From the rise of a Western-dominated system in the 19th century to today’s increasingly plural and contested global landscape, Professor Barry Buzan took the audience, who attended his Distinguished Public Lecture on 9 April 2026, on a sweeping journey through two centuries of world order.
In his lecture, Professor Buzan offered new periodisations and established an understanding of how we got to where we now are, as well as where we might be heading. The focus of the lecture was on the political, economic and social transition from a world order dominated by the West – the first world order on a global scale – to a second global scale world order marked by a much wider diffusion of wealth, power, knowledge, agency, and political and cultural authority.
This new world order is deeply divided on the question of climate change and the unfolding Anthropocene crisis. How that conjunction between a socio-political transformation in global politics, and a mounting crisis between the development of humankind and the carrying capacity of the planet, works out is the defining question for the future.
Professor Barry Buzan was the visiting Ngee Ann Kongsi Professor of International Relations at RSIS and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at The London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom.
Watch the lecture here:
