In this episode of Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett invite author Richard Cockett to retrace Vienna’s ideational footprint around the globe. Together with their guest, they discuss the famed „Red Vienna“ and its anti-progressive „Black“ (as Cockett calls it) counterpart, touch on the origins of the term sexual revolution, and shine a light on the Viennese émigrés—women especially—whose legacy remains widely influential today.

Richard Cockett is a journalist, historian, and academic. He is currently a senior editor at The Economist newspaper and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He was previously a lecturer in history and politics at the University of London, and has written several books about British and world history. His most recent book, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2024), has earned numerous critical accolades.

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Shifting the conversation to the present, the trio examines how stigma and hierarchy continue to shape the behavior of both rising and declining powers, from China and Russia to Europe and the United States. Are today's turbulences best understood through familiar 20th-century analogies, or do the upheavals of the 17th century—marked by climate stress, technological disruption, and prolonged instability—offer a more unsettling parallel? As strongman politics resurges and the nation-state itself comes under pressure from digital platforms and concentrated private power, the episode asks what kinds of order might emerge next and how long we may have to navigate a world without one.

Ayşe Zarakol is a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge. The main themes of her research are East-West relations and social hierarchies in world politics, problems of modernity and sovereignty, and rising and declining powers. She is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which has won six prestigious awards. In 2024, Zarakol was elected to fellowship in the British Academy and the Academia Europaea.

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In this episode of Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett explore Stalin’s competing quests for security, resources, and legitimacy, Khrushchev’s nuclear brinkmanship from Berlin to Cuba, and the unraveling of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Together with their guest, they examine how China emerged as Moscow’s greatest geopolitical nightmare, how misunderstandings shaped the end of the Cold War, and why Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has become a catastrophic gamble for all involved. They also unpack early, little-known peace negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow—and what recent diplomatic maneuvers reveal about the shifting global balance of power.

Sergey Radchenko is a Russian-British historian who currently teaches at the Henry Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Radchenko grew up on Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East before studying in the United States and the United Kingdom. He is the author of several books about the Cold War and has published extensively on nuclear history and Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. His latest book, To Run the World (Cambridge University Press, 2024), won the prestigious Lionel Gelber Prize in Canada this year. He regularly writes for publications such as The Guardian.

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Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist and author covering artificial intelligence. Having previously worked as an application engineer for a digital startup, a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, Hao regularly writes about tech and AI for high-profile publications like The Atlantic. She also leads the AI Spotlight Series, a program that trains journalists to cover AI. Her 2025 book, Empire of AI, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

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Timothy Snyder holds the Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Since 2008, he has been a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where he leads the Institute's Ukraine programs. Snyder is the author of numerous critically acclaimed books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), and, most recently, On Freedom (2024).

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To make sense of this unfolding new world order, Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett are joined by renowned Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan who has studied great power conflicts, war, and the international order for decades. In this episode, she draws parallels between past and present conflicts and unpacks the historical context and potential consequences of this global power reshuffle.

Margaret MacMillan is emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Professor of International History and the former Warden of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988, 2007); Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2001) for which she was the first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize and Nixon in China: Six Days that Changed the World (2007). Her most recent book is War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020) which was in The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Geographical Society of Canada, and Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. MacMillan is also a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum and a Board Member of the IWM.

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In this conversation with American journalist Eoin Higgins, Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett explore how the relationship between the tech industry and US politics evolved and delve into the ideologies uniting the so-called tech bros and their strategic goals for politics in the US and Europe.

Eoin Higgins is an American journalist and historian covering tech, US, and world politics. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The New Republic, The Nation, and more. He also writes for Morning Brew’s tech newsletter IT Brew. Higgins is the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.

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Inspired by Martin Luther and the Reformation, peasants across the German-speaking world fought for a radical new vision of freedom. Roper brings to life the peasants' fears, joys, and struggles while exploring how they rose up against their lords, what ideals fuelled their rebellion, and, crucially, what their fight can teach us for today's crises.

Lyndal Roper is Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, specializing in the history of the Reformation and the early modern period in Germany. She is the author of a widely acclaimed biography of Martin Luther. Her new book Summer of Fire and Blood (German title: Für die Freiheit) explores the Peasants' War of 1525.

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Mark Medish is an American lawyer and policy consultant with extensive experience in government and international affairs. During the Clinton Administration, he served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council , as well as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury. He has also held senior roles at USAID and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Medish is Director and Vice Chair of Panterra, a strategic consultancy, and founder of Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit organization dedicated to civic education and democratic governance. Medish is also member of IWM’s Board of Trustees.

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Rosie Boycott is a member of the House of Lords and has a distinguished career as a journalist, publisher, and author. She served as the editor-in-chief of several British newspapers and co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib. Beyond her media career, Boycott is a well-known food activist, specialising in food and environmental politics and legislation. She was also chair of the London Food Board and advised the city's government on sustainable food policy.

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Dahlia Scheindlin is a political and strategic consultant, and policy analyst at Century International. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and other publications. Scheindlin is also the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023).

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Julie Klinger is an associate professor of geography and spatial sciences at the University of Delaware. She publishes on rare earth elements, natural resource use, the energy transition, and outer space, and is the author of the award-winning book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press, 2018).

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Mark Galeotti is the director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and an Honorary Professor at University College London. A specialist in Russian politics and security, he has worked for the British Foreign Office, headed the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, and studied at Cambridge University and the LSE. A prolific author, he has some 30 books to his credit, most recently Forged in War: A Military History of Russia from its Beginnings to Today (Osprey Bloomsbury, 2024).

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Nils Gilman is a historian and currently the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of the Berggruen Institute, an LA-based think tank developing ideas to shape future institutions. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004), Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (2011), and, most recently, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (2024).

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Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Walt is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, commenting regularly on global affairs. His most recent book is The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (2018). From September to December 2024, he is a Guest of the Institute at the IWM Vienna.

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Our hosts Misha Glenny is the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences and one of the BBC’s most distinguished correspondents, as well as the presenter of the highly-praised podcast How to Invent a Country. Eva Konzett is a renowned editor and reporter for Vienna’s leading news magazine, Falter. Future Discontinuous: Smart Talk with Smart People is a co-production of FALTER and the IWM Vienna.

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