As climate change, pandemics, disasters, migrations, and conflicts increasingly overlap, crises are becoming more complex and difficult to address. The Anthropocene is an era characterized by uncertainty and contestation, in which traditional approaches to crisis management are no longer working. This book examines the ideas that have emerged to help societies move forward, including resilience, navigation, adaptation, precaution, and slow peacebuilding. While these approaches promise hope and progress, A Pragmatism of Beginnings critically highlights their limitations, showing how they often focus on coping with crises in ways that merely preserve and reproduce a decaying status quo.

Drawing on philosophical pragmatism, the book places these imaginaries that drive crisis management today in dialogue with the work of the classical pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, as well as contemporary philosophers Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Elizabeth Grosz, to assess both their promises and their limitations. Across a series of case studies covering disaster response, peacebuilding, global health, climate governance, migration management, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda, the book shows how contemporary crisis governance often seeks to preserve the status quo by managing risks and avoiding breakdown rather than pursue transformative change. A Pragmatism of Beginnings argues that responding to today’s crises requires more; it also demands the courage and imagination to seize new beginnings.

Pol Bargués is Senior research fellow at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs).