Existential Threats: Real and Imagined

March 29, 2026

Existential Threats: Real and Imagined

Event Series: Barcelona, March 2026

The awareness of existential threats to humanity is growing–from climate collapse and pandemics to AI takeover to nuclear catastrophe. While these threats loom large in our collective imagination and feature in our literature, their specific contours are ill-defined. How should we think about the category of existential threat? Does the term obscure the differential impact that threats pose–for example to the powerful and to the weak? And might an emphasis on threats impede an innovative and creative politics oriented towards a more hopeful future?

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Participants

Kohei Saito

Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024. Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is an acclaimed British Pakistani author known for creative fiction and commentary that address contemporary global issues. His recent novels include The Last White Man (2022) and Exit West (2017), which received the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His book The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and later adapted into a successful film. Hamid’s engagement with themes of political turmoil, cultural displacement, and shifting individual and collective identities informs his influential essays on contemporary affairs in leading outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Paris Review.

Ece Temelkuran

Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a leading analyst of the erosion of democracy and the challenge of populism on a global scale. She is the author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now (2021) as well as the acclaimed How to Lose a Country. The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship (2019). Her novels are published in several languages. A frequent contributor to the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, and other leading outlets, she is the recipient of the PEN Translates Award and the Freedom of Thought Award from the Human Rights Association of Turkey. In 2023 she received the El Mundo Award for her body of work.

Gavin Jacobson

Gavin Jacobson is a writer and critic. A former commissioning editor at the New Statesman, his work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the New Republic, and the New Statesman. He writes on Asian history and politics and is currently part of the team at Equator.