The idea of thinking about global development is a relatively new one. And the vision of what politics looks like in this report from the Brookings Institution is very different from the great power politics of modernity, or what we might call the politics of glory that was so common in the pre-modern world. In other words, a new imagination of what counts as “politics” is being offered us. I think we should take it.

Beyond that, the content of the report is actually about challenges for helping people escape poverty. There are governance troubles, but also I suspect the deepest challenge will be producing what they call sustainable development – – that is, development that does not harm the environment and long-term ways while boosting short term aid to impoverished people. Such a bargain would be bad even for the impoverished people being helped, for they or their descendants would be the ones most vulnerable to damage from ecological disruption later. So that's something of what politics would look like in a world that took "global development" seriously as a deliberate aim.  Perhaps it is what our world could become.  

Something of this was presaged in ancient Stoic "cosmopolitanism," and in Kant's remarkable essay "Towards Perpetual Peace" at the end of the eighteenth century.  But though it had antecedents, this understanding of politics is genuinely new, and still radically contested. Part of our struggle today is not only between different polities in the world, but between different understandings of politics.  It's worth considering that such divergences as these exist. There's no guarantee that this emerging vision will, as it were, win.