Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Mosbacher Director of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science, Stanford University. He has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book is Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018.
An agreement brokered between Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the UN permits cargo ships to transport grain from Black Sea ports again. But assurance of mine-free safe passage is a way off. And behind the negotiations are manoeuvres that reflect long-term political, economic and societal implications.
Francis Fukuyama’s argument that far-right identity politics were pioneered by the left has been criticized as blame-shifting. But this is a partial reading, he counters: identity politics are inherent to the democratic ethos and rooted in modernity itself. Understanding their use by the far-right enables us to form a response.
In ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the global spread of liberal democracy signalled the conclusion of humanity’s sociocultural evolution. In view of populism, inequality, Islamism and mass migration, how has Fukuyama’s thought developed in the intervening twenty-five years?
