This course aims to explore the historical roots and possible future trends of six key challenges shaping our contemporary world. The challenges in question are: Demographic Change: Past and Future Trends, Poverty and Inequality: Origins and Consequences, Digitalization and Disruptive Technologies Global Warming and Climate Change, Globalization and Deglobalization, Migration and Global Mobility Regimes: Past and Present While it primarily employs historical methodology, it also draws extensively on frameworks from political science and economics. The course aims to engage with the state-of-the-art literature on these six key challenges, while encouraging critical discussion of the issues.