The interdependence of economies, polities, and societies at the world scale is a defining feature of current world dynamics. Patterns of cooperation and conflict take shape in different ways depending on the actors’ visualization of the interdependencies at the global scale so that framing world interdependence is of crucial importance to understand world dynamics. The conference, which is part of our Academy’s ‘Future of Humankind’ initiative, will provide a global forum of discussion to scholars engaged in analytically understanding the evolution of world dynamics as a process involving a plurality of mechanisms, viewpoints and intersecting trajectories. This approach presupposes attention for path dependence (different actors may visualize world interdependence in different ways reflecting their different histories) as well as the analysis of the circumscribed, yet open-ended, future paths that actors may follow in addressing the possibilities for cooperation and conflict. The themes of the conference reflect this approach. World interdependence in history provides analytical tools for interpreting current developments and prospects. Against this background, the relationships between resources, climate and energy regimes are a defining feature of the ways in which different subsystems interact with one another, reflecting global opportunities and constraints and influencing them. Possibilities for cooperation and stability are fundamentally shaped by the way in which actors (such as countries and systems of countries) visualize mutually consistent systemic (global) constraints and opportunities, and act within mutually compatible time horizons. The conference aims to provide analytical tools for identifying perspectives and trajectories of interdependence at the world scale.

INET’s Participation:

• Monday, March 31^st at 15:40 (CET) Thomas Ferguson presents, “From Whole Earth to Rare Earths: Industrial Structure, Bloc Politics, and Raw Materials in the New World Economy”
• Tuesday, April 1^st at 14:30 (CET) Rob Johnson presents, “Finance, Fiscal Stress, Domestic Turmoil, War, and Peace in a Multipolar World”