Shifting powers: Meeting the challenges of the geopolitical landscape

The Western-dominant, American-led, liberally fiscal, status quo that defined the political world and economic growth for much of the second half of the 20th century no longer feels like a realistic barometer for how future events – wars, riots, elections, treaties – will play out on the global stage. 

Instead, we face a future in which multipolarity, the equal distribution of power between two or more states, changes the behaviour of risks to the increasingly connected global system. Today, the price of oil, elections in South America, or the failure of an emerging economy create far-reaching effects through the globalised system. In the future, the exposure to these effects will likely only grow as the structure of our globalised economy shows very few signs of ending soon. Most of the last decade’s geopolitical upheavals can be directly attributed to the fallout from the global financial crisis and the austerity measures that followed. The economic havoc generated by covid-19 has reopened many of those wounds and will carry with it new rivalries as well as the hangover of national debt.