If 2024 was the year of elections, 2025 will be the year of questions.
The start of the year will see governments across the world at the beginning of new terms, forced to respond swiftly to mounting economic, social, security, environmental and technological challenges. These issues would be difficult to address at any time, but today they come amid a turbulent geopolitical context—one that is seeing a disintegration of the post-war international order.
As a result, leaders will not only need to address specific challenges but do so while finding agreement to build a global framework for promoting peace and prosperity in place of the aggression and economic uncertainty we are now experiencing.
What, then, are the dynamics that should inform leaders’ actions?
What 3 dynamics should inform leaders' actions in 2025?
First, leaders must account for a growth in seemingly irrational responses among their constituents and counterparts. Leaders can no longer assume domestic and global stakeholders will be guided by identifiable interests because polarized domestic and global politics may lead to decisions that appear counterproductive to external audiences. Indeed, some of the forces shaping these decisions are the result of not just deepening polarization but rising levels of misinformation.
Second, leaders need to be ready for a growth in inconsistency. External commitments are made based on a state's location and domestic interests. The effect of geography on consciences is plainly visible in divergent responses to Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. Acceptance of double standards around the application of human rights and the responsibility or desire to protect are now more normal than the aspiration to universal values, such as those espoused by the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Lastly, leaders need to be ready for a growth in influential voices. Leaders will have to reckon with and listen to new actors, from business leaders to social influencers to rising states, many of who are unwilling to adhere to the status quo. The postwar ‘liberal’ consensus is being challenged as much from within as without—even those states that were the bulwark of post-war order contain strong domestic political forces that now contest it.
With these dynamics as a backdrop, what are the most pressing geopolitical questions leaders will need to answer in the year ahead?
Here are five questions for 2025:
How to advance security within a fragmenting global order?
Global cooperation is at a low point and conflict is escalating. Traditional leaders and institutions, such as the WTO and UN, have recently proved ineffective in delivering broad global consensus, or serving as a platform to resolve disputes. Countries and emergent blocs from across the Global South have not yet clarified whether they will serve as a salutary check on a declining West-led global security order, or simply play a disruptive role. Balancing this dynamic will also be Beijing’s task, given that it is at the centre of multiple new geometries—such as the proposed Global Security Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and a possible Russia-Iran-China axis.
The two most divisive conflicts in 2024—Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza—emerged from long-standing frictions. That these conflicts suddenly inflamed, signals that the global security order is too fragmented to either maintain or negotiate peace.
In this context, when adherence to universal values is an impossibility and the existing order is disintegrating, leaders will be forced to acknowledge the limitations to their influence and the constraints of their alliances.
Leaders will have to ask: What are ways to reach across divides to prevent further conflict? Is it possible for leaders to accept more limitations on their power and take on the task of peace-making? What are the minimum areas of agreement that can generate progress and counter retrogressive action?
How to understand sovereignty in the contemporary world?
The ideal of a rules-based order, painstakingly preserved since 1945, is further away from being practiced now than it has been over the past eight decades. Without shared norms, strong institutions, and a commitment to international law, it is difficult to shape a stable, peaceful environment. However, defenders of the rules-based order have come to realize that for many countries, the role and stability of national political institutions and arrangements are essential. While armies crossing physical borders is an obvious affront to sovereignty, perverse economic measures, manipulation of political systems and regulating access to markets, trading arrangements and payment systems potentially violate the UN Charter and can infringe on the most important aspects of sovereignty.
In recent decades, it was seen as vital that countries cede sovereignty and the ability to make independent decisions on certain policies to global governance institutions, in order to build a "cohesive" global order. Illiberal challengers to this order have long stressed the importance, as they see it, of maintaining sovereignty as the building block of international relations. Now, even defenders of a global order often understand that rules cannot be designed or enforced in a world where state sovereignty is not respected. Because without strong states that can speak for their populations and defend their rights, how can a rules-based order flourish?
In 2025, therefore, leaders will ask: Can the independence of the state be addressed and revitalized in parallel with the strengthening of trans-national structures that offer security for their populations?
For more, watch the following video with author Samir Saran:
How to restore (and redesign) trade and economic globalization?
The golden age of trade appears to be at an end. In 2023, trade in goods shrank by about two percent, more than at any point this century other than during a global recession. An increase in conflict and the realization that global values are elusive has manifested itself in challenges to trade, industrial and financial policy. It is now more difficult to protect supply chains and there are new pressures on the integrity of payments systems. New choke points — from the Red Sea to the Baltic Sea — give a taste of the chaos that would follow, for example, the breakout of conflict in the Straits of Taiwan.
Meanwhile, protectionist industrial policies are back due to political circumstances at home and the perversion of global value chains, necessitating a rethink of the global trading system. After decades of warning developing countries that government intervention was dangerous, Western economists have pivoted fearlessly to prescribing it for their own societies. The United States' Inflation Reduction Act has invited claims of protectionism and displeasure from a number of key foreign trade partners. The EU has passed the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, raising similar concerns, even though China has been implementing such a protectionist policy for years. Though these measures are perceived as hypocritical by emerging economies, they are the result of real domestic pressures to ensure competitiveness, rather than solely a desire to escalate competition.
Supply chains pulled apart by protectionist forces may introduce inefficiencies in the global economic system and, consequently, new inflationary pressures. Worse, the endpoint might be a form of “gated globalization” that limits profits and progress to select participants. The lessons of the long years of post-war growth appear to have been forgotten. Those gains may not have been shared equitably among nations, but they were nevertheless real—and responsible for an unprecedented reduction in global poverty.
The world is now somewhere between a free market and interventionist economic era, but as governments intervene in key industries, strong leadership could still shift the world to a fairer trading age.
Therefore, in 2025 leaders will need to ask: Can we learn to negotiate fresh arrangements between new partners while securing longstanding benefits of trade? How will we create new gains from trade, and can we work harder to share its benefits more equitably?
Can we keep innovation decentralized?
The effects of Artificial Intelligence and other advanced technologies on societies and economies have only begun to be understood. Other tech developments of past decades allowed previously under-connected regions the opportunity to catch up with the global frontier. AI might impact inequality differently: it appears that it privileges the owners of algorithms, the owners of data, the owners of capital, and the locations that dominate processing power. If AI needs to be used to build more AI, then there is good reason to suppose that the decentralised nature of tech innovation — which was essential for the growth of employment and aspirations – may be coming to a close. Such a trend would significantly limit the ability of emerging economies to generate additional wealth creation.
For many governments, the rush to regulate technology seeks to address these challenges, but it must be balanced with considerations of the broader gains and opportunities from rapid innovation - for example an acceleration of the scientific calculations needed to mitigate climate change or development of practices to support worker health and safety on the job. Technology sharing between states that do control the means of emerging technology production and those that do not must be prioritized to ensure that the economic and social gains of technology are distributed equally around the world. The centralization of innovation, entrepreneurship and value creation — with AI advances limited to large, capital- and resource-rich firms —will have implications for data equity and diverse knowledge creation.
Leaders will therefore need to ask in 2025: How can we keep innovation and research lean, dispersed and competitive? Can we ensure that the locations of value creation and of innovation become more inclusive, not less? How can global regulatory bodies be designed so that they can keep pace with the speed of change and distribute the benefits of technology equitably?
Hear more from council member Qian Liu:
Can new energy be brought to climate action?
Societies are dealing with unprecedented heat stress. In 2023 the world breached the 1.5°C average temperature rise barrier set by the Paris Agreement for the first time, and its implications are amply visible, with forcible displacement, biodiversity loss, malnutrition and more running rampant. These consequences are having inequitable effects, often most impacting those communities that contribute the least to global warming. This discrepancy has highlighted the failures of the many global frameworks that were designed to mobilize funds to curb emissions and aid adaptation — for example, the provision of $100 billion annually to the developing world by 2020. Climate finance instead tends to be raised in one geography for the needs of that geography.
Multiple ideas have been proposed: reform of multilateral development banks so they can make larger investments in infrastructure and energy, debt-for-climate swaps, and other market-based policy instruments. Leaders need to work less on ideas and more on implementation and accountability.
In the coming year, all eyes will be on promises made during COP28, and whether the commitment of $5-7 trillion annually towards greening the global economy by 2030 and the promise to scale back on fossil fuels are honoured.
Leaders will ask and will be asked: How can sufficient capital be efficiently deployed to sectors and geographies where it can make the most difference?
Looking ahead
In 2025, leaders across the world will have to search out answers to these five questions. Their answers need not be identical; but the chances are that, if they are in sharp dissonance with each other, then the problems the world seeks to address will be magnified. Amid irrationality, inconsistency, and an abundance of voices, finding a fragile consensus is more important than ever.
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