In a global context of growing complexity and fragmentation we desperately need heuristic tools to make sense of the world and to (attempt) to orient our strategic public and private decision-making.
The temptation – as in all moments of geopolitical transition – is to turn complexity into simple schemes in an attempt to, literally, ‘put order’ into a disorderly world. To fix global uncertainty, we turn to various forms of mapping that allow us to fix meaning in space and time.
Such global ‘maps’ may take the form of actual cartographies, but also distinct story-lines that narrate what is happening around us, such as those that attempt to capture the contemporary condition within the language of 19th century geopolitics of ‘great power competition’ or ‘spheres of influence’.
While such ‘mappings’ and narratives may seem to describe the behavior of international actors such as Russia, China or the United States, they may actually conceal more than they reveal about global trends and dynamics, oversimplifying what are much more complex and territorially-variegated developments.
As geographers frequently recall, we should not confuse the map with the territory that it presumes to describe. The maps of global order that geopolitical commentators are tracing for us today are merely a reassuring cartography that recycles the maps of past orders to make sense of a world that is very (very) different.
The allure of simple heuristics to make sense of an increasingly complex world that is transforming in exponential fashion is not limited to the return to the imaginaries of 19th imperial geopolitics, however. It is also manifested in the proliferation of acronyms that attempt to capture the various transformations.
When the VUCA acronym was coined by strategists from the US Army War College in the immediate post-Cold War moment, it was an attempt to make sense of the new world order being born in the early 1990s. Mapping the world as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous speaks, indeed, to the preoccupations of that historical period, a world no longer constrained by the bi-polar order and, as such, potentially much more unpredictable and dangerous. It also, as one of us has argued in other publications, prescribed specific directions for US global strategy in the 2000s, including the need for preemptive action.
When in 2020 futurist Jamais Cascio offered a new acronym – BANI – as a ‘sense-making tool for a world that does not make sense’ – it was similarly a reassuring heuristic for another moment of geopolitical rupture and transition. Describing today’s world as Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear and Incomprehensible provided a frame through which to map transformations that not only shake up all our certainties but that are also occurring with unprecedented speed and scale.
International relations theorist Maria Mälksoo writes of the ‘ontological insecurity’ that defines our current moment, marked by ‘the fear of not knowing what is happening, yet’. Such ontological insecurity drives that which she defines as ‘anxiety geopolitics’. To placate it, we are drawn, she argues, to explanatory frameworks that attempt to capture it within recognisable categories. The ideal mappings of a world of ‘spheres of influence’ or ‘great power politics’ utilized by media commentators, or a variety of catchy acronyms like VUCA, BANI, or most recently TUNA (Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous), that have moved from the military-strategic sphere to corporate boardrooms and to society, do just that: they provide a reassuring fiction that despite the accelerating and exponential transformations of our global context we can somehow make sense of it.
But we should also add here another popular mapping of the world that is increasingly pervasive, certainly after the Covid-19 pandemic: that offered by conspiracy theories. As anthropologist Didier Fassin has argued, we should take conspiracy theories much more seriously as ‘they do not only belong to the realm of delusion’ but are also attempts at sense-making, identifying the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ and the presumed dynamics that make the international system work. This matters because conspiratorial imaginaries increasingly guide many citizens’ electoral choices in a political context of growing polarisation.
It may appear exagerrated to connect the global mapping attempts of respected geopolitical commentators or futurologists like Cascio to the fanciful imaginaries of conspiracists, but they both operate a similar process of oversimplification of the world. So why is this a problem?
All our mappings of the world are always both a description and a prescription for concrete action. A mapping of the world through ‘spheres of influence’ predetermines a distinct set of strategic choices for any geopolitical actor, and accordingly a set of limitations. Similarly, describing a BANI world suggests that it is certain dynamics (and not others) that matter. Such mappings thus define and delimit the boundaries of desirable political and economic choices.
By identifying presumed ‘mega-trends’, ‘patterns’ and ‘geopolitical natures’, such heuristics tend to remove the complexity and uncertainty of today’s world, thus suggesting ‘what really matters’. But while they may be reassuring stories, by eliminating the messiness of today’s geopolitical and geoeconomic arena they also risk eliminating the messy materiality (‘segnali deboli’) that is/are the world. This risks to guide us to make potentially erroneous choices – highly perilous in today’s already perilous world. The danger of eliminating the ‘noise of the world’ is indeed multiplied by the exponential qualitative/quantitative nature of the unprecedented transformations that we are witnessing, where geopolitical as well as geoeconomic dynamics move, literally, at the speed of light. Allies turn into enemies overnight, markets rally and fall in a manner that appears totally asynchronous with geopolitical developments, technological innovation in fields such as AI proceeds at a pace that innovators themselves find hard to predict and govern.
Today, more than ever, we simply cannot afford to mistake our models of the world for the world.