Bangladesh, Aug. 17 -- We are living through a moment in time of cascading disorder. Wars, inequality, and poverty are no longer confined to “faraway” places; they are entwined into a single global crisis that cuts across continents, regions and regimes. What makes this moment distinctive is not only the scale of poverty-nearly 1.1 billion people in multidimensional poverty worldwide-but the collapse of the systems that were supposed to prevent it. Now we face a “new world disorder” in which shocks multiply while the shock absorbers of global collaboration, democracy, and social contracts erode in plain sight. Five structural forces have converged to bring us to this sad reality.

First, power has fragmented. The b...