Is Global Instability the New Normal?
Mohammad Ajeeb
Bradford: The last three decades have been a period of extraordinary progress and profound instability. While humanity has witnessed unprecedented advances in technology, medicine, communication and connectivity, it has also experienced deepening divisions and insecurity.
Peoples across the world today face a convergence of challenges that threaten the foundations of global peace and stability.
One of the most significant pressures has been demographic change. The world’s population has grown from around 5.5 billion in the early 1990s to over 8 billion today. While much of this growth has been concentrated in South Asia and Africa, its effects are global: rapid urbanization, pressure on natural resources, youth unemployment in some regions and an ageing crisis in others.
When states fail to provide education, employment and housing for a growing population, social frustration grows and becomes fertile ground for conflict and migration crises.
A second driver is intense competition in modern technology.
The digital revolution has transformed economies and societies, but it has also created a new arena for geopolitical rivalry. Competition for dominance in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, data control and military technology has intensified mistrust between major powers.
At the same time, technology has made surveillance cheaper, disinformation more widespread, and modern weapons more accessible. What was once a tool for empowerment can now be used to curtail freedoms and to magnify divisions.
This technological competition is compounded by economic and religious wars. Economic globalization lifted millions out of poverty, but its benefits were unevenly distributed that made the rich fabulously richer and the poor more poor.
Trade wars, sanctions, resource competition and widening inequality within nations and peoples have fuelled resentment. In parallel, conflicts framed in religious and ethnic terms have replaced ideological confrontations of the Cold War era in many regions.
From the Middle East to South Asia and parts of Europe, identity-based mobilization has been used to justify violence and to entrench political power.
The consequences of these drivers are visible in daily life. There is a growing lack of empathy and social cohesion within and between societies. Racial, ethnic and religious conflicts have increased, often exacerbated by political actors who benefit from polarization. At the international level, respect for international law has weakened. The principle of collective security, enshrined in the United Nations system, is frequently defied and ignored by both great powers and regional actors.
This erosion has encouraged the rise of nationalism and far-right politics in many democracies, as well as authoritarian nationalism elsewhere, all of which promise security through exclusion.
Perhaps most concerning is the daily curtailment of individual and political freedoms that many peoples now experience.
Restrictions on free expression, press freedom, judicial independence and political participation have become more common. For many citizens, there is a growing fear that the present world order is drifting towards a civil and military dictatorial mindset.
In such an order, the concept of “might is right” replaces dialogue, law and multilateral cooperation. When power alone determines legitimacy, smaller nations and vulnerable communities suffer first, but long-term stability for all is undermined.
This leads to the central question: are these trends an unavoidable threat to global peace and stability, or can they be harnessed and reversed?
There are strong arguments for pessimism. Security competition over technology is structurally difficult to control, demographic and environmental pressures will continue regardless of policy, and international institutions designed in 1945 struggle to manage today’s multipolar world. Technology itself has made authoritarian governance more efficient, suggesting that restrictions on freedom may not be temporary.
However, history suggests that no trend is irreversible. Population growth is already slowing as education, healthcare and family planning expand. Technology, while capable of enabling control, also enables accountability through open-source investigation, satellite monitoring and global communication.
Economic conflicts are manageable when institutions provide fair mechanisms for resolving disputes. Most importantly, the appeal of extreme nationalism tends to decline when governments deliver justice, opportunity and good governance.
The conflicts that appear to be rooted in ancient hatreds are most often sustained by modern failures of inclusion and institutional weakness.
Reversing these dangerous trends does not mean returning to the past. It means updating the rules that govern competition.
This includes creating verifiable agreements for emerging technologies, strengthening regional and international dispute resolution, investing in human capital in regions with young populations, and protecting domestic institutions that safeguard freedoms: independent courts, a free press and space for civil society.
When competition is regulated and cooperation is seen as serving national interest, stability becomes possible.
The instabilities of the last three decades are real and serious. Unmanageable population pressures, technological rivalry, and economic and religious conflicts have contributed to division, intolerance, and the weakening of international law. They have fuelled nationalism and encouraged a dangerous belief that power alone confers legitimacy.
These changes do pose a profound threat to global peace and stability. Yet they should not be unavoidable. With deliberate policy choices, renewed commitment to international law, and governance that restores dignity and opportunity accompanied by fairer distribution of wealth and resources at the national level, these same forces can be harnessed to build a more stable and empathetic world order.
The future will depend less on whether these trends exist and more on how humanity chooses to manage them for the sake of its survival !!
