Interview – Jason Pack
Jason Pack is the founder of the consultancy firm Libya-Analysis LLC, Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defence College Foundation in Rome, and Associate Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society in London. He is the Founder and Director of the NATO & the Global Enduring Project, which produces a range of content (including the forthcoming podcast ‘Disorder’) that investigates the unique features of our current era of geopolitics. Pack lived in Tripoli in the late-Gaddafi period and has visited most years since then. He has held senior positions at the Middle East Institute, the U.S.-Libya Business Association, and the American Chamber of Commerce in Libya, all of which focused on helping Western governments, think tanks, and corporations understand and operate in the Libyan environment. He holds degrees from Williams College, the American University in Cairo, and Oxford University. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus in 2004-5 and a PhD student in History at Cambridge University from 2011-2015. Pack’s most recent book is Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
There is a growing consensus in the community of Western policymakers, the world of think tank fellows, the academic political science field, and among pundits that the last few years of international affairs were fundamentally different to what has come before. For many, this era constitutes a new historical epoch that is structurally distinct from the post-Cold War era. Many have contextualized the broad outlines of this moment as the decline of American hegemony and the rise of China, but I profoundly disagree with this framing of our historical moment.
I support the camp of historians and International Relations scholars who have begun analysing this era as characterized by ‘Disorder’. I started using this concept long before Russia’s February 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine and even prior to Trump’s ascendancy to the White House. My small contribution to this line of analysis centres around the idea that we are living through an era of Global Enduring Disorder (GED) – i.e. a period of planetary disorder that is self-reinforcing and can only end when enough political will is generated by ‘the forces of order’ to overcome this centripetal pull. I use the GED concept to convey that the traditional phase of multipolarity – or restoration of the balance of power, or even a struggle among rival ordering systems – has been skipped. Instead, the superpowers have all, at times, sought to promote the GED, which is marked by a rise in neo-populist leaders (i.e. Trump, Putin, Bibi, and Orban), collective action failures on climate change and tax havens, increasing societal fissures and security challenges emanating from unregulated cyberspace, “neo-mercantilism,” an ongoing struggle for global leadership, and other factors I discuss in Libya & the Global Enduring Disorder…
Read here…