Book Review: Richard Falk, Manoranjan Mohanty and Victor Faessel, eds, Exploring Emergent Global Thresholds: Towards 2030
| Author | Raj Kaithwar |
| DOI | 10.1177/0973598418783400 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Book Review
Richard Falk, Manoranjan Mohanty and Victor Faessel, eds,
Exploring Emergent Global Thresholds: Towards 2030. Delhi: Orient
Blackswan, 2017, 371 pp., `1,050, ISBN 978-93-86392-42-8.
The book under review explores what are the fears and hopes of a social
and political order in the near future. As the editors say, it is an imaginative
work which nonetheless is grounded in normative ideas of envisioning a
more just and humane world for humans as well as ‘for all species’ as we
enter the new epoch of the Anthropocene. The edited volume examines
how some of the contemporary crisis points, such as issues of knowledge
production, world order, secularism and nation-state, to name a few, could
or should shape up a decade later. The editors argue that the speculative
thinking of the contributors remains relevant in understanding the dominant
discourses of the present and distant enough to create plausible alternatives
for the future.
In terms of the methodology the editors underline that they ‘held
conferences of invited participants in New Delhi with the idea of testing
and exploring the viability of this conceptual frame’ (Falk 2017: 3).
The justification for having India as the standpoint is to see how the
‘plural Indian civilization’ thinks about these issues as it has been heavily
impacted by globalization. However, what is not mentioned is the process
of deciding upon the invited participants or how the topics to be covered
were selected out of the vast array of options which could have made
the cut.
Each of the chapters in the volume address quite a diverse range of
issues but for the purpose of analysis it can be argued that chapters by
Vinay Lal, Manoranjan Mohanty, Achin Vanaik, Nivedita Menon, Neera
Chandhoke, and Rajeev Bhargava have a strong normative bent. Their
chapters situate a concept in a historical frame and critically examine its
Jadavpur Journal of
International Relations
22(2) 208–212
2018 Jadavpur University
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0973598418783400
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/jnr
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