I’m a Los Angeles-based political scientist, writer, and associate director of programs at the Berggruen Institute, where I lead the Planetary program. I am also the co-author, with Nils Gilman, of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, which comes out in April 2024, and the author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland, published in 2019.
In recent years I have written on political messianism, on planetary subsidiarity, on moving from the global to the planetary, on Confederate monuments, on the politics of refugees, on Lee Ann Fujii’s posthumous Show Time, on hybrid disaster management, on rituals of provocation, on alt-governance, on climate migration, on post-conflict refugee return, on the geopolitics of geoengineering, on Orange parades, on peace agreements, on municipal elections in Jerusalem, and more for publications like The Atlantic, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Noema.
Children of a Modest Star has been called a “crucial” book that “fills an urgent need of our time” by bestselling science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, believes it offers “real ideas for how inhabitants of the planet can govern ourselves… [to] enable us to survive and thrive.”
Contentious Rituals was praised as “wonderful,” “exemplary,” and “superb” – “essential reading” written “with sensitivity, even beauty.”
I’m an associate editor at Noema (pitch me!). I’ve worked at the RAND Corporation, Columbia Global Policy Initiative, Chumir Foundation, International Rescue Committee, UN Development Program, and the sadly shuttered Dutton’s Brentwood Books. I studied political science at UC Berkeley and Columbia, where I received a Ph.D. in 2015.
I live on top of an active oil field in Culver City, California, with my wife and two young kids. I basically never tweet at @JonathanSBlake. I email at jblake [at] berggruen [dot] org. I look like this:
In recent years I have written on political messianism, on planetary subsidiarity, on moving from the global to the planetary, on Confederate monuments, on the politics of refugees, on Lee Ann Fujii’s posthumous Show Time, on hybrid disaster management, on rituals of provocation, on alt-governance, on climate migration, on post-conflict refugee return, on the geopolitics of geoengineering, on Orange parades, on peace agreements, on municipal elections in Jerusalem, and more for publications like The Atlantic, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Noema.
Children of a Modest Star has been called a “crucial” book that “fills an urgent need of our time” by bestselling science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, believes it offers “real ideas for how inhabitants of the planet can govern ourselves… [to] enable us to survive and thrive.”
Contentious Rituals was praised as “wonderful,” “exemplary,” and “superb” – “essential reading” written “with sensitivity, even beauty.”
I’m an associate editor at Noema (pitch me!). I’ve worked at the RAND Corporation, Columbia Global Policy Initiative, Chumir Foundation, International Rescue Committee, UN Development Program, and the sadly shuttered Dutton’s Brentwood Books. I studied political science at UC Berkeley and Columbia, where I received a Ph.D. in 2015.
I live on top of an active oil field in Culver City, California, with my wife and two young kids. I basically never tweet at @JonathanSBlake. I email at jblake [at] berggruen [dot] org. I look like this:
