Guest Speaker: Adam Day

The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance for an Era of Accelerating Complexity

Today’s polycrisis means we are locked in perpetual battle against risks that feel one step ahead of us. Whether the accel­erating impacts of climate change, newly emerging deadly viruses, fast-spreading wars, or artificial general intelligence, our responses are slow and often poorly fit to the problem. The Forever Crisis offers an innovative approach to global governance in an era of interrelated planetary challenges. It argues that the complexity of today’s risks requires a complex, adaptive response. Drawing from complex systems like ant colonies, central nervous systems, galaxies, and markets, The Forever Crisis offers concrete, actionable proposals for evolving our global governance system. It provides scholars and policymakers with a dynamic approach to addressing the systemic risks facing the planet today and tomorrow.

This is an in-person event. Registration is required.

The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance for an Era of Accelerating Complexity is available for purchase here.

About the Speaker

Dr Adam Day is Head of the Geneva Office of United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. Dr Day oversees programming on peacebuilding, human rights, peacekeeping, climate-security, sanctions, and global governance, while also acting as co-lead on UNU-CPR’s support to the High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism. Prior to joining UNU in 2017, Dr Day served for a decade in the UN, including as Senior Political Adviser to MONUSCO (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), in the UN Special Coordinator’s Office for Lebanon, in the front offices of both UNMIS (Khartoum) and UNAMID (Darfur), and was a political officer in both the Department of Political Affairs and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. Dr Day also has substantial civil society experience, including with Human Rights Watch’s Justice Program and for the Open Society Justice Initiative in Cambodia.

Dr Day was an international litigator in New York, where he also worked pro bono for the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Guantanamo detainees in their suits against former US officials for torture. He also supported the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. He has published widely in the fields of State-building, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, mediation, conflict resolution, human rights, rule of law, transitional justice, climate-security, the UN Security Council, and global governance.

Dr Day holds a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, a Master’s in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a Master’s in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and a Doctorate from King’s College London’s War Studies Department.