With violence erupting in Syria, Gaza, and the Ukraine, the world, it seems, is sliding into the greatest of dangers. The talk is already of a new Cold War, and the world's governments are in need of urgent solutions to prevent the rapid-fire spread of open hostility. Against this backdrop of violence and uncertainty, we present a two-part interrogation into the shifting sands of world politics. In Part I, Rana Mitter argues that Russia is still flexing its muscles and China lacks a global agenda. America remains the dominant player on the global stage, he believes, for now at least.

Not so, says Martin Jacques in Part II. When you go to China, he argues, you will never think of the world in the same way again. With China on the march to economic dominance, the days of the West are numbered. But we must remember, he argues, not simply to use a Western template to think about what China is going to be like. The future of the world will be very different.

Away from the front lines, the culture wars have returned – as if they ever went away. Back in September we published on IAI News a typically forthright interview with leading biologist Lewis Wolpert, in which he argued in no uncertain terms that science transcends culture and there is nothing that art can ever hope to offer the sciences. Predictably perhaps, but nonetheless to a greater extent than we had imagined, Wolpert’s arguments created something of a furore. Clearly relations between the arts and the sciences are not as rosy as some would have us believe.