As the first quarter of the 21st century gently folds into history, humanity finds itself pausing not out of leisure, but out of necessity. Time, which once seemed abundant at the dawn of the new millennium, has moved with astonishing haste. The years since 2000 have not unfolded evenly; they have surged, collided, and reshaped the world with a force few could have anticipated.

Looking back at the past twenty-five years is like surveying a vast landscape marked by dazzling achievements, deep fractures, silent revolutions, and unresolved questions. It is a period that has tested human intelligence, ethics, resilience, and imagination like few others before it. The century opened with an air of confident optimism. The Cold War had ended, ideological binaries appeared exhausted, and globalization promised a borderless world driven by free markets, technological innovation, and shared prosperity. Nations spoke the language of cooperation, and the internet emerged as the great democratizer of knowledge. What began as a modest network of information soon transformed into a digital universe that altered how people learned, worked, loved, protested, and governed.

Advertisement

Emails replaced letters, video calls bridged continents, and digital platforms created new economies while dismantling older ones. Yet, with every door technology opened, it also revealed shadows – surveillance, data exploitation, addiction to screens, and the erosion of privacy. The illusion of a peaceful global order was abruptly shattered in September 2001. The terrorist attacks on the United States did more than destroy buildings; they reshaped the world’s political psyche. Fear became a dominant currency, security a consuming obsession. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed, altering the geopolitics of West Asia and exp o sing the long-term consequences of interventionist policies. Terrorism evolved into a........

© The Statesman