Peter Wagner

Peter Wagner is Research Professor of Social Sciences at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and at the University of Barcelona as well as Research Lead in the Programme «Modernity in Central Asia: Identity, Society, Environment» at the University of Central Asia.

His research, based in comparative historical and political sociology, social and political theory, and sociology of the social sciences, focuses on the historical trajectories and transformations of modern societies. Analyzing the persisting tensions between struggles for autonomy and forms of domination, it explores in the light of historical experiences in different world-regions the current possibilities of progress, not least in the face of human action reaching and exceeding planetary boundaries - which inaugurates the times that remain.

Publications in French include Liberté et disciplne. Les deux crises de la modernité (Métailié 1996) and Sauver le progrès. Comment rendre l’avenir à nouveau désirable (La Découverte 2016). His most recent book Carbon Societies. The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels is scheduled to be published by Polity Press in the spring of 2024.