In a global context characterized by increasing complexity and fragmentation, we feel a visceral need for heuristic tools that allow us to interpret the world and to orient — at least in part — our strategic decision-making processes, both public and private.
The temptation — as happens in all important phases of geopolitical transition — consists in transforming complexity into simplifying schemes, in an attempt to "put order" in a disordered world. To govern global uncertainty, we thus resort to different forms of "mapping" that allow us to fix meanings in space and time.
These global "maps" can take the form of real cartographies, but also of interpretative narratives that try to explain what is happening around us: for example, those that attempt to trace the contemporary condition back to the twentieth-century geopolitical language of the so-called "competition between great powers" or "spheres of influence".
Such "mappings" and narratives may appear useful to describe the behavior of international actors such as Russia, China or the United States; In reality, however, they often risk concealing more than they reveal about global trends and dynamics, oversimplifying much more complex and territorially differentiated processes.
As geographers frequently remind us, one should never confuse the map with the territory it presumes to represent. The maps of the global order that many geopolitical commentators propose to us today constitute, after all, a reassuring cartography that recycles the maps of the past to try to understand a profoundly — and radically — changed world.
The attraction towards simple heuristics, aimed at interpreting an increasingly complex world subject to exponential transformations, is not, however, limited to the return of the imaginaries of imperial geopolitics. It is also manifested in the proliferation of acronyms that, from time to time, attempt to summarize and stigmatize the transformations taking place.
For example, when the acronym VUCA was coined by strategists at the U.S. Army War College in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, it represented an attempt to interpret the new world order emerging in the early 1990s. Defining the world as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous reflected the typical concerns of that historical context: an international system no longer bound to the bipolar order and, precisely for this reason, perceived as much more unpredictable and potentially dangerous. As we have argued in previous publications, this paradigm also implied precise strategic guidelines for US global policy in the 2000s, including the need for preventive action.
When in 2020 the futurologist Jamais Cascio proposed a new acronym — BANI — calling it a "tool of interpretation for a world that makes no sense," he in turn offered a reassuring heuristic for another historical phase of geopolitical rupture and transition. Describing the contemporary world as Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible provided a useful interpretative framework to represent transformations that, in addition to questioning all our certainties, also take place with unprecedented speed and scope.
Political theorist Maria Mälksoo speaks of "ontological insecurity" to define our time, marked by the "fear of not yet knowing what is happening". This ontological insecurity feeds what she calls a "geopolitics of anxiety". To mitigate it, Mälksoo argues, we are attracted to interpretative schemes that attempt to bring reality back into categories that are to some extent recognizable. The representations of a world based on "spheres of influence" or on the "politics of the great powers" used by many commentators, as well as the acronyms VUCA, BANI (or, more recently, TUNA: Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous) have first passed from the strategic-military sphere to the boards of directors of large multinationals and then landed on civil society as a whole, offering a reassuring fiction that, Despite the accelerated and exponential transformations of our global context, it is still possible to understand its meaning.
To these representations, however, we must add another form of mapping of the world that is increasingly pervasive, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic: the one proposed by conspiracy theories. As the anthropologist Didier Fassin has argued, such theories should be taken much more seriously, since they "do not belong only to the realm of illusion", but also constitute attempts to attribute meaning to reality, identifying the "good" and the "bad", as well as the alleged dynamics that would govern the international system. This is particularly relevant as conspiratorial imaginaries increasingly influence citizens' electoral choices in a political context characterized by increasing polarization.
It may seem excessive to juxtapose the attempts at global interpretation elaborated by authoritative geopolitical commentators or futurologists such as Cascio with the imaginative imagery of conspiracy theorists; however, both operate a similar process of oversimplification of reality. Why do we think this is a problem?
Each of our "maps" of the world is always, simultaneously, a description and a prescription for concrete action. A representation of the world based on "spheres of influence" predetermines a specific set of strategic choices for each geopolitical actor, implicitly defining their limits as well. Similarly, describing the world as "BANI" suggests that it is some dynamics — and not others — that are decisive. Such mappings therefore end up defining and delimiting the boundaries of political and economic choices considered desirable or possible.
By identifying supposed "megatrends," "patterns," "patterns," and "geopolitical natures," these heuristics tend to remove the complexity and uncertainty of the contemporary world, implicitly suggesting "what really matters." But if on the one hand they offer reassuring narratives, on the other hand they risk eliminating the disordered and contradictory dimension of the current geopolitical and geoeconomic arena while also risking eliminating that same chaotic materiality made up of "weak signals" that constitutes the real world.
The risk is that of directing potentially wrong decisions — and therefore highly dangerous — in an international context that is already extremely fragile and volatile. The danger of eliminating the "noise of the world" is further amplified by the qualitative and quantitative nature of the unprecedented transformations we are witnessing, in which geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics literally move at the speed of light.
Allies who suddenly turn into adversaries; financial markets that grow or collapse according to dynamics that are apparently asynchronous with geopolitical developments, technological innovations, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, which are advancing at a speed that is difficult to predict and govern even for innovators themselves.
In conclusion, today, more than ever, we cannot afford to confuse our models of the world with the world itself.