Trend Geopolitics driver: three variant paths from a second globalisation to a wild era

Summary

For the complex geopolitics driver, KISTEP set three variants according to whether conflict between countries intensifies, persists or eases. In the second globalisation path, technology, economic and security tensions ease rapidly and give way to efficient, sustainable new structures of specialisation and collaboration, recreating an era of globalisation. In the reordering amid chaos path, current tensions settle into a new cold war of two poles with limited cooperation, yet the global order stabilises within that reorganised structure. In the wild era path, self-centred national conflicts escalate into local and full-scale wars, poorer countries fall into economic colonisation and distrust between states becomes the new normal of a warring-states world. These three states form the geopolitical axis of the four scenarios.