The Global Challenge

Abstract

The rise of populism, hyper-nationalism and hard-core right-wing ideology, which is threatening to erode democracy, has been a global concern over the last five or six years. These relatively recent essays constitute a discourse on political economy to understand the origins of this ‘new politics’, and the risks that it constitutes for the world. The essays examine various factors that gave rise to this, from the availability of new, digital technology for mass communication, to the limitations of human language for parsing our complex world with multiple participants from different social backgrounds where the same words have different meaning. The essays cover different geographies—from United States and Brazil to India—and different methodologies to examine this new global challenge