globalization in 21st century essays

YaleGlobal Online

A World Connected: Globalization in the 21st Century

No word has evoked as much passion in recent times as the word “globalization,” which carries an array of meanings among different people and disciplines. But the fact is that globalization is a historical process that has connected the world and influenced it, for better or worse, in every aspect of life. 

is a collection of more than 100 thought-provoking essays by renowned scholars, journalists and leading policymakers published over the past decade by YaleGlobal Online, now published by the MacMillan Center. The essays are grouped by chapters on Global Economy and Trade, Security, Diplomacy, Society, Culture, Health and Environment, Demography and Immigration, Anti-Globalization, Innovation and Global Governance and offer insights about globalization trends for the future. The volume contains an introduction by the editors and a preface by Yale University President Richard C. Levin.

“With intelligent and timely analysis, YaleGlobal and its first e-book, A World Connected: Globalization in the 21st Century, perform the valuable task of raising awareness about our interconnected world and highlighting the need for international cooperation and better governance.” – Richard C. Levin, President, Yale University

“As the story of globalization continues to unfold, reflecting on the lessons and challenges of both the recent and more distant past is critical to understand the options as we move forward – together, as nations, societies, communities and individuals – and the potential impact of our collective choices. This book will serve as an invaluable and thoughtful reference along the journey.” – Tracey Keys, GlobalTrends.com

Essays on a 21st century multilateralism that works for all

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Brahima sangafowa coulibaly , brahima sangafowa coulibaly vice president and director - global economy and development , senior fellow - global economy and development kemal derviş , kemal derviş senior fellow amar bhattacharya , amar bhattacharya senior fellow - global economy and development , center for sustainable development homi kharas , homi kharas senior fellow - global economy and development , center for sustainable development john w. mcarthur , john w. mcarthur director - center for sustainable development , senior fellow - global economy and development amrita narlikar , amrita narlikar president - german institute for global and area studies josé antonio ocampo , josé antonio ocampo professor of professional practice in international and public affairs - columbia university, co-director of the economic and political development concentration - school of international and public affairs eswar prasad , eswar prasad senior fellow - global economy and development elizabeth sidiropoulos , elizabeth sidiropoulos chief executive - south african institute of international affairs dennis j. snower , dennis j. snower nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development vera songwe , and vera songwe nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development , africa growth initiative nathalie tocci nathalie tocci director - istituto affari internazionali, honorary professor - university of tübingen, visiting professor - harvard kennedy school.

February 16, 2022

Edited by Brahima S. Coulibaly and Kemal Derviş, this collection of essays builds upon a 2021 global “experts” survey on multilateralism . While not an exhaustive list, the topics addressed here comprise some of the most pressing issues for international cooperation in the years ahead, as identified by both the survey respondents and the essay authors. The editors’ overview follows here.

By Brahima S. Coulibaly and Kemal Derviş

Introduction.

There is no general agreement on what shape the “world order” will take in the years and decades ahead. What is certain, however, is that humanity will have to deal with huge and in many ways unprecedented transformations and challenges, such as the digitalization of economies and societies, climate change and mitigation, pandemic preparedness, extreme income and wealth concentration, 1 and new types of “weapons” associated with dual-use technologies.

There are great opportunities for improved well-being associated with many of these challenges. Digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) could result in tremendous increases in productivity, and the green transformation necessitated by climate change could constitute the greatest economic, social, and business opportunity since the industrial revolution. 2 However, failure to adequately address some of these challenges, notably climate change, could lead to immense economic and social damage; it could add to the existing pressures caused by mass migration resulting from the imbalance between geographic concentrations of populations and economic opportunities. Furthermore, digitalization could exacerbate inequalities and lead to mass surveillance of societies led by autocrats. In turn, some of the “weapons” that may be developed with new technologies could lead to a scale of destruction of the planet tantamount to nuclear weapons. The U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres starts his new agenda-setting report by stating “humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough.” 3 Multilateral cooperation is therefore needed more than ever to both fully realize the potential benefits of these shifting trends and minimize the dangers that accompany them.

The Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution conducted a global “experts” survey on multilateralism in the Spring of 2021 as part of a project on the future of global governance. 4 The topics addressed in this compilation of essays do not attempt to cover all challenges faced by multilateralism, but they reflect issues considered most important by the survey respondents, as well as the authors of these essays. Together, they address some of the most pressing questions and needs for international cooperation in the years ahead.

Read the rest of the overview in the full report

Overview Brahima S. Coulibaly and Kemal Derviş

1. multilateralism and dynamic divergence in the global economy eswar prasad and vera songwe, 2. global governance: balancing power and equitable representation kemal derviş and josé antonio ocampo, 3. regional cooperation: a necessary complement to global multilateralism brahima s. coulibaly and elizabeth sidiropoulos, 4. multilateralism and climate change: providing a global public good and following an ethical imperative amar bhattacharya and kemal derviş, 5. from vertical funds to purpose-driven funds: a new approach to multilateralism homi kharas, john w. mcarthur, and dennis snower, 6. liberal democratic values and the future of multilateral cooperation kemal derviş and nathalie tocci, 7. multilateralism, liberal values, and the global south amrita narlikar.

Related Content

Kemal Derviş, Sebastian Strauss

August 9, 2021

• Between 1995 and 2021 the top 1 percent of the global population captured 38 percent of the increase in wealth. See “World Inequality Report 2022.” https://wir2022.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2021/12/Summary_WorldInequalityReport2022_English.pdf .
• Nicholas Stern. “G7 leadership for sustainable, resilient, and inclusive economic recovery and growth.” https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/G7_leadership_for_sustainable_resilient_and_inclusive_economic_recovery_and_growth_full_report.pdf .
• United Nations. “Summary of Our Common Agenda Report.” https://www.un.org/en/content/common-agenda-report/summary.shtml .
• Dervis and Strauss, 2021. Responses contained in this survey.

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August 19, 2024

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Globalization Essay

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When discussing the drawbacks and benefits of globalization, essays tend to be on the longer side. The example below is a brief exploration of this complex subject. Learn more in this concise globalization pros and cons essay.

Introduction

• Benefits and Disadvantages of Globalization

Reducing Negative Effects

In today’s world, globalization is a process that affects all aspects of people’s lives. It also has a crucial impact on businesses and governments as it provides opportunities for development while causing significant challenges. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of globalization using evidence from academic sources. The report also suggests how governments and companies may implement to reduce the negative impact of the process.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Globalization

Globalization is a complex concept that can be defined by the process of interaction between organizations, businesses, and people on an international scale, which is driven by international trade. Some people may associate it with uniformity, while others can perceive it as the cause of diversification. The reason for such a difference in public opinion is that globalization has both advantages and disadvantages that should be analyzed.

The most significant positive aspects of globalization include global economic growth, the elimination of barriers between nations, and the establishment of competition between countries, which can potentially lead to a decrease in prices. Globalization supports free trade, creates jobs, and helps societies to become more tolerant towards each other. In addition, this process may increase the speed of financial and commercial operations, as well as reduce the isolation of poor populations (Burlacu, Gutu, & Matei, 2018; Amavilah, Asongu, & Andrés, 2017).

The disadvantages of globalization are that it causes the transfer of jobs from developed to lower-cost countries, a decrease in the national intellectual potential, the exploitation of labor, and a security deficit. Moreover, globalization leads to ecological deficiency (Ramsfield, Bentz, Faccoli, Jactel, & Brockerhoff, 2016). In addition, this process may result in multinational corporations influencing political decisions and offering unfair working conditions to their employees.

Firms and governments can work on eliminating the negative effects of globalization in the following ways. For example, countries should work on microeconomic policies, such as enhancing opportunities for education and career training and establishing less rigid labor markets. In addition, governments can build the necessary institutional infrastructure to initiate economic growth. To solve the problem of poor working conditions, it is vital to establish strict policies regarding minimum wages and the working environment for employees. A decrease in the national intellectual potential may be addressed by offering a broad range of career opportunities with competitive salaries, as well as educating future professionals on how their skills can solve problems on the local level.

Companies, in their turn, may invest in technologies that may lead to more flexible energy infrastructure, lower production costs, and decrease carbon emissions. They can also establish strong corporate cultures to support their workers and provide them with an opportunity to share their ideas and concerns. Such an approach may eliminate employees’ migration to foreign organizations and increase their loyalty to local organizations. It is vital for companies to develop policies aimed at reducing a negative impact on the environment as well by using less destructive manufacturing alternatives and educating their employees on ecology-related issues.

Globalization has a significant impact on companies, governments, and the population. It can be considered beneficial because it helps to eliminate barriers between nations, causes competition between countries, and initiates economic growth. At the same time, globalization may result in a decrease in the national intellectual potential, the exploitation of labor, and ecology deficiency. To address these problems, organizations and governments can develop policies to enhance the population’s education, improve working conditions, and reduce carbon emissions.

Amavilah, V., Asongu, S. A., & Andrés, A. R. (2017). Effects of globalization on peace and stability: Implications for governance and the knowledge economy of African countries. Technological Forecasting and Social Change , 122 (C), 91-103.

Burlacu, S., Gutu, C., & Matei, F. O. (2018). Globalization – Pros and cons. Calitatea , 19 (S1), 122-125.

Ramsfield, T. D., Bentz, B. J., Faccoli, M., Jactel, H., & Brockerhoff, E. G. (2016). Forest health in a changing world: Effects of globalization and climate change on forest insect and pathogen impacts. Forestry , 89 (3), 245-252.

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IvyPanda . "Advantages and Disadvantages of Globalization Essay." June 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-globalization/.

Globalization in the 21st Century

Labor, Capital, and the State on a World Scale

• © 2010
• Berch Berberoglu

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Beyond Global Capitalism: A Discussion

“Economic Facts Are Stronger Than Politics”: Friedrich Engels, American Industrialization, and Class Consciousness

The Emergence of a Global Labor Market and Its International and Political Implications

• globalization
• transformation
• area studies

Table of contents (10 chapters)

Front matter, introduction: globalization in the twenty-first century.

• Berch Berberogiu

Dynamics of Twenty-first-Century Globalization: New Trends in Global Political Economy

• Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Neoliberal Globalization and Capitalist Crises in the Age of Imperialism

• Alan J. Spector

Neoliberalism and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America

• James Petras, Henry Veitmeyer

Globalization and Marginalization of Labor: Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa

• Johnson W. Makoba

Global Capitalism in Crisis: Globalization, Imperialism, and Class Struggle

Globalization and china: from neoliberal capitalism to state developmentalism in east asia.

• Alvin Y. So

Globalization and Gender: Women’s Labor in the Global Economy

• Lourdes Beneria

The Failure of Neoliberal Globalization and the End of Empire

Conclusion: globalization for a new century, back matter.

"At a time of great turmoil in global financial markets and an impending worldwide economic depression, and as neoliberal capitalist globalization is being called into question, Berberoglu s latest book brings together some of the best minds in the field to sort out the crisis of global capitalism to provide the framework for the future course of globalization in the 21st century. An excellent compilation of articles that span the world, this book is bound to set the stage for a new round of discussion and debate on the prospects for the transformation of contemporary neoliberal globalization and the emergence of a multi-polar world order that is mass-based and democratic. I highly recommend this book for its pioneering role in providing us the tools for the critique of a failed system and the building of a new and just society." - Walda Katz-Fishman, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

"While many scholars have grappled with the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization and the future course of the global economy in the twenty-first century, few have offered much that is new on the subject. Berberoglu s latest book, however, is unique in the clarity and power of the ideas he and his contributors bring to the table. Taking on the basic tenets of neoliberalism and its disastrous effects on working people around the world, the ten essays lay bare the crisis of capitalist globalization and its bankrupt policies that have enricheda small minority of wealthy capitalists, while devastating the great majority of the world s people. A must-read for all those interested in the future of our planet, Berberoglu s book goes a long way in explaining what s wrong with our crisis-ridden global economy and society and what it will take to make it right. I give this book my highest praise." - Judy Aulette, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

About the authors

Bibliographic information.

Book Title : Globalization in the 21st Century

Book Subtitle : Labor, Capital, and the State on a World Scale

Editors : Berch Berberoglu

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106390

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan New York

eBook Packages : Palgrave Social Sciences Collection , Social Sciences (R0)

Copyright Information : Berch Berberoglu 2010

Softcover ISBN : 978-1-349-38113-5 Published: 14 May 2010

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-10639-0 Published: 12 April 2010

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : X, 238

Topics : Area Studies , Sociology, general , Political Sociology , International Economics , International Relations , Urban Studies/Sociology

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Globalization in the 21st Century

Manfred b. steger.

The fate of globalization in the 21 st century hangs in the balance. Although recent data show that most global integration has been on the rebound after the 2008-9 global financial meltdown and the COVID-19 pandemic, public sentiments about globalization have soured. The neoliberal glorification of globalization as beneficial market integration is running out of steam, while national-populist visions of “deglobalization” exert significant mass appeal. T oday’s ostensible globalization backlash scenario seems to be confirmed by soaring inflation rates, global supply chain disruptions, accelerating climate change and ecological deterioration, lagging transitions to greener forms of energy, escalating economic inequality, and rising geopolitical competition among the Great Powers, especially the United States-China rivalry and the protracted Russian-Ukrainian war. On the flipside, however, such grim scenarios reinforce the fact that most of today’s problems are global in nature. This book provides an accessible assessment of 21 st -century globalization that draws on global theory and history to engage pressing issues such as digitization, ideological polarization, higher education, demographics, human development, and the environment. Assembling such a big picture of globalization in this young century supports the practical efforts of setting the globe on a more equitable and sustainable path.

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Globalization in the 21st Century

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: capitalism

Globalization has become one of the principal symbols of economic, cultural and political life in the 21st century. Although there is no precise definition of globalization, due to the complexity of the term and the varying attitudes towards it, put simply it is the process by which nationality is becoming all the time more irrelevant. International organizations such as Coca Cola, Disney, McDonald’s, Sony, Shell Oil and IBM, symbolize such a process. In layman’s terms, globalization is basically the means by which people around the globe are now more connected to each other than ever before. Information and money flow more swiftly and goods and services produced in one part of the globe are progressively more obtainable worldwide. International travel is also more frequent and international communication is routine. However globalization as we know it today is vastly different from its humble beginnings. The following essay will look at the effect global institutions have on a national level and whether they challenge or defend the interests of the nation.

Richard Peet’s reading deals with the beginning of globalization, brought on by a struggle for dominance and control of the world’s resources, through the use of coercion. Globalization was heralded by Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. European capitalists then required labour to develop their new found continent. This came in the form of slavery, “black slavery had an economic rather than merely a racial basis – it was used because it was cheaper.”(Peet, R. pg.120) This lead to the demise of Africa’s potential for development as millions of slaves were taken from their homeland. This left a void of labour in Africa, therefore inhibiting their ability to develop their own nation. This is still prevalent in today’s society as sweatshops in underdeveloped countries with deplorable conditions are used as labour for many of the world’s global institutions such as Nike and Polo Ralph Lauren (see attached table 9.3, Klein, N. pg.528)

The Term Paper on To what extent has globalization reshaped international politics?

... to the Western powers. In conclusion I believe that globalization has reshaped =international politics however managed to maintain orginal structures and ... a major changing point for international politics. Realists believe however that the role of globalization has been exaggerated. They believe ... to produce their goods due to the cheaper cost of labour and different tax laws. This has a knock-on ...

Wallerstein reading addresses the rise of socialism and communism as an antidote to the capitalist value of progress at any cost. He ponders whether or not “historical capitalism represents progress or regression.” (Wallerstein, I. pg.100) He believes “historical capitalism has developed an ideological framework of oppressive humiliation…which today we call sexism and racism.” (Wallerstein, I. pg.102) Globalization has led to a very small group having a monopoly over world trade. In Australia the richest 10 percent of its population “own 85% of all shares, 72% of rental investment properties and 60% of business assets.” (Kelly. S, 2001)

However, contrasting views do exist in relation to globalization, so it’s important to assess both the positive and negative impact.

Globalization has allowed for the creation of a new world politics, in which countries are not isolated units anymore. Globally the world has become united in dealing with issues such as pollution and environmental standards. Recent developments in information and communication technology allow individuals from different regions to communicate speedily across huge distances and access information rapidly. Democracy is spreading rapidly which is leading to the development of a common culture. Between 1975 and 1995 the number of democracies in the world increased from 36 to 75 states, which coincided with the globalization boom, and has lead to much closer links between nations. For less developed countries, globalization offers access to foreign capital, global export markets, and advanced technology, allowing faster growth which in turn promotes poverty reduction, democratization, and higher labour and environmental standards. (www.freetrade.org/issues/globalization.html)

The Term Paper on Globalization and the new world food crisis

Since the dawn of civilization, man has always ventured and made developments for his betterment. Man’s basic need like any other animal on the planet has been his food. Initially man devised new hunting skills and innovate new weapons to hunt and feed. As time passed by he understood the basics of agriculture and ended his nomadic life. This was a turning point in mankind and the need for growing ...

In contrast opponents to globalization believe it increases inequality between nations. Such inequality is caused due to the rapid expansion of trade and economic developments without reference to human rights and labour standards. Globalization inhibits governments from subjecting worldwide economic forces to regulation and control. The uneven distribution of wealth associated with rapid globalization may be widening the gap between certain countries and regions. In order for a nation to prosper in today’s economy, they must possess the core foundation of competitiveness. Such competitiveness leads to the exploitation of poorer nations, further contributing to the uneven distribution of wealth. Global organizations increase their profit margins at the expense of the sweatshop worker whose human and civil rights are being violated. Illegal activities such as terrorism and drug trafficking have been allowed to flourish due to the free movement of goods and persons, the hallmark of globalization.

In conclusion globalization bodes both good and ill for mankind however nevertheless appears to be here to stay, whether we like or not. The challenge that lies ahead is not to try and reverse it, but to harness the positive potential whilst minimising the adverse effects. Unless this opportunity is seized, nations and global institutions will continue to struggle for domination and power. Those nations and institutions unable to compete and adapt in their current global economic climate will continue to be used by those that can. It is now up to mankind to decide wether or not the power will be cleverly used or not.

Bibliography

Kelly, S. (2001) Australians’ wealth and retirement, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10635/20011112/www.onlineopinion.com.au/2001/Jul01/Kelly.htm, accessed 05/05/03

The Term Paper on Wildlife Resources: A Global Account of Economic Use

Earth Wildlife Extinction Introduction             Conservation of wildlife (wild living resources), is important for the development of any nation. The extinction of the wildlife has therefore become the agenda in American and other Nations in dealing with preservation of wildlife. For instance, all but a small handful of countries have national parks. However, the most challenges facing nations ...

Klein, N. (2000) No Logo, Table 9.3. Sweatshop Profiles, London: Flamingo

Peet, R. (1991) Global Capitalism: Theories of societal development, London: Routledge, pp. 114-124

Wallerstein, I. (1983) Historical Capitalism, London: Verso, pp. 97-110)

http://www.freetrade.org/issues/globalization.html, The Benefits of Globalization, accessed 04/05/03

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The 21st century superhero : essays on gender, genre and globalization in film

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The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film Paperback – June 20, 2011

Superhero films are one of the most enduring genres of cinema, and their popularity is only increasing in the 21st century. These ten critical essays explore the phenomenon through the lenses of numerous academic disciplines, and cover topics such as the role of globalization in the formation of superhero narratives, the shifting nature of masculinity and femininity in the superhero world and the state of the genre today. Of particular interest is the way these narratives, however fantastic, abstract, futuristic or simplistic, resonate with specific events in the world and function as starting points for discussion of contemporary sociopolitical conflicts.

• Print length 212 pages
• Language English
• Publisher McFarland & Company
• Publication date June 20, 2011
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 6 x 0.42 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0786463457
• ISBN-13 978-0786463459
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McFarland & Company (June 20, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 212 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0786463457
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786463459
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.42 x 9 inches
• #312 in Comic & Graphic Novel Literary Criticism
• #372 in Comics & Graphic Novel History & Prices
• #6,970 in Science Fiction Manga (Books)

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our recommended books this week include four new novels that, taken together, offer a pretty good snapshot of the cultural zeitgeist: a polyamorous breakup story, a surreal post-pandemic fever dream, a book about the deep, cloistered pleasures of academic study and a novel that applies the “Romeo and Juliet” template to the federal siege of a doomsday cult like the one that rocked Waco, Texas, three decades ago. (That book is Bret Anthony Johnston’s “We Burn Daylight,” and it contains this kindling-dry line from the cult leader, after the local sheriff asks how he would respond to a visit from the taxman: “I’d assure him any money changing hands here is a donation to our church. Then I’d ask him if he’d prefer to shoot or pray.”)

In nonfiction, we recommend Jean-Martin Bauer’s firsthand account of efforts to eradicate global food shortages and Yuan Yang’s group portrait of four young women navigating social change in contemporary China. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE NEW BREADLINE: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century Jean-Martin Bauer

An illuminating account of the author’s 20 years working with the World Food Program, this book provides a close-up look at efforts to vanquish global hunger.

“What makes ‘The New Breadline’ so compelling are not the big debates it touches on but the small details Bauer shares from a realm that usually operates out of the public eye.”

From Alec MacGillis’s review

Knopf | $30

WE BURN DAYLIGHT Bret Anthony Johnston

“Romeo and Juliet” meets the 1993 Waco, Texas, siege in Johnston’s new novel, which follows two teenage lovers on opposite sides of an increasingly dire confrontation. One is connected to a heavily armed doomsday cult, while the other is the son of the sheriff investigating it.

“The music of it all is just so damn seductive. … A darkly dazzling pilgrimage of violent delights, and violent ends.”

From John Wray’s review

Random House | $29

STATE OF PARADISE Laura Van den Berg

Van den Berg’s latest is a fever dream of a novel ostensibly about a narrator’s search for her missing sister, but more broadly about the borders of reality and the surreal nature of our post-pandemic life.

“Moody and hallucinatory, the novel asks: How do we distinguish reality from its opposite — whatever that might be?”

From Ruth Franklin’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $27

PRACTICE Rosalind Brown

Starring an undergraduate student at Oxford, Brown’s debut novel is exquisitely attuned to the thrill and boredom of academic life; it is hard to think of another novel that describes so precisely what happens when an ardent young person sits down to read and learn and write.

“Conveys the hesitancy, extravagance and naiveté of a young mind discovering what writing can do.”

From Brian Dillon’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $26

PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order Yuan Yang

For six years, the journalist Yuan Yang followed four very different young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order” — a country changing dramatically to an industrial superpower. The result is a moving work of reportage, whose scale toggles between global to personal.

“A powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city.”

From Michelle T. King’s review

Viking | $30

MISRECOGNITION Madison Newbound

The protagonist of Newbound’s witty debut novel returns to her hometown nursing a catatonic sorrow after her brutal breakup with a couple — a male artist and a female gallerist — who were her employers before they were also her lovers and roommates.

“‘Misrecognition’ is sharp and funny, but never cruel or condescending, when skewering quarter-life crises, contemporary sexual mores and internet addiction. … A quietly commanding debut by a writer of intense precision and restraint.”

From Justin Taylor’s review

Simon & Schuster | $27.99

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The 25 Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century: Honorable Mentions

Over the next four months, Billboard will be unveiling our picks for the 25 most important and impactful pop stars of the last 25 years. But first: the best of the rest.

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In 2019,  Billboard ‘s staff  revealed its picks  for the greatest pop star of every year dating back to 1981 (the first year of MTV, essentially the birth of the modern pop era), with essays making the case for each as the biggest, brightest and most important star in their solar system that calendar year. For the last   few years , we’ve also counted down our picks for the 10 greatest pop stars of the 12-month period, with each getting their own year-in-review tribute from one of our staffers. (Our picks for the No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the Year this decade have included BTS , Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift .)

But with the quarter-century mark coming up, we decided it was a good time to zoom out a little bit on the whole last 25 years in pop stardom. And so this week, we begin our countdown of the 25 Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century: a list attempting to take stock of the pop stars who have been most important and most impactful in the U.S. over that timespan. We will be unveiling our list over the course of the next four months, unveiling one or two artists a week, along with our usual essays commemorating each artist — as well as additional articles focusing on different aspects of their careers and rounding up their chart achievements, and regular podcast and video discussions of our chosen stars’ careers and legacies. We hope it will all serve to properly celebrate the 25 artists who have most defined the pop music and pop culture of the first 25% of this century, and to help provide an accurate snapshot of how the sound, look and overall meaning of pop superstardom have evolved over that period.

First, however — we must acknowledge that 25 is simply nowhere near a big-enough number to properly acknowledge all the pop stars who have dominated the charts and moved the culture since Y2K. So with that in mind, we’re starting off our rollout of this project with a quick unranked list of our Honorable Mention picks for the best of the rest: the 25 pop stars who were great enough to get strong consideration for our top 25, but ultimately just didn’t quite have either the stats, the impact, the longevity or the volume to elbow their way into our main list. We love ’em all just the same, and we couldn’t kick off this project in earnest without giving them their proper due first.

And we must also issue our obligatory reminder that unlike with our  Year-End Charts , these Greatest Pop Stars are NOT mathematically determined by stats like chart position, streams or sales numbers. Those play a big part in our final rankings, of course — you can’t be one of the greatest pop stars of the century without great pop hits and great pop albums — but so do things like music videos, live performances and social media presence, and more intangible factors like cultural importance, industry influence and overall omnipresence. (And we’re measuring this over all 25 years of this century so far, so if you were only heard from at the beginning or the end of that period — or only had one or two big songs, albums or eras — that’s gonna significantly hinder your ranking here as well.)

Here are our 25 picks, presented alphabetically, for the closest-but-not-quite pop stars — the Nos. 26-50 Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century, essentially — and check back throughout the next few months as we count down our top 25, and officially name our Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century this autumn.

His 21st Century in Pop : Perhaps no rapper this century had a breakout more magnificent than the artist born Curtis Jackson, as his 2003 debut LP Get Rich or Die Tryin ‘ arrived on the back of an avalanche of mixtape and media hype (and one of the greatest lead singles in hip-hop history) and played like an already-minted greatest hits album. His mercenary approach to rap led to absolutely stratospheric commercial heights — including well over a million in first-week sales for sophomore set The Massacre — and between his instantly iconic album covers, unavoidable music videos and increasing visibility in film and television, chances are even your grandmother could recognize him by his pecs alone.

Why Not Top 25? After losing a much-publicized first-week sales showdown with Ye (then Kanye West) in 2007, the bottom fell out for 50 Cent surprisingly quickly — he’s yet to score a Hot 100 top 10 hit as a lead artist or a Billboard 200 No. 1 album since, and new releases became more scattershot as he shifted focus to his acting career and business investments.

ALICIA KEYS

Her 21st Century in Pop : The American Idol era desperately needed an Alicia Keys, a soul singer-songwriter and piano prodigy whose pipes were as immaculate as both her pen and her general credibility. It’s hard to imagine the first half of the 2000s without her Songs in A Minor and The Diary of Alicia Keys and their respective show-stopping singles; subsequent albums squeezed out singalongs for the heavy-hearted for well into the next decade, as she upped her always-welcome presence in film and TV. As you read this, chances are some future spotlight-stealer is currently auditioning for their first major look with “If I Ain’t Got You.”

Why Not Top 25? Rarely totally absent from the mainstream over the past 20 years, Keys’ time as a pop superstar was nonetheless mostly limited to her first three albums, and she hasn’t had a real hit single since 2012.

BILLIE EILISH

Her 21st Century in Pop : The first artist born in the 21st century to score a Hot 100 No. 1 hit could not have felt a more appropriate paragon of Gen Z superstardom: Billie Eilish was trend-defying, she was both incredibly dark and incredibly silly, and she kept her closest collaborator limited to her immediate family – but she was also undeniably, massively pop. In the five years since debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go simultaneously made her a chart-topper, a style and music video icon and a Grammy darling, Eilish has proven worthy of her generation-leader status by evolving rapidly as an artist while maintaining her ability to create era-defining smashes. No other artist could go from “Bad Guy” to “My Future” to “Lunch” without ever having to leave the top 10. 

Why Not Top 25? Simply a matter of volume: If her rise had started a couple years earlier or this period ended a couple years later, it’d be almost impossible to keep her out. 

Her 21st Century in Pop : Set aside the long-delayed sophomore album — as the wait for the follow-up to her spectacular 2018 debut Invasion of Privacy continues, Cardi B’s sustained commercial power and multi-platform superstardom has only become more impressive. In 2017, “Bodak Yellow” transformed Cardi from a reality-TV fixture to a chart-topping rap phenom; Invasion quickly capitalized on the single’s success, while also sending rising Spanish-language stars Bad Bunny and J Balvin to the top of the Hot 100 with “I Like It.” Over the next half-decade, Cardi kept cranking out hits that either crossed over to pop radio (like “Girls Like You” with Maroon 5) or exploded across hip-hop culture (like “WAP” with Megan Thee Stallion), while also dabbling in Hollywood projects and brand deals. Now, Cardi is one of the most influential female rappers ever, and one of the most bankable hit-makers across all of hip-hop, making money moves while the rest of the world waits for her next big one.

Why Not Top 25? : Tough to crack the quarter-century list when your mainstream breakthrough came two-thirds of the way through those 25 years. And even though Cardi kept scoring hits following the Invasion of Privacy era, some of those hits — “Money,” “Up,” “Enough (Miami)” — might have enjoyed longer chart runs had they been tethered to a proper full-length.

CARRIE UNDERWOOD

Her 21st Century in Pop: One of the two most recognizable American Idol alums in popular music, Carrie Underwood has been one of country music’s defining voices since she first topped the Hot 100 with Idol victory single “Inside Your Heaven” back in 2005. In the years that followed, Underwood scored some of the genre’s biggest crossover hits in “Jesus, Take the Wheel” and “Before He Cheats,” and earned four Billboard 200 chart-toppers. Her powerful belts and thunderous performances have also made her live shows bustling attractions; in addition to her most recent arena tour, she’s extended her blockbuster Las Vegas residency all the way into 2025. Not only has the eight-time Grammy winner been inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and the Hall of Fame in her home state of Oklahoma, but she’s also topped the Christian Albums chart twice (with 2020’s My Gift and 2021’s My Savior ), and is one of the few musicians who can say they’ve been synonymous with Sunday Night Football. 

Why Not Top 25 : While she was a consistent seller in the late ’00s and early ’10s, her recent studio efforts haven’t made as much of a commercial impact, and her crossover success has been fairly limited for the last decade.

CHRIS BROWN

His 21st Century in Pop : In the wake of Usher’s mid-’00s mega-dominance, Chris Brown emerged as the next man up in the timeless triple-threat model of pop&B stardom. He topped the Hot 100 right away with “Run It!” and quickly proved he had the songs to match the skills; when he performed with Rihanna at the 2007 VMAs it seemed like pop had found its reigning power couple for many years to come. That relationship of course ended horrifically just a couple years later, with Brown’s abuse permanently tainting both his image and his music, and further violent outbursts would ensure he never recaptured the innocent magic of his early years. But he pivoted to a more caddish public image and never really stopped having hits, as his fans remained loyal, his music evolved with the times, and no younger version of himself ever rose up to replace him. 

Why Not Top 25? Even as he rebounded quickly commercially, Brown understandably remained a highly divisive figure in the pop world, with just those first few years remaining treasured memories for (nearly) all. 

CHRISTINA AGUILERA

Her 21st Century in Pop : Christina Aguilera actually had the first new Hot 100 No. 1 hit of the 21st century, with the second single off her debut album, as “What a Girl Wants” followed “Genie in a Bottle” to the top spot and confirmed Xtina as the second-biggest solo star of the nascent TRL teen-pop era. But Aguilera’s maturity would come rapidly: Stripped , her follow-up album, lacked the No. 1s of her debut but proved she was nobody’s No. 2, widely expanding her artistry in both depth and diversity. Decades and several more successful career transformations later, it still feels like the gold standard for this-is-me pop star statement albums; meanwhile, “What a Girl Wants” is still being sung by (male) pro athletes in unavoidable cell phone commercials. 

Why Not Top 25? After 2006’s chart-topping Back to Basics , the hits dried up pretty fast: Aguilera never released another totally successful album, and her only major pop successes of the last 15 years have come as features.

Her 21st Century in Pop : Doja Cat took a shortcut to mass visibility in 2018 with the hilarious viral one-off “MOOO!,” so by the time she’d parlayed that into actual pop stardom with her 2020 Hot 100-topper “Say So,” many expected her time in the limelight would be limited. In fact, it’s been anything but: Over the first half of the 2020s, you wouldn’t even need a full hand to count the number of pop stars more consistently productive, successful and attention-demanding than Doja Cat. It’s not always good attention she’s demanding – as her own fans will attest – but Doja has played the game brilliantly (if recklessly) for seven years now, and has a catalog of songs, albums, videos, performances and social media moments that stand with anyone else’s over that period. “MOOO!” still rules too, btw.

Why Not Top 25? The recency hurts, of course, as does the fact that as many brilliant moments as she’s strung together over the years, she doesn’t quite have the pull to stop the world with a release – evidenced by the fact that she’s yet to score a Billboard 200 No. 1 album.

Her 21st Century in Pop : Dua Lipa wrote a set of “New Rules” for what a pop breakthrough looks like when she scored her first top 10 Hot 100 hit with the 2017 electro-pop post-breakup playbook following a series of hits in her native U.K., mixing her high-fashion sensibility and indie tastes to create an undeniably cool star. She’s doubled down on dance in the years since — including high-profile collabs with Calvin Harris (“One Kiss”) and Silk City (“Electricity”), plus her PNAU remix with Elton John (“Cold Heart”) – and fully established her nu-disco domination with her supernova sophomore album  Future Nostalgia  in 2020. Not even a global pandemic could keep people from dancing to the project’s string of smashes, most notably the unstoppable fifth single “Levitating,” which became the  longest-charting song ever by a female artist on the Hot 100 (77 weeks) and finished as 2021’s year-end No. 1 Hot 100 hit . In 2023, the Albanian-British artist was the face of the blockbuster Barbie soundtrack, thanks to her mermaid cameo and party-scene-setting Hot 100 top 10 lead single “Dance the Night.”

Why Not Top 25? While  Billboard  selected  Radical Optimism  as one of the  best albums of 2024 so far , thanks to its sure-footed lyrics and riskier productions, Lipa failed to crack the Hot 100’s top 10 with the project’s first three singles – but we’re still more than radically optimistic that she could rejoin pop’s upper echelon at any moment.

His 21st Century in Pop : Hard to remember a time when Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, a.k.a. Future, debuted on the national stage and was considered something of a hip-hop gimmick, his singing and rapping blending together seamlessly in a post-Auto-Tune warble. Pluto had the early converts, and Honest had the pop-leaning defenders, but Future gradually established himself as a superstar for the streaming era, his melodic prowess, self-lacerating lyricism and croaked emotion spread across gritty mixtapes and guest-laden full-lengths. Depending on who you ask, Future’s professional apex could be the murky genius of his critically beloved 2015 project DS2 , scoring back-to-back No. 1 albums in consecutive weeks with 2017’s Future and Hndrxx , earning the first Hot 100 No. 1 of his career with “Wait for U” in 2022, or helping lob the first grenade of the Drake-Kendrick Lamar feud with the smash hit “Like That” this year. Like the voice that made him famous, Future is a shape-shifting force of nature, and his various achievements have made him an indispensable part of modern hip-hop.

Why Not Top 25 : Although he’s collaborated with everyone from Taylor Swift to Maroon 5 to Ariana Grande, following the 2014 crossover bid Honest , he’s mostly stayed pop-adjacent, while keeping both feet firmly in the hip-hop world — as Future rapped after that project, “Tried to make me a pop star, and they made a monster.”

JENNIFER LOPEZ

Her 21st Century in Pop : No one defined celebrity at the beginning of the 21st century quite like Jennifer Lopez. Music certainly wasn’t the only part of that – her film success and tabloid ubiquity were both crucial – but it still might’ve been the biggest; she released six top 10 Hot 100 hits over the first three years of the ‘00s, and helped define an era where hip-hop, R&B and pop all got more cuddly together than ever before. J. Lo bookended the next decade with a judging role on American Idol and a career-defining dramatic turn in the strip-club crime story Hustlers , then she kicked off the 2020s with a career victory lap co-headlining performance at the Super Bowl – all while never looking like she’s aged a single day. 

Why Not Top 25? Great as her peak was – and she was our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of 2001 – she ruled in a relatively weak era for pop stardom, and neither her signature hits or biggest albums still inspire quite the same reverence from pop fans today as the stars who ruled before or after her.

KELLY CLARKSON

Her 21st Century in Pop : The ultimate singing-competition success story has been proving for almost a quarter-century that the voting public got it 100% right back in 2002’s inaugural season of  American Idol  when they chose Clarkson as the show’s most promising pop star. Starting with her triumphant coronation ballad “A Moment Like This” topping the Hot 100, she’s been a fixture on the chart, scoring two more No. 1s — 2009’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” and 2011’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” – and 11 total top 10s, including the pop-rock all-timer “Since U Been Gone” (No. 2 peak in 2005). She’s continued to make her mark throughout the years, including with the evergreen modern Christmas classic “Underneath the Tree” in 2013 and the surprise No. 8-peaking megaballad “Piece by Piece” in 2016. In a full-circle career moment, Clarkson has returned to the medium that made her famous by coaching on  The Voice  for nine seasons and hosting five seasons (so far) of her namesake TV talk show, which has racked up 21 Daytime Emmys and launched her fan-favorite Kellyoke cover series.

Why Not Top 25 : Clarkson has unquestionably endured as a multimedia celebrity, but her time as a hitmaking pop star was really limited to her first 10 years after  Idol .

KENDRICK LAMAR

His 21st Century in Pop : The most acclaimed rapper of the last 15 years arguably has the most bulletproof reputation in all of hip-hop – as J. Cole recently found out the hard (but not as hard as some) way, the only bad things you can really say about him as an artist are that he occasionally gets kinda preachy and he doesn’t come around often enough. And when Kendrick Lamar does come around, the results are spellbinding: Three award-winning, chart-topping, undisputed classic LPs (with underrated arguable fourths and fifths on both sides of that run), two decade-separated guest verses that both upended hip-hop’s entire hierarchy, and even a few Hot 100 No. 1s in there, just to show that he can.

Why Not Top 25? Even with those No. 1s, Kendrick Lamar just never really cared about making pop stardom the main thing, and (2024 aside) has largely shrunk from the spotlight when he didn’t absolutely have to be in it – during his most center-staged moment of the century, he was still sneering at Drake, “Only you like being famous.” 

Her 21st Century in Pop : The story of Kesha is still being reclaimed by the artist herself — during and following a years-long legal battle with producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the pop star has used her music to shake up her party-hard image, and communicate perseverance amid personal and professional complications. Yet anyone who experienced Kesha’s dollar-sign days, a blaze of Jack Daniel’s and glitter to kick off the 2010s, remembers one of the most dominant debut eras of the century. “TiK ToK” was the mega-selling first single, but “Blah Blah Blah,” “Your Love is My Drug,” “Take It Off,” “We R Who We R,” “Blow” and “Die Young” all reached the top 10 of the Hot 100 within a three-year span, as hedonistic turbo-pop took over the airwaves at the end of Obama’s first term. And Kesha was the master of ceremonies who was far more insightful than she let on — the emotional stunners on 2017’s Rainbow and 2023’s Gag Order resonated long after the party was over.

Why Not Top 25 : As musically rewarding as Kesha’s recent output has been, she unfortunately couldn’t achieve the same hit rate as the first few years of her career — over the past decade, only one of her songs, 2017’s “Praying,” made it to the top 40 of the Hot 100.

LANA DEL REY

Her 21st Century in Pop : “This is the reason for half you bitches’ existence – including mine,” Billie Eilish informed the crowd during her guest appearance at Lana Del Rey’s 2024 Coachella headlining set. Well put: Del Rey was as influential as any artist of the past 15 years in changing the overall direction of pop music – providing a transformative downtempo alternative to the turbo-pop that ruled in the early ‘10s with something heavier, more theatrical and much more narratively murky, but all still just as alluring and world-building. You’d have an easier time building a list of major pop stars who haven’t rightly paid homage to the Venice Bitch in the years since. 

Why Not Top 25? Formidable as the Cult of Lana has become over the past decade-plus, it is still mostly a cult – her actual top 40 presence has been more minimal than you’d think, with her only two Hot 100 top 10 appearances coming via an uncharacteristic EDM remix and a chill sesh alongside the world’s biggest artist .  

Her 21st Century in Pop : One of the most instrumental figures in the trend of anti-pop stars becoming pop stars, Lorde stands as one of the most important singer-songwriters of the century so far. She exploded onto the scene with 2013’s “Royals,” a cool, biting takedown of pop maximalism and materialism that won a pair of Grammys topped the Hot 100 for nine weeks. Parent album Pure Heroine marked the first entry in a discography that has defined large swaths of young millennials and elder Gen Z, and was followed a year later by the hit Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 soundtrack, which displayed her keen curatorial ear (Grace Jones! Ariana Grande! Pusha T!) Her fearless approach to writing about the most uncomfortable intricacies of adolescence, self-worth and love came to a head with 2017’s Billboard 200-topping Melodrama , which earned an album of the year Grammy nod. Follow-up Solar Power gave her another Billboard 200 top 10 in 2021, but she wouldn’t have another culture-clutching moment until her appearance on Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing” remix in 2024.

Why Not Top 25? She’s a songwriting savant with some indisputable pop classics, but her commercial success and the overall volume of her output is a bit lacking for her to crack the top 25.

Their 21st Century in Pop : Countless early-’00s pop-rock artists enjoyed brief moments in the sun before disappearing from top 40; a smaller group were able to sustain their runs for multiple hits and albums. Yet Maroon 5 exists in a class of its own, as a collective able to evolve with pop trends and keep rattling off sizable hits for nearly 20 years straight. Led by Adam Levine, who separated himself from the adult pop also-rans with his hunky charisma and lighter-than-air croon, Maroon 5 moved efficiently from coffee-shop pop-rock (“This Love,” “Sunday Morning”) to wedding-reception dance (“Moves Like Jagger,” “Sugar”) to top 40-baiting rap collaborations (“Girls Like You” with Cardi B, “Beautiful Mistakes” with Megan Thee Stallion), collecting family-friendly top 10 smashes all the while. There’s a good chance that your grandmother loves a Maroon 5 song, and that your adolescent nephew does too.

Why Not Top 25? Although Levine has established himself as a cultural figure thanks to a long-running gig on The Voice and some choice collaborations, Maroon 5’s musical influence has been relatively muted — not hit merchants, per se, but chameleonic enough to never establish one set formula that other pop-rock groups have copied.

MEGAN THEE STALLION

Her 21st Century in Pop: From her fiery flow – honed in the battlefield of cyphers in her Houston hometown – to her immaculate branding, Megan Thee Stallion is simultaneously one of the most unlikely and unpredictable pop stars of the 21st century. She truly broke into the mainstream with 2019’s saucy “Big Ole Freak,” an unabashedly Southern hip-hop joint that followed four mixtapes. By 2020, Megan became the hottest thing on the planet, landing a No. 1 single in “Savage” alongside Beyoncé, and taking home three Grammys (including best new artist) Despite a harrowing shooting and a nasty court battle that threatened to derail her career, Megan scored a conversation-dominating smash with “WAP” (with Cardi B) and this year launched a hugely successful North American arena tour. Between earning her B.S. in health administration while pursing her career and her evolution into a political pop powerhouse – even Vice President Kamala Harris has tapped her on the campaign trail! — Megan Thee Stallion somehow has it all, and continues to inspire the rest of us to get like her.    

Why Not Top 25? With her true breakthrough happening just five years before the cutoff and the lack of a No. 1 album, Megan isn’t quite one of the top 25 pop stars of the century (yet).

MISSY ELLIOTT

Her 21st Century in Pop : Missy was easily the baddest chick on the block in the early 2000s, with a series of game-changing albums and singles that treated both pop and hip-hop as Play-Doh, to be stretched every which way and ultimately re-molded in whatever image she saw fit. She approached music videos the same way: Her (at times literally) shape-shifting approach to the medium set new standards for outside-the-box imagination in hip-hop, while also still being accessible and popular enough to clean up at the VMAs. Missy spent the first five years of the millennium being absolutely light years ahead of the game; when she took a step back after 2005’s The Cookbook , it felt like she was just giving everyone else a chance to catch up.

Why Not Top 25? Unfortunately, Missy never fully stepped back into the spotlight after 2005 – despite popping up every so often over the past two decades with new (and frequently excellent) singles, guest verses or live appearances, she hasn’t released an album since then, and only set off on her first-ever national headlining tour this July. 

His 21st Century in Pop : A few weeks into the new millennium, three beats rang out, a voice called out “HOT S–T!,” and Cornell Haynes Jr., the St. Louis rapper known as Nelly, burst into the spotlight by rejiggering the melody of “Down Down Baby.” “Country Grammar (Hot S–t)” was an electric debut from the Midwest MC, establishing a playful flow and mainstream-ready charm that helped turn his 2000 debut Country Grammar into a mega-seller. His follow-up, 2002’s Nellyville , was even bigger, thanks in part to the club-dominating “Hot In Herre” and R&B juggernaut “Dilemma” with Kelly Rowland; those two singles spent an astonishing 17 weeks combined atop the Hot 100 in 2002, ahead of Nellyville scoring an album of the year Grammy nod. Nelly spent the next decade rattling off a variety of top 10 hits, from the crunk-adjacent “Grillz” with Paul Wall and Ali & Gipp to the “Cruise” remix with Florida Georgia Line.

Why Not Top 25 : Nelly was ubiquitous during the first 10 years of the 21st century, but the past 15 have been light on crossover hits and with bigger gaps in output — understandable for a veteran artist, but enough to blunt his modern appeal.

OLIVIA RODRIGO

Her 21st Century in Pop : For any pop artist, watching your debut single start atop the Hot 100, spend eight weeks there and become a year-defining sing-along would equal success beyond your wildest dreams; for Olivia Rodrigo, her 2021 breakthrough simply functioned as the first box marked in a sprawling checklist. Since then, the former High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star has collected two No. 1 albums (2021 debut Sour and 2023 follow-up Guts ), two more Hot 100 chart-toppers (spunky Sour pop-punk anthem “Good 4 U” and sweeping Guts kiss-off “Vampire”), a best new artist Grammy and millions of screams as an arena headliner. And despite the Disney background and crossover success, Rodrigo’s guitar-heavy aesthetic — as well as her love for ’90s alt vets, covering Veruca Salt live and enlisting The Breeders as an opening act — prime her as a new-school rock star as much as a pop phenom.

Why Not Top 25: Rodrigo wasn’t alive at the beginning of the century, and has only been a star for the past three-and-a-half years; she’s accomplished a ton in a relatively short amount of time, but it’s still early days. (Don’t be shocked to see her on this list if we update it in 25 years, though.) 

Her 21st Century in Pop : P!nk never fit into the pop star mold, with her purposely rebellious image acting as the rough-edged answer to the bubblegum boom of the turn of the century. But her hits were undeniable: After her feisty R&B-inspired breakthrough with 2000’s “There You Go,” her top 40 cred was cemented as part of the quartet behind the Moulin Rouge -commissioned 2001 Hot 100 No. 1 cover of “Lady Marmalade.” That was just one of her four No. 1s (from 15 top 10s), as she also topped the chart with 2008’s sassy “So What,” 2010’s outcast anthem “Raise Your Glass” and 2013’s Nate Ruess duet “Just Give Me a Reason.” The scrappy artist has taken her career to new heights thanks to her acrobatic live performances — most notably her gorgeous  “Glitter in the Air” routine at the 2010 Grammys — and is still smashing Billboard Boxscore records with Cirque du Soleil-worthy aerial feats at every show.

Why Not Top 25? She’s a touring legend with a deep catalog, but she’s never strung enough huge hit songs and albums together in any one era to truly dominate the pop landscape.

POST MALONE

His 21st Century in Pop : Post Malone seemed like a smart bet for one-hit wonder status after his somewhat uhhh sure breakthrough “White Iverson” reached the Hot 100’s top 15. Then he was a two-hit wonder, then a three-hit wonder, and pretty quickly he was just one of the biggest hitmakers on the planet, now with six Hot 100 No. 1s to his name. While he started in rap, he’s flirted plenty with R&B, metal, alternative and now country – and though you’d be unlikely to ever confuse him with Justin Timberlake, he’s ultimately revealed himself to basically be a pop star at his core, with hooks, pipes, charisma and dance moves for days. Even “White Iverson” is basically bubblegum in retrospect. 

Why Not Top 25? Though he feels like he’s already been with us forever at this point, Post Malone has really only been a star for eight years now – and about half of those years were looking kind of dicey, as Posty tried to figure out his place in a post-pandemic world, until he got some help in 2024 from Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and (of course) Morgan Wallen.

His Decade in Pop : There is no artist as synonymous with dancehall’s Stateside crossover peak than Sean Paul: From 2002’s Hot 100-topping “Get Busy” to his 2016 Sia-assisted chart-topper “Cheap Trills,” Paul has been the defining face and voice for the genre in the U.S. His booming, room-rattling voice and rapid-fire delivery helped make dancehall unavoidable on top 40 radio, both on his own (“Gimme the Light,” “Temperature”) and through seismic collaborations with Beyoncé (“Baby Boy”), Rihanna (“Break It Off”) and Clean Bandit (“Rockabye”). For most of the decade’s first half, there was not a dancefloor that could resist the allure of Paul’s voice: Dripping with equal parts sensuality and swagger, he injected Island flavor into the American mainstream in a way that sidestepped gimmickry. In recent years, he’s focused on the Latin music market, collaborating on chart-topping records with Enrique Iglesias (helping his pivotal “Bailando” cross over in the early 2010s) and Feid (2023’s “Nina Bonita”).

Why Not Top 25? After a strong hitmaking run as a leading man in the 2000s, his only major hits in the 2010s came as a guest star — and 13 years without a Hot 100 entry as a lead artist is hard to ignore.

Her 21st Century in Pop : With release of her 2017 debut LP Ctrl , SZA, the St. Louis-born, Jersey-bred singer-songwriter effortlessly positioned herself as the heir to Lauryn Hill’s elusive throne. Her confessional, messy, audacious songwriting spoke to the hearts of millions around the world – particularly Black women working through their 20s. Ctrl came up short at the Grammys and failed to send a single to the Hot 100’s top 20, but eventually won the long game, shifting over three million units and setting the groundwork for 2022’s SOS . SZA’s sophomore album spent a whopping 10 weeks atop the Billboard 200, spawning five Hot 100 top 10 hits (including her first No. 1 “Kill Bill”) and providing a credible challenger to Taylor Swift’s mega-blockbuster Midnights for album of the year at the 2024 Grammys. Outside of her half-decade-separated studio albums, SZA earned an Oscar nod for Black Panther Kendrick Lamar duet “All the Stars,” scored top 10 hits alongside Maroon 5 and Drake, and helped keep a bright light on R&B as other genres threatened to leave it in the streaming dust. 

Why Not Top 25? Despite her undebatable impact, SZA didn’t really become a proper pop star until around 2021, meaning she missed out on the majority of the young century.  

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How Settler-Colonialism Colonized the Universities

The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel.

O n October 7 , Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas’s exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?

The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.

One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”

Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it “makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-­colonial regimes.” When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial ‘domicide,’ making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands.” Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the “hyper-­visible Palestine case …  provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly.” Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that “the world is an unequal place” where “marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice.”

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

T he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.

Read: The curious rise of settler colonialism and Turtle Island

For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider “terra nullius,” the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.

When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being “no one’s land,” Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—­as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.

Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate . In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—­as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.

In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.” Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-­term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.

China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.

These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet’s residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-­first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—­like India’s rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—­occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-­Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-­speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

But the focus on Israel-­Palestine isn’t only a product of the discipline’s limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.

I srael also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those that happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—­white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-­and-­soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it.”

For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the “rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite.” The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about “Zionists,” who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics.”

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti­-Semitic and anti­-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-­Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-­Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti­-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred , sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—­an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.

Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism , that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, “profiteering and usury.” Anti-­Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying “Anti-­Semitism is the socialism of fools,” used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.

The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The Apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (­the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—­the circumcision of the heart, a new law “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false

Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’” except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.

When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—­including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—­defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-­Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”

As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.

This essay is adapted from Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice .

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