COMMANDING HOPE

“Homer-Dixon [is] one of the best-informed and most brilliant writers on global affairs today.”
– The Guardian

From Canada's #1 best-selling thought leader: Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink.

For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? has examined the threats to our future security – predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called The Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was.

Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically – too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, and more authoritarian.

In his fascinating long-awaited new book (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values.

Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, or “Tad” as he is known to his friends and colleagues, is Director of the Center for the Study of Peace and Conflict at the University of Toronto, and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. After studying for two years at the University of Victoria, he moved to Ottawa, where he received his B.A. in Political Science from Carleton University. He then founded a national student organization that encouraged debate on the ethical implications of scientific research, and he traveled widely overseas.
Tad began graduate work in Political Science at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied international relations, defense and arms control policy, and conflict theory. He also read widely in social psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind and language, and environmental science. After completing his Ph.D., he moved to the University of Toronto and, in the subsequent eight years, led several international research projects examining the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. In recent years, his research has focused on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

Besides The Ingenuity Gap, his books include The Upside of Down, Carbon Shift, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence and, coedited with Jessica Blitt, Ecoviolence: Links among Environment, Population, and Security. Dr. Homer-Dixon has been invited to speak about his research at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell Universities, UC Berkeley, MIT, West Point, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He twice briefed Al Gore during his tenure as Vice President of the United States.