Bersenevskaya nab., 14, building 5A
119072 Moscow
Russia
The most pressing issues we face today—from greenhouse gas emissions to deadly viruses—are planetary in scale and scope. Yet the failure of the international community to steer a safe path away from danger could not be any clearer. The pandemic exposed fatal shortcomings in the dominant mode of global organization, developed during 30 years of neoliberalism up to the 2008 financial crash. Since then, a window has emerged for new modes of intervention and societal recomposition, where economics and policy are built to fit the scale of our dilemmas. The existing model of global governance carries with it the imprint of Euro-Atlantic geopolitical culture.
Elsewhere it is contested by China’s vision for a world order embodied in the Belt and Road Initiative, a megascale engineering project that will span many years into the future. While the neoliberal era aimed at dismantling state barriers to the movement of capital, the Belt and Road is focused on constructing networks for trade and domestic economic development, often by indebting partner nations. The technical, spatial, and temporal dynamics of these competing global models clearly differ, but what is their standing with respect to the planet—the underlying “thing” they intend to organize? Are there hints of an alternative model of planetary governance somewhere in the tension, which could rise to meet contemporary challenges? And most importantly: could the infrastructures already in place—physical, legal, and digital—be used for more innovative purposes, accommodating collective decisions about how we want the world to be remade?
All Under Heaven: Sоvereignty and Infrastructure After Globalization by Seiche and Strelka Mag is a project that explores how waves of globalization have shaped and reshaped political, social, and economic paradigms over the past century, stretching and bending the meaning of sovereignty. In a series of conversations with experts in modern history, law, anthropology, and media studies, Seiche takes the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a case study for understanding the physical and non-physical networks that are the backbone infrastructure of an emerging world order.
The project features an essay by Seiche collective and five conversations on the shifting role of sovereignty in an era of transnational and extrastate networks, with expert input from Ryan Bishop, You Mi, Quinn Slobodian, Matt Ferchen, and Murphy Mok.
All Under Heaven: Sоvereignty and Infrastructure After Globalization is supported by Design Trust Seed Grant and Strelka Institute.
Seiche team: Mikhail Anisimov, Yulia Gromova, Tomas Clavijo, Katya Sivers, Andrei Zhileykin.
Research Advisor: Lukáš Likavčan
Editors: Philip Maughan, Theo Merz, Timur Zolotoev, Lynsey Free
The concept was initially conceived during the 2018 The New Normal program at Strelka Institute. Program Director: Benjamin Bratton. Design Faculty: Nicolay Boyadjiev, Maria Slavnova.
