Document Database

Since the end of the last century, the world has been facing a set of challenges that the existing institutions are unable to address and solve. This is a fact that has been confirmed over the last thirty years through a succession of all kinds of crises. Citizens have found that the beautiful ideal of freedom preached by free-market sycophants is just a facade set up to conceal the altar of greed. The Forum for a new World Governance explores these changes in this extensive work, only available in Spanish for the moment, accomplished by ten enthusiastic writers.

In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear disaster put the dangers of current energy policies on the table again, while the Arab Spring triggered the tectonics of a region that was supposed to be politically static. After Rwanda, the Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have joined the growing list of wars, which we had promised to abolish forever. At the same time, conferences like the one in Copenhagen or Rio have invariably led to statements that illustrate the absence of capacity and political will to truly address the global environmental crisis. Meanwhile, the “Occupy” and “Indignados” movements have shown the growing gap between governments and citizen mobilizations. The former have been unable to become a engine of change while the latter are leading citizen resistance but are still failing to influence the course of events.

The Forum for a new World Governance has tried to capture and analyze these changes and others, convinced that the answers to these crises must be provided by citizens themselves. This is the perspective in which it has published the Diccionario del Poder Mundial (Dictionary of World Power). The dictionary format makes it possible to navigate through the mazes of our changing history, with constant comings and goings between the past, the present, and future, and to move through the rich complexity of its 108 entries. The topics dealt with are remarkably diverse, ranging from Globalization to Governance of Space, from China to International Law, from World Economy to Ressentiment. From traditional entries like War and Peace, to surprising ones like Poetry or Football. The Dictionary also gives prominence to history as well as to prospects. In the same perspective, it juxtaposes practices and the theories often underpinning them. Some entries are devoted to individuals and others to notable events, but in general, purely biographical and historical entries have been limited to the benefit of theme-based ones.

The team behind this work is constituted by university graduates from all the continents with experiences on the field all over the world. It includes, among others, a veteran of UN peacekeeping operations, an elected representative and environmental activist, an independent French-Chinese intellectual, a political scientist raised under American Cold War orthodoxy, a freedom fighter from the South American anti-dictatorship struggles, and a Global Justice movement activist.

Find here the new online version of the dictionnary