The global risk landscape is shaped by an intricate web of geopolitical conflicts and regional instabilities. Learn what our intelligence team anticipates for 2025 and beyond.
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October 28, 2024 INSIDE THIS ARTICLE, YOU'LL FIND: |
The global risk landscape in 2025 is shaped by an intricate web of geopolitical conflicts and regional instabilities. Ongoing wars in the Middle East, deepening schisms in the Balkans, and the escalating chaos across the Sahel region are just a few of the crises that will challenge governments, multinational organizations, and travelers alike. Combined with gray zone warfare, interstate conflict, transnational organized crime, terrorism, and the rising threat of natural disasters driven by climate change, these multi-faceted crises will demand comprehensive and proactive risk management strategies to protect businesses and their people.
At Global Guardian, we identify these converging crises as part of the 'Age of the Polycrisis,' a new era where multiple, interconnected challenges amplify each other’s impacts. Understanding the cascading effects of these risks is key to maintaining resilience and operational continuity in an increasingly volatile world.
Want more analysis of the risks posed by the year ahead? Download our “Insights From The 2025 Global Risk Map” webinar, where our experts and guests discussed the polycrisis phenomenon and how it is shaping today’s security trends.
Why 2025 Is the ‘Age of the Polycrisis’
A polycrisis refers to a situation where multiple global and local crises — from geopolitical conflicts to economic distress, climate change, and transnational crime — interact and exacerbate one another, creating complex and interconnected risks. These crises do not occur in isolation but instead amplify each other across geostrategic fault lines, escalating local issues into regional or even global threats.
As this new Cold War between the East between the new East, comprised of Russia, China, Iran and others and the West expands, so too does the geostrategic stress felt by countries caught in the crisis and the crossfire countries caught in the crossfire. We are now in the age of a polycrisis.”
– Zev Faintuch, Head of Intelligence and Research, Manager
One clear example is the civil unrest in New Caledonia in May 2024, which revealed how seemingly localized events can be manipulated to expose larger geopolitical tensions. What started as unrest over French police brutality was inflamed by Russian and Chinese misinformation campaigns, turning a domestic issue into a flashpoint with global significance. The unrest in New Caledonia, a small island with strategic importance, highlights how powers like Russia and China exploit local tensions to undermine Western influence. In this case, New Caledonia's situation became a proxy battleground in the broader geopolitical struggle between East and West.
This example reflects the broader reality of 2025: local crises are becoming increasingly intertwined with global ones. The intensification of new Cold War dynamics between superpowers, competition over resources, and the fragility of states around the world means that small sparks can ignite much larger fires. As a result, the global risk landscape in 2025 is defined by this polycrisis phenomenon, where crises are not only increasing in frequency but are more interconnected than ever before.
As we look to 2025 and beyond, global polycrises will have unique effects on different regions. From Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa, each region faces its own set of challenges, shaped by the intersection of local vulnerabilities and global pressures.
Identifying 2025’s Risks Using the ‘GSI’
The Geostrategic Stress Index, included in Global Guardian’s 2025 Risk Map, is a forward-looking tool that measures the susceptibility of a certain country (or territory) to destabilization by a foreign actor in the next five to 10 years. Destabilization could include:
- Exacerbation of domestic tensions
- Thawing of frozen conflicts
- Escalation of hot conflicts through aid or proxies
The underlying model behind the GSI is comprised of four different buckets:
- Foreign Intervention Appeal. Does a country have vital resources and grievances that can be exploited? To create a baseline, we look at the strategic minerals that the United States, China, and the EU all agree will be important over the next several decades, as well as some highly fungible items like precious metals, diamonds, and energy commodities like coal, oil, and gas.
- State Volatility. How vulnerable is a state to outside interference? Here, we're looking at internal grievances, and we created a metric that we call “combativity” that measures the extent to which political struggles are violent. This bucket also include. state fragility
- Security Resilience. This measures the capacity of a state to push back against foreign destabilization in any of its forms.
- Geopolitical Orbit. The underlying logic is that countries that are not firmly in one geopolitical camp are at the greatest risk for destabilization.
Anticipating Global Risks in 2025 and Beyond
Utilizing the information visualized on the 2025 Global Risk Map and GSI, the following are regions where we expect potential polycrises to emerge or worsen in 2025 and beyond:
Israel, Gaza, and the Increasingly Violent Middle East
When looking at the last year, no singular events, conflicts, disasters et cetera have had a greater impact than the October 7th War. Since October 8th, 2024, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and to a lesser extent, Iraq, Syria, and Iran have all been involved in this regional war. The Houthis, Iran's proxy in Yemen, have been attacking Israel with long-range drones and cruise missiles and have attacked over 80 merchant ships in the Red Sea, which has led to an over 70% decrease in maritime traffic the shipping lane that facilitates the movement of goods from Asia to Europe and vice versa. Shipping costs have drastically increased as a result. With Iran threatening to disrupt traffic in Strait of Hormuz where around a third of the world's oil moves through this conflict has major implications for the global energy market, let alone the obvious and terrible human tragedy.
Trouble in the Balkans
While the Balkans are not particularly resource rich, they do have deeply entrenched ethno-religious schisms that make domination by a foreign power more palatable than power sharing with a local adversary. This is the dynamic we see when countries break up and then you have competing ideas of nationalism where the nationalistic ambitions overlap. Serbia still claims Kosovo and both Serbian and Kosovar politicians invoke the nationalist issue to score points domestically. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if China, Russia, the United States and the EU were not deeply invested in the outcome of these contests.
"The Balkans exemplify increased risk from the localization of international conflicts and the internationalization of local conflicts.”
– Joseph Chafetz, Intelligence Analyst
Meanwhile, there is a permanent Western military presence in KFOR, which is largely comprised of NATO, and then we have a very probable presence of GRU and ex-Wagner militia paramilitary personnel in Serbia and the Republika Srpska, which is a breakaway part of Bosnia. So, all the chess pieces are on the board. The systems that exist in the region exist in tension with one another, and no local party is willing to accept the solution offered by their opponent.
Spiraling Situation in the Sahel
If you look at a map of the coup belt and a map of the Sahel, the geological area south of the Sahara, they’re almost a one-to-one match. The Sahel’s countries feature weak institutions that are coup-prone, a lack of state legitimacy, and anti-Western sentiment that precludes cooperation with responsible security partners. This all leads to a situation where the region’s regimes, with their very narrow bases of support, need to enlist support for their regimes from groups like Wagner that end up being paid through concessions of mining and extractive resources. These conditions further exacerbate the ethno-religious grievances, the economic grievances, and the climate impact of desertification.
As chaos in the Sahel spirals, the neighboring regions of Coastal West Africa and Central African are experiencing spillover. As these conflicts begin to merge, it is increasingly difficult to address completely independent crises like monkeypox, which is now spreading in the DRC, or the spread of separatism and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea.
Crisis begets crisis, creating opportunities for actors who profit from destabilization. These co-constituent and simultaneous crises are greater than the sum of their parts.
Operating in a High-Risk Environment
For organizations operating in high-risk environments, tools like Global Guardian’s Risk Map and Geostrategic Stress Index (GSI) provide vital insight to anticipate and manage potential threats, particularly when business operations take place in volatile regions. While the high-profile risks such as coups, terrorist attacks, and kidnappings are often the most visible, they are far from the only challenges security managers must navigate.
A significant concern in crisis zones is the challenge of transporting people and resources. Overland routes are often unreliable, as they pass through areas controlled by violent extremist groups or forces hostile to Western interests, making aviation the most viable option. However, air travel is not without complications — diplomatic disputes can lead to the loss of overflight privileges, and limited commercial flights to conflict zones restrict available routes. Visa processing can also be slowed by diplomatic tensions. Compounding these logistical issues is the lack of accurate, timely information. In areas where Western or United Nations forces have been expelled, the absence of reliable intelligence creates a critical information gap. Without data on security incidents, involved actors, and the broader political context, security managers are left in the dark.
Another critical challenge is ensuring that employees comply with travel tracking protocols, especially when operating in high-risk regions. As Colin O’Brien, Chief Security Officer for the United States Institute of Peace, noted in our webinar, compliance often comes down to effectively communicating the benefits of such systems.
“Some people don’t want to feel like they’re being tracked or monitored,” said O’Brien. “We have a great policy that says we are not watching where you go on GPS unless there is a reason, either due to an emergency SOS activation or someone crossing a geofence that we've established. A lot of it is just trying to meet people where they are, take the time to explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and show them that there’s a real benefit to that.”
Key Takeaways for Businesses
- Assumptions that worked yesterday don’t necessarily work for today or tomorrow. Prioritizing continual reassessment is imperative.
- In a non-permissive transportation environment, being able to move before everybody else is critical to being successful. Sitting back to benchmark can preclude your ability to support or remove your people out of harm's way.
- Creating robust communication plans with built-in redundancy is critical for crisis situations.
- Commitment to travel safety protocols, including travel tracking, is crucial in these environments. To improve employee adoption, clearly explain why tracking is necessary and in what specific situations (e.g., activating emergency SOS or crossing a pre-set geofence) it will be used.
- Having a policy that assuages travelers' privacy concerns is instrumental in compliance and positive outcomes.
- In an emergency, the ability to identify the crisis and your exposure to it becomes critical for your leadership chain.
As 2025 approaches, the global risk landscape is becoming increasingly unpredictable and complex. Businesses operating internationally must prepare for the convergence of geopolitical instability, environmental crises, and emerging security threats. Navigating this landscape requires not only vigilance but also the right tools and intelligence to anticipate risks and respond quickly.
By leveraging comprehensive risk assessments and real-time intelligence, organizations can better protect their people and assets, ensuring resilience in the face of uncertainty. The challenges ahead will be significant, but with the right strategies in place, businesses can adapt to this new era of heightened global risk.
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