“40 maps to understand a fractured world”, a special issue of “Le Monde”

Special issue. Gaza, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sahel. Four wars, four illustrations of a fragmented and disoriented world order, whose entanglement and violence worry humanity and threaten peace, especially in the Middle East, where the risk of conflagration is significant. Heirs of a XX^e century known for its multiple tragedies and injustices, these conflicts resurface at a time when the world is painfully emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic and when questions arise about the convulsions of a globalization that is nevertheless irreversible.

The combination of the resurgence of interstate wars, the persistence of irregular conflicts and the non-lethal crises that cover the planet complicates the progress of the world and affects the international system in its foundations. Because this systemic crisis remains difficult to read, the special issue of World “40 maps to understand a fractured world” (116 pages, 11.90 euros) aims to facilitate understanding around maps revealing a changing world.

The architecture of peace put in place in the 20th century^e century is it in the process of collapsing, with a West affected in its acquired power and a heterogeneous global South, but ready to redefine the rules of multilateralism by taking greater account of the affirmation of an extra-Western time? If the West is no longer the scribe of history, the rest of the world is not in a position to write the rest. The game remains open but close, because the war in Ukraine has become the new matrix of balance. If the fire is limited, for the moment, to the Ukrainian space and its surroundings, the Russian-Ukrainian or Russian-Western conflict, or, by extension, Sino-American, is widening well beyond, against a backdrop of deadly global tensions.

Growing inequalities

As a result, in the first quarter of the 21st century^e century, this world in transition is not just a vast site of international rifts; it is also conducive to intersocial conflicts where power competitions are coupled with rivalries between the demands of liberalism and the defense of social achievements. These are sources of growing inequalities and solidarity between people from one culture to another, from one continent to another, against any mercantile logic, ever more brutal and deregulating of the ecosystem and States. -nations.

These upheavals also extend to the ecological and political spheres. Climate disruption and its repeated disasters are accompanied by political disruption where democracies, out of breath and incapable of regenerating, are – without knowing it – providing fodder for far-right movements and fueling confrontation with autocratic regimes, who aspire to reinvent the world.

By closing this atlas of a fractured world, readers might then be tempted to ask themselves: will humanity have the resources necessary to overcome this juxtaposition of crises? It is up to those who govern and those who are governed to ask themselves the question, because the risk of moving from a fractured world to an explosive world can no longer be excluded.