On 1 December, a guest lecture was delivered by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Distinguished Professor of Global Studies and Sociology. The lecture was organized by the Beauty and Inequality Research Team and addressed the current global condition marked by multiple, overlapping crises and shifting power relations.
The lecture argued that today’s economic, political, and geopolitical crises cannot be understood in isolation. Instead, they are closely connected to the historical transformation of global capitalism and the gradual decline of established hegemonic powers, alongside the rise of new actors in the global order. These developments point toward a multipolar world that is no longer organized around a single dominant center.
It was emphasized that capitalism under conditions of multipolarity and multicrisis takes diverse and uneven forms across regions. Moving beyond linear and single-model interpretations, the lecture invited a more nuanced understanding of global crises as embedded in complex, historically contingent, and plural configurations of power and political economy.
