Today, 30 June, Jason's ideas grace the hallowed pink pages of the Financial Times for the first time with his article, The west must work with Russia to save the Arctic.

You can probably buy it at newsstands near you until the end of today. Jason was able to write about this exciting and different domain thanks to the research assistant work of a young and upcoming scholar Edward Rhys Jones. Unfortunately, the article is behind a rigid firewall (although you may be able to access it as a new visitor or through an affiliated academic institution) and we are not at liberty to share a PDF. Therefore, by way of summary, we shall say it explores how amidst efforts to constrain further Russian aggression, there are areas we still need to work with Moscow on, notably climate change and the preservation of the Arctic.

The lack of strong collective action approaches towards the climate crisis is a crucial component in our era of disorder, and one we will see unfolding in the Arctic:

Russia has expanded its military presence in the high north in response to thawing sea routes. The invasion of Ukraine has led two previously neutral Arctic states — Finland and Sweden — to clear the last hurdles for Nato membership. If they can no longer act as brokers between Russia and the US on Arctic matters, rival military posturing will certainly worsen. China, which has its own Arctic ambitions, is seeking to establish a 'Polar Silk Road' — thus multiplying long-standing tensions on the northern Norwegian island of Svalbard…

Coordination with Russia and China without diminishing the West's ability to assist Ukraine or hold Moscow accountable is needed to prevent these possibilities from thawing into reality. As the tentative co-operation of the post-cold war era has eroded, the Arctic seemed to be the last bastion of a functional rules-based international order. Now, however, a combination of mutual distrust, sanctions and Ukraine-centred priorities threaten to make genuine collaboration difficult to achieve. Western governments must differentiate between areas of mutual interest and those which require a co-ordinated riposte to Moscow.

Martin Van Creveld, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and one of the world’s best-known experts on military history and geostrategy, reviewed Jason's book Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder last month. Van Creveld said the book was a 'must' for 'anyone interested in Libya and its relations with the rest of the world', commending Jason as an Arabist and for connecting Libya to a broader framework through which we can unpack global disorder:

If there is anyone who can even begin to make some kind of sense of the way Libya is going, both internally and in respect to its infinitely complex relations with the rest of the world, it is Mr. Pack. As the title of his book indicates, on the whole his vision of the future is not optimistic. Unless something dramatic (“global collective action”?) is done, Libya is likely to remain in as much of a mess as it has been at least since the beginning of the by now half forgotten “Arab Renaissance” in 2011. Unless something dramatic is done, too, that mess is more likely to spread to other countries—particularly in Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Europe–­than the other way around.

Sabina Henneberg's review of Jason's book, Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, published by Public Seminar on 15 June, commended Jason's work for highlighting and predicting the dynamics we are currently seeing in the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

At the same time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given fresh evidence that Pack is right about the growing danger of global disorder. In the immediate weeks following Russia’s push toward Kyiv, Western countries were forced to choose between imposing sanctions that would hurt their own economies and letting Russia’s actions continue unimpeded. Meanwhile, Russia’s permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council prevented the body, which is mandated to respond to international violence, from taking action.

As Pack makes clear, the presidency of Donald Trump was merely a symptom of the deep-rooted and systemic dynamics he describes, and its replacement by the Biden administration is doing little to reverse these trends. The chaos created by the United States’s retreat from Afghanistan in summer 2021 also serves as evidence that the decline of American hegemony is linked to a rise in global disorder.

Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder adds to the growing chorus of informed voices warning of the need for some kind of corrective action at the global level— whether new American leadership, reformed international institutions, or something else.