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.
Who Owns the Map: Data Sovereignty is Required to Protect Democracy
Mapping is a political act. From the earliest cadastral surveys to modern navigation platforms, to map is to govern: Determining what is visible, what is counted and addressed, and what is not. Control over spatial data has always carried political consequence. What has changed is the scale, the granularity, and the speed at which that data now moves through systems that most citizens do not see and most governments do not adequately regulate. The same location data that underpins navigation, urban planning, and emergency response also flows through broker markets to advertisers, hedge funds, and state agencies, with minimal legal constraint in much of the world, and none at all in a substantial part of it.
AI and big data analytics have made that data exponentially more legible and exploitable than it was even a decade ago, and the technology is accelerating faster than the governance response. Decentralised mapping offers new possibilities for citizen participation and democratic ownership of spatial infrastructure, but only under governance conditions that do not yet widely exist. But without them, decentralisation risks producing a more complete surveillance architecture than older state systems ever possessed. Data sovereignty over spatial data is one of the most important and overlooked mechanisms by which we protect our democracies in the age of ubiquitous connectivity.