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Is Our Civilization Collapsing?: The Prospects for International Conflict and the Future of Contemporary Global Civilization - Couverture souple
Synopsis
Is Our Civilization Collapsing?
By Dr. Anwar Anaid
Is Our Civilization Collapsing? examines the forces shaping contemporary global civilization. It asks: is humanity approaching systemic decline, international conflict, and civilizational collapse?
Drawing on more than a decade of research, Dr. Anwar Anaid brings together political economy, international relations, history, sociology, philosophy, and environmental analysis. Rather than treating war, climate change, inequality, and social fragmentation as separate crises, the book shows how they interact within a single global system.
At the center of the study is “homocentric reasoning”: a human-centered worldview that places human interests, economic expansion, and mastery over nature above the ecological systems on which civilization depends. Anaid traces this outlook through religion, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, industrialization, nationalism, and the global spread of capitalism. He contrasts it with the “reasons of nature”—the ecological, and evolutionary realities that operate independently of human preferences and political ambitions.
The book also presents an original interpretation of violence through predation and anti-predation. Conflict, it argues, has often arisen from attempts to seize the production, resources, territory, or productive capacities of others, together with efforts to resist such predation. Modern capitalism and the internationalization of production have reduced some incentives for conquest by expanding productivity, trade, and economic interdependence. Yet they have also redirected much of humanity’s predatory pressure toward nature, producing ecological degradation, and tension between economic expansion and environmental limits.
The analysis examines the achievements and contradictions of global capitalism, including profit, competition, innovation, trade, and the allocation of capital and labor. It also considers geopolitical shifts. The result is a portrait of an interconnected civilization whose economic foundations depend on cooperation even as political rivalry encourages division.
Anaid explores divisive populism, nationalism, territorial ambition, and renewed competition among major powers. He questions whether “reason of state” remains adequate in a world of global supply chains, environmental interdependence, and technologies whose effects cross borders. Policies that appear rational from one state’s perspective may become irrational from the standpoint of humanity as a whole.
The book also addresses the ideological vacuum that followed the Cold War, the revival of nationalist and religious movements, materialism and consumer culture, and pressures created by increasing global economic inequalities and weakened collective purpose. Environmental decline emerges as the clearest sign of the conflict between homocentric development and the reasons of nature.
Placing the present within a historical cycle of ascendance, transition, and decline, the book offers a cautionary assessment. Great-power rivalry, political polarization, weakening international trust, ecological pressure, and renewed patterns of predation may produce conflicts of unprecedented scale.
Yet this is not only a diagnosis of crisis. The concluding chapters consider how decline might be avoided through the “reasons of humanity”: a framework recognizing the shared interests of a globally interdependent species. Anaid argues for stronger and deeper international cooperation, reform of the global political economy, and sustainable production.
Ambitious in scope and urgent, the book will appeal to readers of global affairs, political economy, international relations, environmental studies, philosophy, and futures studies, as well as educated general readers seeking a deeper understanding of the interconnected crises of the twenty-first century.
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