Come Order the Disorder with Jason Pack
This substack, the Disorder Podcast, and the connected NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project all try to present a holistic vision of the myriad interconnected problems of our poorly coordinated and rapidly changing world and put concrete forward implementable SOLUTIONS TO TODAY’S ERA OF GLOBAL DISORDER.
Gone is the time of coherent international coordination. Instead, with the rise of neo-populism, trade wars, inflation, anti-migration policies, and widespread popular fears over the delegation of sovereignty to the supranational level, major world leaders have sought to promote the ‘Enduring Disorder’ and ride its whirlwind. Conventional geopolitical theory fails to explain this world in which many major states are no longer rationally pursuing their long-term interests.
This substack expands on the topic of the current week’s Disorder Podcast and the Project areas of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project:
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Why did you Make the Disorder Pod:
Firstly, I feel that many of the world’s top table issues are interlinked, but are usually presented as if they were discrete. Issues about the Arab Spring are covered separately from issues about regulating AI. The climate change dossier and the tax evasion dossier are written about like they are not connected. But in reality these issues are all part and parcel of the coordination failures that underlie the Enduring Disorder. Secondly, I noticed that a lot of journalism, think tank reports, and other podcasts are really all about the problems. They diagnose them and tell funny stories about them. I wanted to create a show that was engaging and told real people’s stories, but also proposed solutions. That is why I made the Disorder Show and created our unique ‘Ordering the Disorder’ segment.
Who is Jason Pack?
My informal Bio: Jason Pack is the inventor of the ‘Global Enduring Disorder’ paradigm: the concept behind the Disorder podcast.
Born in Manhattan, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Jason Pack abandoned his previous career in molecular biology–– deciding instead to grow a beard and move to Beirut. Little did he know that nearly all Lebanese university students are clean shaven. Later, while based in Egypt and on the cusp of a breakthrough with his Arabic in Autumn 2003, his parents forbade him from studying in Yemen, so instead he took a road trip to Baghdad and Karbala right after the US invaded Iraq.
In 2004-5, Pack was a Fulbright Scholar in Syria. In 2008, he discontinued his first attempt at graduate work at Oxford, to move to Libya to assist Western businesses grapple with the late Qadhafi-era economic reforms. In Autumn 2010, he decided to give graduate school another try and returned to Oxford and then Cambridge. As the Arab Spring reverberated around the Middle East in 2011, Pack drew upon his experience in Tripoli to advise Western policymakers, appear in the media and set up his own consulting company, Libya-Analysis LLC. In 2015, he founded a charity, Eye on ISIS, dedicated to promulgating accurate real-time information about the jihadi threat in Libya. In 2017-18, he returned to Washington, DC, to serve as the Executive Director of the U.S.-Libya Business Association – a position from which he later resigned from over ‘governance’ issues pertaining to certain dynamics in Trump-era Washington. Drawing primarily on that experience, he wrote Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder (Oxford University Press) and came up with his key ways of seeing the world.
Today, Jason Pack is the Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defence College Foundation in Rome. He also leads a project entitled NATO and the Global Enduring Disorder, which produces a range of content attempting to sketch out a ‘unified field theory’ of our current era of geopolitics, while proposing actionable solutions to our most pressing collective action challenges. Jason’s analysis and opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy, among others. He was the 2018 World Champion of Doubles Backgammon and is the CEO of The Birthplace of Wine Experience. In 2020, Pack was awarded the UK Global Talent Visa after receiving the endorsement of the British Academy as a global leader in his field. He is trying to call North London home.
My formal Bio: Jason Pack is the host and founder of the Disorder Podcast. Jason Pack is the Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defence College Foundation in Rome. In partnership with this organisation, Jason founded and directs the NATO and the Global Enduring Disorder programme, which produces a range of content (including a podcast and series of publications) sketching out a ‘unified field theory’ of our current era of geopolitics while proposing actionable solutions to our most pressing collective action challenges.
Jason Pack is the Founder of Libya-Analysis LLC and the non-profit Eye on ISIS, which creates the Libya Security Monitor. His most recent book, Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder (Hurst/Oxford University Press) explores what Libya’s dysfunctional economic structures, its ongoing civil war, and the lack of a coordinated international response to chaos in the country reveal about broader patterns in 21st century geopolitics.
His analysis and opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, Newsweek, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. He holds an M.St. in Global and Imperial History at St. Antony’s College, Oxford in 2011. He is a recipient of the UK Global Talent Visa and has been endorsed by the British Academy as a 'global leader in his field'.
You can find Jason’s website here, his Twitter here, and his CV here.
