Is our world broken, and what can we do to fix it? The book The World Is Broken sets out to answer this question.
The book starts from the stories of people who are most affected by the failures of the international system, like a Palestinian peace activist whose ten-year-old daughter was killed by an Israeli soldier, or a Filipino climate change diplomat whose brother disappeared in a superstorm.
Building on these stories, The World Is Broken looks at the systems humanity created to address global warming, economic crises, international pandemics and war and terrorism. The book shows how our inability to address these four global crises is a symptom of the undemocratic structures at the heart of our postwar international system.
Governing the international system democratically is a radical idea, but also common-sense in a very real way: According to polls it is supported by majorities of societies around the world, in the rare cases normal people are asked how they want the world to be governed. These majority-held views just need to be activated: normal people holding these views need to organize into political action and political movements.
But do normal people have the power we need to fix the world?
The book’s optimistic message is that the we do have the power, and therefore the responsibility, to fix our world. Civil resistance, a social change methodology, offers a path to achieve that necessary change, and fix our broken system of global governance. Civil resistance have led movements of normal people around the world to victory, especially against undemocratic structures: from the crusade that won votes for women, through the campaign that won India’s independence against colonialism to US civil rights movement; from the present-day global climate movement to the protests for black lives — each of these examples shows how civil resistance can be used by normal people to win against the strongest opponents, including undemocratic powerholders.
The result of over 10 years of research, The World Is Broken by Shimri Zameret will be published by Beacon Press in 2025.
Buy the book to learn how normal citizens in the 21st Century can fix our broken world by radically democratizing it, using tools that time and again throughout history helped movements achieve liberty, equality and justice.
