6: Politics shouldn't be at the Dinner Table

Who gets to make the rules?

Chapter 5 ended with a deceptively simple realization: health is never only about health. Who receives a vaccine, who can afford treatment, whose neighborhood absorbs environmental risk, whose knowledge counts during a crisis, and whose suffering becomes statistically acceptable are all shaped by institutions, resources, histories, and choices. Eventually, every one of those questions runs into politics. And this is where things get interesting.

Politics is sometimes taught as a world of elections, presidents, constitutions, political parties, and people arguing on television. Those things matter. We often say politics shouldn't be brought to the dinner table, but global politics is considerably bigger and much messier, and in fact we should talk about what is happening in the world at dinner. We don't live in a vacuum and it's import to have a strong understanding about what is happening politically in the world around us. Politics is about power: who has it, how they got it, what they can do with it, what limits it, and what happens when other people refuse to accept it. In a globalized world, those questions no longer stop neatly at national borders. Governments regulate what happens inside their territories, but financial markets can move billions of dollars across those territories in seconds. Digital platforms headquartered somewhere else can shape what citizens see before an election. Corporations can possess revenues larger than the economies of some countries. International organizations establish rules governments voluntarily accept and later sometimes resent. Wars can disrupt grocery prices on another continent. Refugee movements can become central issues in elections thousands of miles away. A political decision made in one capital can ripple through supply chains, energy markets, security alliances, migration routes, and your bank account before you have finished wondering why any of it matters.

Welcome to global politics.

The central tension of this chapter is not simply globalization versus the nation-state. States have not disappeared, and globalization has not produced one seamless political community. Political authority has instead become layered, contested, and uneven. Governments operate alongside international organizations, corporations, regional blocs, cities, social movements, Indigenous nations, armed groups, digital platforms, and transnational networks. Susan Strange (1996) famously argued that globalization was changing the relationship between states and markets. The more interesting question today is not whether power disappeared from the state, but where power moved, how it changed form, and which actors gained the ability to shape the rules.

For a brief moment after the Cold War, some observers believed they knew where all of this was heading. Francis Fukuyama (1989, 1992) famously suggested that liberal democracy might represent the endpoint of humanity’s major ideological evolution. Markets were expanding, democratic transitions were occurring across several regions, and international institutions appeared increasingly influential. The future looked surprisingly settled. The world of 2026 does not look particularly settled.

Democratic backsliding, authoritarian resilience, resurgent nationalism, Russia’s war against Ukraine, conflict across several regions, intensifying U.S.-China competition, debates about migration and sovereignty, technological rivalry, and growing distrust of political institutions all complicate any story of inevitable convergence. At the same time, international cooperation has hardly disappeared. Governments still negotiate treaties, regulate trade, coordinate health responses, share intelligence, cooperate on disasters, participate in international organizations, and attempt (sometimes successfully and sometimes spectacularly unsuccessfully) to manage problems no country can solve alone.

That contradiction is the chapter. Globalization connects political systems without making them agree. It produces interdependence without eliminating rivalry, spreads norms without guaranteeing compliance, and can weaken some forms of state authority while strengthening others. Rather than asking whether globalization has made states obsolete, we will ask something more useful: Who makes the rules in an interconnected world, who can ignore them, why do people accept some forms of political authority and reject others, and what happens when competing visions of the world collide?

Because politics is not something happening somewhere else. The global arrives locally in the availability of medicine, the jobs in your community, the information on your screen, the passport you carry, the products you can buy, and the rights you can exercise. Chapter 6 follows those connections all the way to power.