Week signals: Breaking traditions
Plus: watch points for Germany, the Balkans, Georgia, Venezuela, and the Sahel.
This week:
IN REVIEW. The shock of collapse, measuring state resilience, and five regimes most at risk.
UP AHEAD. A vote in Germany, Kosovo-Serbia talks, the Georgian presidency, crunch time for Caracas, and an olive branch to the coup belt.
The Week in Review: Calculating risk
The week began with the fall of an old government in Syria. It ended with the start of a new one in France. In between, the attempt to suspend one in South Korea continued to ricochet. We also saw a new president appointed in Ghana, an old president hospitalised in Brazil, and a yet-to-be-inaugurated president named Person of the Year.
Much of the week was also spent speculating on what this year’s bout of anti-incumbency means for 2025 and who might be next to fall, whether at the ballot box or gunpoint. Legitimate questions were raised about the fragility of authoritarian states. Syria’s collapse always seemed possible but was nonetheless shocking. Many inside and outside the regimes in Iran, Russia and beyond will have wondered if and when their time might also come.
There are various theories as to what makes a state fragile and what makes one resilient (or even anti-fragile). One of the most commonly-cited views, at least in the West, was encapsulated in political scientist Ian Bremmer’s 2006 book The J Curve, where he posited that a regime’s vulnerability could be measured along a spectrum of economic and political openness. The least open (e.g., Turkmenistan), were robust but rigid. The most open (e.g., Norway), were robust and flexible. Those moving towards openness (e.g., Iraq), or in the middle (e.g., Hungary), were at risk.
This paradigm has been invoked to provide a realist justification for liberal democracy. Not only is it good for the citizen, it’s good for the state. Free nations are not only richer and happier, but stronger. Open societies are safer to themselves as well as each other. Democratic peace theory shows how states accountable to their citizens embrace interdependence. Countries with a McDonalds don’t go to war. Or at least they didn’t, until Russia invaded Ukraine.
But openness is just one factor part of resilience, and there’s no clear consensus on what makes a strong state and what makes a weak one. And just as 19th century measures on what constituted civilisation look outdated (see the map above), 20th century measures on stability and freedom are beginning to look outdated too.
Two other common resilience measures are the Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index and the Economist’s Democracy Index. No measure is perfect (ask the credit ratings agencies), but when used for predicting vulnerability, whether of a democracy or autocracy, neither can say why Niger saw a coup in 2023, but the Central African Republic didn’t. Likewise, neither can say why Syria and Bangladesh have seen revolution, but Iran and Pakistan haven’t. Nor can they say why politics is currently so volatile in South Korea or France, but not in Singapore or Switzerland. More varied measures of state capacity can help, as can knowledge of the internal politics (or indeed sheer luck), but there have been plenty of smart people waiting years for the coming collapse of China. And they’re still waiting.
With those caveats, we’ve been doing our own thinking on what makes and breaks a state, and where things are heading for those typically seen at risk. So, without being predictive, here are five we think you should watch out for: