Drivers of Instability and Effects on our Democracies
Modern democracies are under growing strain. Technological acceleration, climate stress, and geopolitical conditions place increasing pressure on our institutions, while institutional capacity is declining and trust in knowledge, science, and governance is weakening. The potential results of this instability is the collapse of democratic capacity to face the challenges of the 21st century.
We organize our research around two linked questions:
What is driving instability in modern democracies?
How do those pressures affect our societies and institutions?
Lena River Delta, Russia | NASA
Drivers of Instability
We examine the structural forces pushing our societies toward instability, including:
Technological disruption, particularly AI and information systems
Environmental and climate pressures, resource stress, and degradation
Geopolitical shocks, conflict, migration, and demographic change
Effects on our Democracies
We look at how these pressures translate into stress on democratic capacity, including:
Weakened knowledge and information systems
Loss of trust in science and public institutions
Strain on courts, constitutions, and checks and balances
Fragility in governance and electoral systems
Together, these dynamics create a serious risk: Democracies losing the ability to know what is true, coordinate collective action, and respond coherently to large-scale challenges.
Throughout this year, the GIE Foundation is publishing a focused set of commentaries examining how key instability pressures are evolving and how they affect democratic capacity in practice - and providing recommendations on what democratic societies can do about them.
Topics include:
Demographic decline and its implications for governance and social cohesion
AI transparency and trust in public and institutional decision-making
Polarisation, tipping points, and fragility in democratic systems
Defence, security, and public communication in democratic societies
Environmental and resource pressures shaping political stability
Additional pieces will follow as new risks, pressures, and potential leverage points emerge.
Below is a selection of the GIE Foundation’s Commentaries exploring these themes. These Commentaries seek to identify a specific leverage point where intervention can materially improve an aspect of stability in our democracies, and provide directional policy recommendations.
Reclaiming Human Skills as Core Skills in the Age of AI
Democratic societies run on a set of human capacities that no industrial taxonomy has ever named accurately: Judgement, empathy, critical reasoning; the willingness to be persuaded by evidence and the courage to refuse to be persuaded by power. We have called these capacities 'soft' for fifty years, systematically underpriced and underrepresented them, and built institutions on the assumption that they can be added back in later if we need them.
AI adoption inside public institutions is now accelerating that error - removing human judgement from the front line of courts, benefits agencies, schools, and regulatory bodies, and calling the result an efficiency gain. The consequences are not merely labour-market consequences; there are dire ramifications for the stability and health of our democratic societies, and the policy response currently being constructed across the OECD is asking the wrong question.
When Nothing Is Trustworthy: AI, Transparency, and Democracy
AI-generated audio and video are now cheap, fast, and increasingly indistinguishable from reality. The immediate harms - fraud, manipulation, harassment - are already visible. Deepfakes and other generative content are already influencing the outcomes of elections, the fluctuations of markets, and the course of society. This is dire. But the deeper risk still is the erosion of trust in evidence itself. As synthetic media proliferates, our institutions are losing their ability to anchor a shared reality, and our democratic capacity will degrade.
Transparency standards - provenance, watermarking, and verification systems - are a serious part of the infrastructure needed to stabilize the information environment. Adoption, interoperability, and enforcement will determine whether they have any meaningful effect on institutional resilience, and ultimately, if we can use these tools to protect our democracies.
AI on the Frontlines
Large-language models are being used intensively by both sides in the Ukraine war, demonstrating their potential for offensive propaganda, but also how far they can help defend against political disinformation. Can AI help democracies win the information war?