During the hey days of the Covid pandemic, and especially post Covid pandemic there was lot of talk of world starting with a ‘new normal’ in terms of multilateralism, whereby not repeating the mistake of countries becoming much more inward looking, blurring the line between self-interest, and selfish interest, for instance, in terms of practice of ‘vaccine apartheid’, and politics in terms of wrongly creating an air of xenophobia among demos instead of blaming neoliberal and ultra-nationalist mindset as reasons behind economic misery faced by demos – especially in the wake of ever rising happenings of climate change catastrophes.

Sadly, this thinking of a ‘new normal’ has been increasingly lost in the years that followed the end of Covid pandemic, which urgently needs to be re-kindled, with a global push towards a three-pronged policy based on economy, ecology, and epidemiology, so that climate change crisis could be effectively dealt with, along with reaching SDGs related targets in a timely manner, especially since the pace of progress towards both the climate change-, and SDGs related goals has unfortunately continued to remain very slow up till now.

Existential threats and Neoliberalism—I

Instead, similar to what happened in the HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’ that became a global phenomenon over the last decade or so, while countries continued with power politics, under ultra-nationalism, and protecting the politico-economic extractive institutional design status quo – including continuing with the practice of keeping weak policies towards money laundering, off-shore accounts acting as safe-heavens for mainly ill-gotten money, or money saved from tax jurisdictions (rather than fixing some rough edges of tax system), and a lack of a meaningful wealth tax – they forget that the ‘winter is coming’, and within it the ‘White Walkers’, to borrow a famous phrase of that drama, and very dangerous enemies of mankind in that drama serial, which overall meant very hard times were coming, and need to be related to in terms of thresholds of climate change as being fast approached that will reportedly bring irreversible changes in climate globally, and overall life as we know it.

Hence, conflict may be in the shape of Ukraine-Russia war or the crises in the Middle East and Kashmir, especially given such conflicts also holding the catastrophic potential of being serious nuclear flashpoints – not to mention........

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