On January 16, CEBRI held the event "Discussing the book 'Fractured World: Reflections on the Crisis of the Liberal Order'", aiming to foster critical reflection on the transformations and uncertainties of the contemporary international landscape.

The meeting featured diplomat Diogo Ramos Coelho, author of Fractured World, a book that explores the fractures of the global liberal order, addressing themes such as the rise of autocratic regimes, the crisis of multilateralism, and the intensification of geopolitical rivalries.

Drawing from the author's experience as a diplomat at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, the book examines the profound process of transformation in the global order since the end of the Cold War, with a focus on the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The book revisits the promises of the post-1989 world, raising essential questions: What worked? What failed?

To address these questions, the author analyzes the foundations that sustain and structure the contemporary international order, expanding the analysis to include philosophical, social, economic, and political dimensions. These foundations encompass the ideas that shaped the worldview, international institutions and regimes, economic globalization, and communication and network technologies.

The debate included the participation of Ambassador Benoni Belli, Senior Fellow at CEBRI and Brazil’s Permanent Representative to the OAS; Carlos Milani, Senior Fellow at CEBRI and Full Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at UERJ; Ambassador Gelson Fonseca, one of CEBRI's founders; and Lia Valls Pereira, Senior Fellow at CEBRI and Adjunct Professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). They provided insights into the challenges of the contemporary liberal order and possible paths toward a more stable and inclusive international system.

Ambassador Benoni Belli, who authored the book’s preface, remarked: As the author aptly described, we are witnessing the return of geopolitics and geoeconomics, which manifest in the disengagement of powers from international regimes, the pursuit of unilateral solutions, or approaches based on a new idea of balance of power with echoes of the 19th-century international system.

Watch the full debate HERE.