"The problem, however, is that the nation-state is badly broken and no longer working for average people around the world.

Riven by deepening inequalities in education, opportunity, and income, plundered by powerful oligarchs who extract wealth and then move on, corrupted institutionally and constitutionally, the nation-state is failing badly as a guarantor of individual rights, liberty, and prosperity, writes the British Indian author Rana Dasgupta in his new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order.

And since Trump and his like-minded nationalists also hate globalism or any idea of international governance that leaves most people—the 99.75 percent of human beings on the planet who live in nation-states—with little to protect them and promote their pursuit of happiness.

The human race today is “politically naked,” concludes Dasgupta, a prominent essayist and novelist, in his compelling and brilliantly researched—if decidedly anti-Western—book.

The “nation-state system falls short of the most commonsensical conceptions of equality and justice,” he writes. “Since nation-states have monopolised our political life, that betrayal is existential: we have nothing else.” As a result, “the sensation of progress” developed over many centuries has been “replaced by the anxiety of futurelessness.”

This foreboding sense of “futurelessness” pervades a slew of new books that document the breakdown both of the international order and the national polities that are supposed to be caretakers of that order—but which are instead faltering or failing themselves."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/27/book-review-after-nations-dasgupta-westad-prasad-milanovic/

#Nationalism #NationStates #Globalization #Capitalism

"Nearly all of us on Earth live within a 'nation-state'. Nation-states are an invisible and seemingly inevitable and eternal part of the infrastructure that forms our society: the water we swim in. Rarely do we pause to consider how this global system of nation-states came into being, and what might replace it after its gone. But as the United States wages a war of aggression on Iran, in a move that will drive up oil prices and the cost of living for ordinary citizens all over the world, the question presents itself anew: who do nation-states serve; what are they for?

On Downstream this week is the author and essayist Rana Dasgupta, whose latest book, ‘After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order,’ tackles these questions head-on. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, they discuss: What is a nation-state? How did they come to replace the role of religion in the liberal era? Do states need their citizens to have rights? What are the most salient challenges to the nation-state today? And were the gains in workers’ rights of the last century a sign that progress and democracy will triumph in the end, or something more like a historical blip?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo88imJNWkU

#Nationalism #NationStates #Imperialism

#NationStates confirms #DataBreach, shuts down game site

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nationstates-confirms-data-breach-shuts-down-game-site/

#gaming #cybersecurity #privacy

So #NationStates has zombies for Halloween. A lot of my people are zombies. More are dead. I think they'll just....be...fine...

Regardless, have a zombie piping plover!

Every now and then I think about playing #nationstates again, which is a the silly browser based game where you run a country and every decision you make turns extreme and things go comically wrong.

The best part of it is really the roleplaying - because there's not a way for countries to fight with each other, people playing the game just decided to do forum based RPs where they play as characters from their countries, fight wars, and write elaborate guides to their imaginary countries.