Rising oil prices, resource crises, global warming, sovereign wealth, outsourcing…Emerging nations are united in these issues and are drawing global development along. Who are they, really? What impact do they really have? Toward fear or hope? With strong growth, an ever expanding presence in the global economy, a stabilized institutional system and a form of capitalism, emerging nations are designing a a displacement of the world's gravity as much in geopolitical and cultural terms as in values. But they also flaunt a new political ambition founded on their recent economic power. At the WTO, they formed the G-20, spearheaded opposition of wealthy nations, and succeeded, through an alliance strategy, in pressing all the more on the commercial negotiations of the Doha cycle. Undeniably, emerging nations have reshuffled the cards of the international game. Nonetheless, will human rights standards be gambled, in order to pass an alternate plan if the "Beijing consensus" triumphs in Asia and elsewhere? And don't other nations, like North Korea or Iran, risk destabilizing the world in a more decisive way? Must we bow to this emergence of a new world order, or admit that the world has entered an era of permanent instability?

Global issues, with CERI (the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po), partnering with L’Express offers: an new thesis on a planetary challenge a meeting of the minds of recognized specialists in international relations, political science, sustainable development, economics, and sociology analyses abundantly illustrated by new, colorful cartography.