Global Dialogues

Our global future looks bleak. Existential threats crowd the horizon, from climate disaster and pandemics to runaway AI and nuclear annihilation. Failing domestic politics and international diplomacy, driven by destructive power politics, are not meeting our shared global challenges. Without a change of direction we may face a future of environmental collapse, public health crises, technological dystopia, and cataclysmic war.

What might such a change of direction look like? What can we hope for? How can we shape the future instead of awaiting it passively?

The world’s great philosophical and spiritual traditions recognize two root causes of our contemporary crises–unchecked egoism and the lust for power—as perennial threats to human flourishing. But they also hold out the possibility of transformative change through moral regeneration and social renewal. Shifts from conflict to cooperation can arise from new power dynamics. But they can also grow out of personal and collective conversion—an emotional-spiritual turn from enmity to community and from grievance to reconciliation.

The possibility of conversion—attested to in human experience and thematized in art and literature—is a cause for hope in our divided world.

Across the ages individuals and families from hostile groups have reconciled through intermarriage and cultural exchange. Rival religious, racial, and ethnic communities have abandoned violence for peaceful coexistence—and even mutual respect. And nations that have fought wars have become enduring allies. Such transformations, less visible than protracted conflicts, always involve struggles for resources and recognition. But they can rarely be reduced to those power dynamics. Reconciliation that endures involves an element of conversion; it has an irreducible emotional and spiritual dimension.

Literature can accompany and encourage such transformations. Great stories often relate people and communities caught up in conflicts but open to possibilities for far-reaching change. They show how such transformation can take place, through gradual learning, changes of heart, and spiritual renewal—often at great cost. They provide examples of hope, even amidst apparently hopeless conditions. Some of the greatest novels of the last several decades have drawn on the experiences of the Global South—societies torn by the experience of colonialism and economic and political exploitation have also shown tremendous resiliency and solidarity in the face of adversity.

Bringing Writers and Youth Together

In an era of unprecedented existential threats bringing writers into dialogue with university students and a wider public will open more space for hope in our global future.

We should not expect young people, collectively, to be more hopeful about the state of the world. Many are caught up in the same tribal nationalism and divisive politics as their older contemporaries—and even more subject to the polarizing algorithms of social media. They are welcoming AI into their lives at a faster pace, as both assistants and companions, leading us into a new world of machine-human interaction. And they do not expect political elites to solve the climate crisis or abandon war as a tool of statecraft.

At the same time, many young people are hungry for hope about the future—it is their future. They are looking for inspiration. They have a greater intellectual curiosity and openness to dialogue than their elders, who are more set in their ways. And they have a more global orientation, having travelled more and been exposed to more international cultural influences than older generations. Given the rise of social media and AI, university students are less likely to experience literature than in previous younger generations. Or they encounter it in an academic setting where it merely seems another discipline in which to secure good grades. The global dialogue between writers and youth, so critical if we are to nurture new sources of hope, can and should take on new forms.

Through webinars, online forums, and in-person gatherings in Doha and Yogyakarta, GGD will bring students together with writers to imagine ways forward in a divided world. Students will learn about literature as a social and political force, and writers will benefit from the insights of young people who will forge the world of tomorrow.