GEAB Special issue July

The ‘world-after’ is a phrase which was probably uppermost in most people’s minds during the period of global lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. For the authors and readers of the GEAB, it is nothing new; this phrase has been at the centre of our anticipatory analyses since issue No.28 of October 2008. At the time, the LEAP team spoke of the world-after September 2008 (or ‘post-September-2008 world’), named for the climax month of the subprime crisis in which the collapse of Lehman Brothers occurred. Since January 2006, when the first GEAB issue was published, the bulletins have been chronicling the global systemic crisis with the aim of helping everyone to prepare for the world to which it was to give birth…right up to the anticipation of what we have called a ‘stabilisation phase’ that we entered in the early months of 2020 via the current crisis. That a health, economic and social crisis of such magnitude could give rise to a form of stabilisation of global geopolitical relations might seem paradoxical to some, but not to the assiduous readers of our newsletter and research work, where the 2020 horizon has been adopted since the beginning of the millennium.

Having reached this date and deadline, it seemed important to us to take stock of our archives, to draw up an inventory of the trends anticipated, successfully or not, over the past fifteen years or so, and to start offering a ‘historical’ reading of the painful birth of the third millennium. This is the purpose of this special summer issue.