By john The single most dangerous political risk heading into late decade is not war, not recession, not election chaos — but global governance fragmentation. The world is silently entering a structural phase where the foundational supranational Pokemon787 institutions built post-1945 cannot govern 21st century power competition anymore — but no new institutional regime is agreed to replace them. This is the grey zone that will define global politics before 2035.
The UN cannot force compliance. WTO cannot enforce trade discipline. IMF conditionality does not have the normative authority advantage it once had. WHO legitimacy was structurally damaged by politicization during pandemic era. Security Council veto is now used as power stall tactic not global responsibility instrument. The global system is slowly losing global referee.
But the world cannot function without global refereeing.
This is the most underpriced geopolitical systemic risk right now.
Modern power conflict is not symmetric. AI, semiconductor sovereignty, compute resource allocation, industrial strategy, maritime legal warfare, election engineering, financial weaponization — all require a coherence regulatory environment to avoid system-wide chain reaction. But the political architecture that used to create predictable guardrails is now non-operational.
That vacuum will not remain empty.
Countries are now building parallel institutional systems.
China is building non-Western finance architecture, non-Western standards alliances, non-Western arbitration ecosystems, currency swap diplomacy networks, non-Western security guarantee frameworks, and Belt & Road 3.0 industrial institutionalization. The Gulf monarchies are building sovereign capital multilateral networks that bypass western Bretton Woods channels. ASEAN is trying to build middle power multilateralism to resist hegemonic binary alignment. The EU is building normative defense of the rules-based order — but cannot enforce it globally without US.
The US meanwhile is moving away from universal institutions and is shifting to coalition conditionality blocks (Indo-Pacific, AUKUS, Quad, minilateral semiconductor regimes, tech alliance clubs). Washington is no longer trying to reform global governance — Washington is trying to re-route it.
The non-aligned world sees this fracture as opportunity: they do not want to choose a side — they want to arbitrage institutional fragmentation.
This is where the next world risk emerges:
If global governance breaks into parallel jurisdictional networks — the monitoring, enforcement, and legitimacy layer collapses. When that layer collapses — escalation containment becomes probabilistically harder, because every conflict will operate under multiple overlapping rule systems with no supreme adjudication mechanism.
Institutional fragmentation also means global political risk premium becomes permanently higher. Investors will demand higher return because global predictability regime vanishes.
Tech governance becomes even more dangerous — because AI, quantum, bio-compute and compute sovereignty will operate under different sovereign normative worlds. Standards war becomes structural, not episodic.
This is not a temporary transitional turbulence. This is new world structural architecture.
The risk is not multipolarity. Multipolarity can be stable if institutional coherence exists. The risk is multipolarity without governance coherence — which becomes competitive chaos system.
Before 2035, the world will likely be governed not by a single global governance system — but by competing legal regimes, competing finance standards, competing trade compliance ecosystems, competing tech regulatory spheres, competing maritime interpretation blocks.
This fragmentation will define geoeconomics, security, and strategic alignment for the next 25 years.
The real global political question now is not which ideology wins.
The real global political question is:
Which institutional regime will govern a multipolar world — and who gets to define which rules matter?
This is the decisive struggle that will shape the century.