By Dr Bertrand Ramcharan
Seventh Chancellor of the University of Guyana.
Previously Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
‘Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century’ is the title of a highly regarded 2022 book by Professor Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. Her telling conclusion in the book is: “How… democracies can be sustained as the likely contests over climate change and energy consumption destabilize them will become the central political question of the coming decade.” We need to add, in the Guyanese context, the lethal ethnic politics in our fragile and contested democracy.
Thompson thinks that in order to mitigate against the possibly destructive nature of the politics to come, collective understanding will need to catch up with what the conjunction of physical realities about energy and the realities of climate change entails. On top of this, there is the ever-present risk of geopolitical conflict, including over territory where critical resources are located – such as Guyana.