélites y el camino a la desintegración política
Michael Reid
New Haven 2023
Yale University Press - 336 Pages
Helen Thompson Hard Times in the 21st Century
José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec El Mediterráneo, de la guerra de Troya a las pateras
Daniel Yergin Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
