Worlds In Crisis: A Special Issue of South Central Review

The current issue of South Central Review, “Worlds in Crisis.” is an experiment of sorts. It was borne of a recognition of burgeoning national, international, cultural, and climactic crises that are unprecedented in the new millennium. More than one commentator here and abroad has compared the current international situation to that of the political and economic crises of the 1930s, which led to the conflagrations of World War II and the Holocaust and then the advent of the Cold War. But that comparison does not take into account the many other ways our world is under extraordinary duress today. More than two decades ago, the Bulgarian/French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov stated in starkest terms that “the world is not getting to be a better place.” Sadly, Todorov’s assertion seems even more timely today. For this reason, South Central Review decided to undertake a preliminary inventory of the variety, diversity, and complexity of the critical situations we face that challenge our present as well as our future well-being.  This issue offers the results of that inventory.

What “crises” are we referring to here, and what does the word “crisis” mean? To what extent are the crises in question global, national, regional, local? To what extent are they political, economic, ecological, historical sociological, psychological, technological, and/or even existential? As the essays and the interview appearing here will confirm,  they are “all of the above”—and more.

Internationally, unless one has been living under a rock one is aware of the ongoing wars and crises in Ukraine, Gaza and the middle East and the rise of populisms here and abroad, not to mention the global as well as national impact of the re-election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Readers are also aware of the ravages of global warming and the climate crisis unless one chooses to deny that reality, as any number of political leaders and others have—and continue to do. There are also ever-present concerns about gender and racial equality, religious freedom, individual rights, and so on. And what AI and other technological developments are doing and will continue to do we are only beginning to understand—perhaps at our peril. Virtually all these concerns resonate on regional, national and even local levels as well—along with other matters of critical concern that blight our societies but with which we seem powerless, or lack the will, to deal. In this country alone, we continue to be incapable of confronting the threat of gun violence, or of understanding or caring about the very real and terrible costs of the capital punishment as well as the oft-hidden ravages of domestic violence.

In assembling this issue, we asked scholars in a variety of disciplines from the United States and abroad as well as politicians, journalists, public intellectuals, lawyers, and social workers to reflect on the crises that they see and that they grapple with in their professional as well as their daily lives. The result is a collection of twenty-three interviews, short reflections and scholarly essays that we are confident the reader will find stimulating, often unsettling, and occasionally disturbing. But we are also confident that the reader will emerge from these pages better informed about the world we live in.