The Essentials of Theory U

PART I

A Framework for Seeing the Field

Some people say that, for all the talk about change, very little actually happens. But in my experience that is not true. I have seen tectonic shifts several times in my life. I saw it when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989—and with it the Cold War system. I saw it when the apartheid system ended in South Africa. I saw it when a youth movement swept the first African American president of the United States of America into office. I saw it when the center of the global economy shifted from the West to East Asia over the past two or three decades. And I see it now in the recent rise of autocrats, nationalists, and far-right movements as a counter-reaction to a single sided globalization and as an overlay ...