The World After Gaza

By: Pankaj Mishra

Length: Not Yet Known

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications

Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the ‘darker peoples’, in W. E. B Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world.

The World after Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the darker peoples’s frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World after Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.

'A rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding' NAOMI KLEIN

©2025 Pankaj Mishra (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'If books have a role today in the elucidation of justice, then I believe The World after Gaza will prove to be as crucial to our own times as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was to his' (Andrew O’Hagan)

'Pankaj Mishra is our globally leading public intellectual and his coruscating and scintillating meditation on the ethical purchase of Holocaust memory as the Gaza war goes on is one of the indispensable documents of civilisation in a barbaric time. With his alert conscience, impeccable learning and meditative writing, Mishra chronicles how the very attempt to register the crimes of the past in a world of continuing hierarchy can transform into an alibi for the disasters of the present' (Samuel Moyn)

'With clarity and even a dose of self-reflection, the always brilliant Pankaj Mishra sifts through the many implications of the horrid war on Gaza' (Joe Sacco)