Podcasts · The Club of Rome Podcast

Understanding a multipolar world with Chandran Nair

25 Sep 2026 · 31 min · Episode 24

Is the shifting global order heading towards conflict, or can the world's many civilisations and worldviews learn to coexist? In this episode, Chandran Nair, founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and member of the Club of Rome, joins Nolita Mvunelo to unpack the tensions reshaping international relations.

Nair argues that today's flashpoints, from Ukraine to Gaza to Venezuela, stem from the West's difficulty in accepting the rise of other powers, and he challenges us to rethink what leadership, democracy and accountability mean in a crowded, unequal world. Tune in for a candid, provocative discussion on power, history and the search for a genuinely multipolar peace.

Transcript

Nolita: It is perhaps clearer than ever that the global geopolitical order is shifting. The question is, will this happen through force and disruption, or can we transition to a world where many civilisations and worldviews can coexist in mutual respect?

Today's guest is well-placed to explore these answers. Chandran Nair is founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, a Pan-Asian think tank based in Hong Kong, focused on advancing a deeper understanding of global issues, including the shift of economic and political influence from the West to Asia, and the reshaping of the rules of global capitalism.

His books include "Understanding China," "Dismantling Global White Privilege" and "Consumptionomics: Asia's Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet." In our conversation, we discuss how different worldviews are influencing the global landscape today and possible pathways to a more peaceful multipolar world.

Chandran, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to jump straight into the first question. So last year, in 2025, you released a book on Understanding China, which is a report to the Club of Rome and you reinforced the idea of multiple worldviews. You speak about how the Chinese see an all-encompassing civilisational concept called Under the Heaven.

From this vantage point, how do you see the current relationship between existing civilisations and worldviews and what is standing in the way of reconciling those worldviews?

Chandran: What I mentioned in the book was simply to try and get people to understand that China and other large countries see the world quite differently in terms of its complexities and the relationship between countries than the West.

And if you're an objective observer of history and of Chinese, uh, China's relationship with the world, you'll see that by far, the Chinese have adhered to that to that sort of principle of coexistence, civilizational relationships, et cetera. That is not to say that some may interpret some actions of China, as some are doing, as a departure from that.

But broadly, if you're an objective observer, you will say the same. You would probably see the same of India as well.

I'd just like to make a point about this term civilisation. Everybody uses that. I sort of don't like it because it seems to imply that there are hundreds of civilisations around and depends how you wanna define a civilisation.

There's a lot of arguments of what is a civilisation. And then we can get into a rabbit hole of civilisations, right? And then this whole thing about, "well, which civilisation is older? Which civilisation is deeper? Which civilisation has absorbed all of these things?" And all of that. So I sort of don't like that civilisational term, though in the context of trying to explain China to the world, I do say that China remains very much a civilisational state. You could not say that the United States is a civilisational state. Question it has...

Nolita: What's the...

Chandran: Well, because it's too young. It has no underlying sort of long history of 10,000 years of a culture, civilisation, traditions, et cetera, born. So it's from all of the place. If the Native Americans had not been slaughtered, then you'd say there was a civilisation there.

So that's…

Links in the notes 1

• https://clubofrome.org

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