Surviving Chaos
We live in an explosive world. Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next – from pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions – the old rules of global order are collapsing. Mark Leonard reveals how geopolitics is being rewritten in an age of 'Un-Order', where no one agrees on the rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in international politics between the grand 'architects' who try to build a stable global system and the nimble 'artisans' who adapt, improvise and survive amidst disruption. China, he shows, has embraced the artisan's mindset, while Europe and the West cling to the fading certainties of the architects.
Reviews
"Mark Leonard has written a highly readable and important exploration of the new world order... He gets beneath and beyond the myths and caricatures of all too much foreign policy debate. His insights into Chinese thinking should be essential reading for policymakers in the West, while the advice he gives to Europe is well worthy of our leaders' attention. For a book that is so short, he has a lot to say that deserves to be heard."-Alistair Campbell, co-host of The Rest Is Politics
"Mark Leonard's writing always bristles with ideas and insight. His new book is both sweeping and granular, refreshing and realistic. Surviving chaos starts with understanding it, and Mark's book helps us do that."- David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee, former British Foreign Secretary
"Surviving Chaos is yet another of Mark Leonard's brilliant books. In this chaotic world, he gives all of us a lucid analysis of what is going on, and clear policy recommendations on what we should do. Recommended reading for both the ivory tower and the engine room."
- Alexander Stubb, President of Finland
"Written with calm authority, this book stands out for its conceptual ambition and disciplined analysis. Leonard resists both nostalgia and fatalism... His strength lies in his ability to compare ways of thinking rather than merely cataloguing events... a book that sharpens how readers understand power, change and adaptation in today's international system."- Jude Blanchette, Distinguished Tang Chair in China Research; Director, RAND China Research Center
"At a time when great powers and new actors are rewriting the geopolitical rules of the road, Mark Leonard's Surviving Chaos offers compelling ideas on where we are, where we're headed and what we can do to protect our common future."- Ian Bremmer, President and Founder of Eurasia Group
"An extremely absorbing, constructively critical, and heartfelt book. It offers a compelling way forward in this unordered world."- Comfort Ero, President and CEO of International Crisis Group
"Leonard is a force of nature, leading creative intellectual thought across Europe and globally for the past two decades. In describing a world of unorder, Surviving Chaos disrupts conventional thinking and forces us to reckon with the possibility that today's world may become a permanent state of affairs, not the transition from one order to the next that scholars have assumed. Leonard's analysis is as sharp as it is creative and captures the underlying drivers of this change—the exponential growth of the global economy, skyrocketing CO2 emissions, the rapid growth of computing power, and the mushrooming of the world's population—in today's geopolitics."- Leslie Vinjamuri, President and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs
"Mark has looked at the world as it is now, not how we wish it to be. An honest, almost brutal analysis of the trends Europeans need to see with eyes wide open and equip themselves to either compete or witness a civilisational regression. Mark has this unique ability to tear down complexities and present the historical and contemporary explanations for the chaos that is revealing itself incoherently to most. A must read for anyone trying to understand this moment of transition from order to unorder."- Hina Rabbani Khar, former Foreign Minister of Pakistan
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Mark Leonard
Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of ECFR. He hosts the weekly podcast “Mark Leonards’s World in 30 Minutes” and writes a column on global affairs for Project Syndicate. Previously, he worked as director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform and as director of the Foreign Policy Centre. He has spent time in Washington, DC as a transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. In September 2021, he published his last book The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict.