We are in the midst of a new world war, but it's not World War III.

Ours is not a total-industrial re-run of the Second World War. It is a pervasive logic of politics-with-violence that resembles gangsterism, and it plays out on a global political marketplace where power is bought and sold like any other commodity. This logic drives the contemporary great-power competition that results in so many cyberwars, gangster-style wars, and hybrid wars. It is responsible for the mass violence, starvation, displacement, and incarceration we see every day. It creates the situation in which crucial world-altering developments-financial hyper-bubbles, extreme technological acceleration, reckless overexploitation of the planet's resources-are immune to rational policy. We are left with imperial, disruptive, CEO-style rule answerable only to wild power.

Taking a wide lens to international history and contemporary global politics and violence, World Peace Foundation Executive Director Alex de Waal shows us that traditional liberal conceptions of world peace were designed for another era. In order to pursue major human priorities such as global health, poverty reduction, power over AI, and a solution to the climate crisis, we need to re-invent our thinking from the ground up.