In the report’s opening chapter, “The Expansion of Geopolitics”, World Economic Forum President Børge Brende argues the number of actors exerting geopolitical influence is growing and domains for geopolitical competition or cooperation are also expanding.

Within this context, Brende calls for a cooperative order: “The more powers compete and pursue strategic advantage at the expense of addressing shared technological, environmental and economic challenges, the more likely it will be that a broader sense of friction will develop across the global system. A rivalrous global system will in turn make it more unlikely that shared priorities are fulfilled,” he writes.

Brende notes that global coordination in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks and the 2008 global financial crisis offer a paradigm for a more collaborative response to geopolitical challenges. Cooperation, he argues, will ultimately prove more beneficial to individual states – and to the world at large.

“As the world becomes even more interconnected in terms of flows of information, capital and people, states will be more reliant on one another to realize positive outcomes for themselves and the global community,” Brende writes. “At a time when power dynamics are in flux, there is an opportunity for stakeholders to make the decision to shape geopolitics in a cooperative, rather than competitive, manner.”

Report by the World Economic Forum