The New Dark Age: The Decline of Global Systems

The Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (ICCS) launches a new Seminar Series with a visiting lecture from Professor Phil Williams, Director of the Matthew B. Ridgeway Center for International Security, University of Pittsburgh. Drawing on complexity theory and the notion of wicked problems, this lecture suggests that the world is heading towards a new dark age. The next few decades of the twenty first century will be characterized on the one side by the decline of governance, the long recessional of the Westphalian state, and the collapse of the rule of law, and on the other by multiple challenges including emerging geopolitical rivalries, the extension of conflict domains into cyberspace, the rise and ubiquity of violent non-state actors, population growth and urbanization, and global climate change, and hyper-connectivity. The mismatch between the scale and scope of the challenges and the capacity for managing them is likely to result in a profound crisis characterized by chaos and disorder, the rise of alternative forms of governance, and the northern expansion of the global south. Phil Williams holds the Wesley W. Posvar Chair in International Security Studies at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Williams has published extensively in the field of international security. In 2001 and 2002, Dr. Williams spent a sabbatical at CERT where he worked on intelligence analysis for cyber-threats and financial cyber-crime. Dr. Williams has worked more recently on terrorist finances, ungoverned spaces, and drug trafficking through West Africa.