Peoples at the centre of history

The great illusion of our time, or rather, the great illusion that enchanted many of us Europeans until a few years ago, was summed up in a simple postulate: "History is over." Corollaries of this postulate, impossible to prove and therefore all the more true, were the certainties that all knowledge had already been codified and that there was only one legitimate way to interpret the course of events. Naturally, at the heart of this conception was and is the awareness that the culmination of human evolution is Western civilization, with its apparatus of laws, rights, and freedoms. Another unshakeable awareness, more alive than ever, is that all human beings aspire to a Western-style way of life and are ready to fight against the tyrant of the day to become in every way like us.

It's a shame that simplifications of this kind, so comforting to the Western ego, aren't helpful in deciphering what's happening around us. Nor are they sufficient to grasp the complexity of our planet, inhabited by more than eight billion people, the vast majority of whom are completely alien to the traditions, culture, systems of government and power that prevail in Europe, the United States, and a few other parts of the world.

Dario Fabbri , one of Italy's leading experts on geopolitics and editor of the magazine Domino, tells us this story with a narrative style endowed with enormous evocative power. He does so in his latest essay, entitled The Destiny of Peoples (Gribaudo, 2025, pp. 176, also available as an e-book), in which he explains how humanity has made history and created our time . And it has done so in a way that eludes any type of analysis based on dogma, immovable certainties, or attempts at simplification based on the idea that leaders, the economy, or the powers that be hold the reins of human progress.

Dario Fabbri offers us a different, more open perspective, a geopolitics interwoven with disciplines such as anthropology and collective psychology, supported by historical depth, ethnography, and linguistics, showing us how the humanities are and remain schools of thought, destined to be transcended, reformed, and reinvented. If the tools we know were truly sufficient, we wouldn't be so surprised by what's happening in the world. Human geopolitics arises from this awareness. From the rejection of linear narratives, of crystallized dogmas. It is not leaders, not master thinkers, not economic and financial elites who write history, stories, but peoples in motion: their fears, desires, ambitions. Through those feelings, over the centuries, peoples have created other peoples, the roots of speech, languages, religions, myths, ideas. To the point of composing our present. Because communities, even when they don't yet know how to tell their story, are already at work.

In this new book, Dario Fabbri suggests we observe people as they build their own destiny. And that of others.