The Unravelling of Globalization

The headlines of early 2026—Greenland, Venezuela, the visible recalibration at Davos—are symptoms of something deeper.

The world is experiencing a fundamental transformation of the global order established after the Cold War. For decades, globalization proceeded under assumptions that economic integration would lead to political convergence, shared prosperity would reduce conflict, and universal standards would eventually govern most domains of human activity. These assumptions now appear increasingly untenable.

What we are witnessing is not a temporary disruption but a structural shift. The international system is fragmenting across multiple domains simultaneously—trade, security, technology, finance, information—with each area of breakdown reinforcing the others.

The Compounding Forces

The 2008 financial crisis revealed how interconnected systems transmit shocks while distributing benefits unevenly. The political backlash empowered movements that explicitly rejected globalist frameworks.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed dependencies on foreign suppliers for essential goods and demonstrated the limits of international coordination under geopolitical strain. Resilience displaced efficiency as a governing priority.

Digital sovereignty emerged as nations recognized that infrastructure and data are strategic assets requiring national control. The borderless internet gave way to separate digital domains with incompatible rules and governance philosophies.

Great power competition intensified, transforming economic relationships from positive-sum to zero-sum. In the gaps, middle powers leverage geographic position and resource control to expand their options.

The Ukraine war catalysed reorganization of security, energy, and finance along bloc lines—demonstrating how quickly decades of integration can be dismantled when security concerns override economic logic.

Rising authoritarianism and democratic decay created fundamental incompatibilities in how different systems approach rights, information, and institutional legitimacy.

US policy shifts, which accelerated in 2025, have reoriented the world's largest economy and military power away from the multilateral order it helped create, toward transactional bilateralism prioritizing narrowly-defined national interests.

The Cascade Dynamic

These forces don't operate in isolation—they cascade. When powerful actors abandon constraints without consequence, they create permission structures for others. Each defection lowers the threshold for the next; what begins as exceptional behaviour becomes normalized practice. Scholars call this a norm cascade — transformation that compounds not through gradual shifts but through rapid, self-reinforcing shifts in accepted behaviour. What's distinctive now is the direction: accelerating abandonment of the constraints that made the previous order function.In the gaps left behind, new dynamics are taking shape, making this a critical moment to understand the shifts underway and determine how to position for what comes next.

What Comes Next

The 10F forecasts examine what this transformation means across ten critical domains—and what it demands of organizations navigating a world where the old rules no longer hold, and new ones have yet to stabilise.

Sign up to receive the forecasts when they launch in February 2026.

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