Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk 2011

With the end of the Cold War, international politics has entered a transitional phase, marked by a period of US dominance. The US has been an increasingly reluctant hegemony, more and more unable and unwilling to shoulder the costs of the international system.

A key question follows: what replaces US dominance? Will China or a set of other powers eventually challenge US power? What circumstances could get the US to reassert itself? Could the bases of strategic interaction and conflict have changed so much as to make a fragmented non-polar world a real possibility?

This Council analyses how grand strategy, conflict and great power interactions are evolving: specifically, how current conflicts evolve, the new potential points of conflict; and how the nature of great power interaction is changing.

This shift in the international balance of power is a change that gives emerging market states much more political and economic influence at the world’s most important bargaining tables.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk looks at the how the rebalancing and the uncertainty this generates will create new risks and opportunities for policymakers, investors and business decision-makers.

The Global Agenda Council's paper on Geopolitical Risk 2011 can be viewed here. 

The Global Agenda Council's Geopolitical Risk Report can be read here.