There are also pitfalls in building long-term resilience strategies when the options to avoid exposure to risks are limited. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sparked an energy and inflation crisis and urgent measures to reduce hydrocarbon dependencies on Russia, and in turn curb Putin’s coercive powers. But the race for renewables has increased dependencies on less stable countries in Africa for the critical raw materials that clean energy technologies require, as well as on China, which dominates the global supply chains for their extraction and processing.

In this respect, reducing exposure to today’s risks may increase vulnerabilities to the next conflict or crisis, unless care is taken to anticipate scenarios and map dependencies. The coup in July in Niger, a major supplier of uranium, exemplifies the risks of reliance on unstable countries for materials essential to reach net zero goals. The possibility of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait as perhaps the preeminent geopolitical risk in the coming years raises the question of whether de-risking from Russia over Ukraine has simply made the West more exposed to Chinese coercion over Taiwan. 

The assessments in Strategic Outlook 2024 may help narrow some gaps in thinking about future risks. But closing the resilience gap and finding sustainable long-term strategies will require difficult decisions, because there is no certainty that the worst cases will come to pass or even be foreseen. Building resilience isn't about being right or certain about the future. It is about being prepared for and geared towards managing uncertainty, and this process begins with forecasting.

As we look to the future throughout Strategic Outlook, the question amidst all these ongoing and emerging changes is whether governments, and indeed global businesses, can keep up and be prepared for the risks that will attend them. This is a pressing question about tying anticipation to action because the only constant of our era is change. And the safest assumption now is that changes occur faster than ever thanks to technology and the interdependencies of risks. 

In our Resilience Perceptions Survey, the majority of respondents said that war, environmental destabilisation and cyber risks are expected to pose the greatest threats to the resilience of organisations over the next five years. This includes civil and interstate conflicts, risks stemming from climate change, natural hazards and biodiversity loss, as well as cyber espionage and cybercrimes. The next most frequently selected risks were economic instability and market volatility stemming from political and social unrest. 

Faced with such risks, many respondents felt that the way their organisations are structured and a lack of strategy are the biggest impediments for creating resilience. This speaks largely to how enterprises manage risks, particularly geopolitical and global security risks. But it also seems to suggest that many global organisations are struggling to keep up with the pace and complexity of how, when and where new crises occur and unfold, and impact their organisations. 

That AI technology could give malign actors capabilities that would otherwise be beyond their reach is perhaps the greatest long-term global security concern. We are already seeing how quickly cyber threat actors are exploiting AI to write harmful code, engage in spear phishing at scale and attack networks. Without adequate safeguards to prevent advanced AI proliferating out of control, it would only be a matter of time before malign non-state actors see similar leaps in capabilities in the physical domain. In 2022, it took a mere six hours for an AI tool to suggest 40,000 different potentially lethal molecules, some of which were similar to the VX nerve agent.

The need to regulate this technology is as plain as it is pressing, but the speed with which effective regulations can be enacted is lagging behind the rapid evolution of the technology. It is quite possible that AI laws and regulations become outdated as soon as they come into effect. And it seems unlikely that key regulations will be in place for some of these elections in 2024. The most effective near-term mitigations may well prove to be benevolent AI technology solutions rather than those of a purely regulatory nature.

The mainstream arrival of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) adds yet another new dimension of risk in geopolitics and global security. AI has now propelled us towards a new future far sooner than many could have imagined. The scope of opportunities that AI promises seems almost limitless, but managing the risks that accompany this revolutionary technology will require a degree of positive sum cooperation that is lacking in international relations at present.  

The pace of change in AI technology is so rapid that the risk can be conceived of as one of widening gaps. The gaps being those between the technology and our knowledge and understanding of it and its risks, and how we manage the risks that may arise before the technology proliferates beyond control. This lag in understanding and in finding common ground may render attempts to regulate AI quickly and holistically far less effective than they need to be. 

Such risks from AI span social, political, scientific, cyber, security, geostrategic and economic domains, and may prove as prosaic and as profound as the opportunities that AI will bring. While many of the risks may take time to manifest, anxieties of sweeping changes such as widespread job losses may prove a more imminent risk issue in 2024. Arguably, though, more urgent near-term risks arising from AI in politics relate to the integrity of democratic institutions and the capabilities AI can give to malign actors to inflict damage.

This will be the first year in which we are most likely to see AI starting to play a major role in shaping political discourse and perceptions before, during and after elections. In 2024, we will see elections determining the governance of more than a third of the world's population, in the US, Taiwan, India, Finland and the European Parliament to name a few. Yet there are urgent questions as to the extent to which AI exploitation may play a role in their political and security outcomes.

Highly convincing deepfake technology is the most prolific concern because of how effective this may prove in undermining public trust, particularly in a populist political climate. This is particularly given the extant trends of conspiracy theories are mainstreaming and disinformation campaigns by hostile states and political actors are spreading within states. AI could also give disruptive fringe actors outsized means to influence audiences and win votes through AI-enabled data populism.

While every region faces different challenges, China-US relations and Russia’s war in Ukraine will almost certainly remain front and centre in geopolitical risk considerations in 2024. What happens in China and the US in 2024 in particular will have global ramifications. Even just the possibility of a return to a Trump presidency in the US presidential elections raises important questions about how the US might engage with China and other powers, and what strategic confidence other countries can have in US alliances and agreements, not least NATO and US support for Ukraine. 

In the case of China, we forecast that its economic downturn will probably become more sustained, leading to lower imports, less consumption and fewer investments abroad, undermining its Belt and Road Initiative in various parts of the world. This would probably contribute to a sustained economic slowdown globally with attending impacts on jobs and employment. We also assess there is a risk that inflation will persist -- if not rise again -- due to supply chain disruptions (particularly in the tech sector) caused by US-China competition, political crises in third countries and the increasingly frequent impact of severe climatic events worldwide. 

All the while, the globally significant scenario of a Taiwan Strait crisis will continue to loom. How such a scenario might play out, be it a political takeover, naval blockade, war or something less kinetic, is widely debated. This raises difficult questions about the cost-benefit considerations of global planning and mitigations for what many seem to regard as a high-impact but low-probability risk. But in our estimation, a denouement of sorts to resolve Beijing's strategic intent on Taiwan will become progressively more likely over the coming two to five years.

Strategic competition between the leading powers predominates, but the emergence of the so-called Global South is an important geopolitical shift to watch. Middle-ranking powers are now pursuing their interests and exercising power on the global stage in ways we have not quite seen before. Overridingly, their goals are self-interested, not collective: security and growth through greater trade and investment. This is important because the strategies of the US and China, and indeed Europe and Russia, rest on trade relations with Global South powers that are themselves competing for ascendance and are challenging established norms.

From energy security to diversified and secure supply chains and access to critical mineral resources and markets, China, the US and Europe all rely on Global South powers to achieve their goals. And it is likely to become a sellers' market, where strategic agreements are defined less by reform and governance norms than by economic and material benefit. A subscription to a stable liberal rules-based order, which many in the Global South feel does not serve their interests, is not required. And with it, the prospects of mutual cooperation to substantively tackle common global risks such as environmental degradation remain weak.