For any progress to last, global peace and security must be guaranteed –this must be a priority in 2025
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This article is a part of the essay series “Budapest Edit”
To understand where the world is heading, we must reflect on where we stand. While 2024 has been a good year for innovation, ushering in a new era of creativity, it’s been a challenging year for global tech talent and energy transition, and a devastating one for global peace and security. Against the backdrop of international crises converging all at once, we enter 2025 facing more unknowns, with great-power rivalries likely to further challenge the policy options for the Global South, undermining developing countries’ ability to negotiate their own future.
Yet, opportunities for cooperation have started to emerge along shared interests. Middle and small powers across the globe are exploring ways to assert themselves through conversations on global governance and the reform of the global financial architecture. Global South countries are increasingly shaping discussions on multilateralism and multipolarity, often choosing minilateral cooperation as a way to secure regional weight, sometimes even a global voice, for themselves. This dynamic is likely to define the year to come and help harness the opportunities that lie ahead in digitisation and decarbonisation.
Middle and small powers across the globe are exploring ways to assert themselves through conversations on global governance and the reform of the global financial architecture.
2024 was framed through the lenses of competition, disruption, and domination. Looking ahead to 2025, accepting the right of the developing world to exercise agency offers some space for optimism. Yet, a conscious shift in perceptions is required to help converge around the kind of multipolar global order that guarantees cooperation to the benefit of all. Only by accepting complexities and contradictions as realities of the world we live in, can we keep growing through innovation and creativity, invest in tech talent, and pursue energy transition. For any progress to last, however, global peace and security must be guaranteed – this must be a priority in 2025.
Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy is an Assistant Professor at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan and an Affiliated Scholar at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
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Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy is an Assistant Professor at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan and an Affiliated Scholar at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She specialises ...
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