An age of liminality: Contradictions in Command
An age of liminality: Contradictions in Command
An age of liminality: Contradictions in Command
Trend Analysis by Cengiz Günay, Tizian Metzner, Theresa Rauch
April 2026
Executive Summary
The rapidly changing world order has engendered a state of liminality, characterized by the persistence of old structures, institutions, processes, and habits that are simultaneously being disrupted, undermined, and replaced by emerging dynamics.
Authority is undergoing a significant change in nature in light of widespread autocratization and its inherent personalization processes, concurrent with the increasing primacy of technology in decision-making and the resulting de-personalization.
The capitalization and corporatization of the state go hand in hand with a growing convergence of political and economic elites, who are increasingly able to assert their interests and exert leverage over (geo-)political decision-making.
The developments underlying this apparent paradigm change complicate forms of cooperation, participation, and resistance as we have known them. In this increasingly unpredictable environment, the prospects and conditions for human agency will have to be reconfigured.
Zusammenfassung
Die sich rasch verändernde Weltordnung hat einen Zustand der Liminalität hervorgebracht. Dieser zeichnet sich durch das Wechselspiel alter Beharrungskräfte, Strukturen, Institutionen und Prozesse aus, welche gleichwohl und gleichzeitig untergraben und ersetzt werden.
Im Angesicht von Autokratisierung sowie dazugehöriger Personalisierung und Zentralisierung wandelt sich die Natur politischer Autorität. Dieser Wandel wird durch die Auslagerung politischer Entscheidungen an Technologie konterkariert – mit widersprüchlichen Implikationen für politische Bewegungen.
Die Kapitalisierung und Korporatisierung des Staates gehen Hand in Hand mit einer zunehmenden Verschmelzung politischer und wirtschaftlicher Eliten, die vermehrt in der Lage sind, ihre Interessen durchzusetzen und maßgeblichen Einfluss auf (geo-)politische Entscheidungen zu nehmen.
Diese fundamentalen Veränderungen haben zur Folge, dass sich politische Partizipation innerhalb von Staaten grundlegend ändern wird. Folglich wirft die Unberechenbarkeit politischer Großwetterlagen grundsätzliche Fragen für die Handlungsfähigkeit von Bürger:innen in Demokratien auf.
Introduction
International politics in 2026 has proven turbulent. The United States’ intervention in Venezuela, the Trump administration’s threats to annex Greenland, and the Israeli-American war on Iran have undermined dialogue and diplomacy, put a strain on transatlantic relations, and disrupted international markets.
The world has entered a new era characterized by the rule by force rather than the rule of law. The return of power politics, the breakdown of the rules-based international order, and the paralysis of international organizations represent a major challenge for the EU, which itself has been a product of the liberal world order whose parting we are currently witnessing.
Major shifts do not only occur on an abstract international level. Instead, they are visible and tangible at a local level as well. Cities, towns, neighborhoods, social life worlds, and workplaces are in flux.
Observing these transformations from a (Central) European position, in most European societies, anxiety and pessimism have replaced a reassuring sense of stability, security, and predictability of the future. Europeans feel overwhelmed by the sheer speed of change, the rising number of security threats, and the lack of political coping strategies. Feeling abandoned or even betrayed by the United States, its traditional security guarantor, many are mourning the falling apart of the world we once knew.
In such an increasingly unpredictable world, it is more important than ever to identify long-term trends and recognize emerging risks and opportunities.
This Trend Analysis defines three meta-trends that will be relevant for international politics throughout 2026 and beyond. A meta-trend can be defined as a long-term socio-economic, political, and/or societal development that shapes or drives multiple smaller trends. Meta-trends usually persist in the long-term. They are systemic and transformative, feeding into mega-trends—such as the overall weakening of the liberal world order and the associated emergence of a multi-polar world—which manifest over an even longer duration. Hence, meta-trends represent an intermediate level between mega-trends that reshape structure and order in a long-term perspective, and micro-trends that have a narrower scope and often a shorter lifespan.
The three meta-trends presented here have been drawn from the 2026 oiip Trend Reports (available here), which identified trends in different geographies, thematic niches, and contexts. They range from the assessment of the impact of the rise of misogyny on democracy, shifts in political discourses, and shifts in the understanding of governance, to changing forms of protest and the implications of AI and new technologies on warfare and border management.
The overarching meta-trends based on these reports were defined through abductive reasoning, which begins “with a puzzle, a surprise, or a tension, and then seeks to explicate it by identifying the conditions that would make that puzzle less perplexing and more of a ‘normal’ or ‘natural event’” (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow 2013, 26). This “sense-making” process has involved analyzing the past and present in a continuous process of exchanges towards a deeper, richer, and holistic understanding that allows for projections for the future.
An Age of Liminality: When Contradictions Converge
The Transition from one era to another does not occur in a clearly defined trajectory. On the contrary, past transitions highlight that it is a messy process where change occurs simultaneously at different speeds, at different levels. This creates a state of liminality, characterized by the persistence of old structures, institutions, processes, technologies, interactions, and habits, which are increasingly disrupted, undermined, and, in some cases, replaced by emerging developments and dynamics. Liminality describes the coexistence of contradictory trends and developments, pointing toward divergent possible futures. This makes predicting the ultimate outcome of specific dynamics difficult, if not impossible.
The Changing Nature of Authority
What can be observed is a continuing trend toward streamlining decision-making structures. This streamlining is often justified by the need for swift decisions and the ability to respond rapidly to emerging challenges and developments. It has not only led to cutbacks in inclusive democratic processes and a narrowing of decision-making structures—largely to the benefit of the executive—but has also contributed to autocratization. This includes the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a single leader or a small group, accompanied by weakened checks and balances, constraints on democratic liberties, and the personalization of power, where authority becomes dependent on a leader’s personality, personal interests, preferences, and decisions.
While personalization has become a defining feature of power at the highest levels, de-personalization— by way of outsourcing decisions to AI— has increasingly characterized decision-making structures at other levels of governance. There is a growing tendency to outsource decision-making to AI systems, particularly in the name of security. This shift is often based on the assumption that technology produces “objective” or “rational” decisions—an assumption that overlooks the fundamentally human origins and biases embedded in AI systems. By surrendering the centrality of human judgment, this process undermines democracy and accelerates the rate of change beyond human control.
Automated verification systems in the context of pre-travel permission regimes provide an illustrative example here. The European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) and the UK’s Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) system have largely outsourced decision-making to AI algorithms. Algorithms determine which information counts as credible, and which signals are treated as risk (Eskiduman 2026). AI algorithms tend to reproduce social hierarchies, racial biases, and dominant security concerns while ignoring specificities regarding marginalized social groups. A central problem in this context is the absence of a clearly identifiable point of contact or human authority. In this fundamental shift in state power, authority is delegated to interoperable databases and AI risk tools making decisions, often long before human agents intervene.
Both personalization at the top of the pyramid and the digitalization of decision-making at lower levels undermine human agency and human rights. They limit accountability and transparency, reinforce bias and inequality, and alter the nature of political discontent and protest. Governments across diverse political systems increasingly rely on technological, surveillance-enabled deterrence to manage civic contestation, raising the personal and professional risks associated with visible protest. Protest has not disappeared under these conditions. Instead, it, too, is being reshaped: through adaptive, self-shielded forms of contestation, including identity concealment, digital risk management, fragmented mobilization, and selective visibility (Çetinkaya & Lubrani 2026).
The prevalent equation of deregulation in technology with uncontroversial and indispensable progress has fostered an environment that hampers the development of an effective regulatory framework in this domain. As decision-making processes become increasingly intertwined with AI, human agency is progressively constrained, making the exercise of human judgment—and dissent—more challenging, yet all the more necessary.
State Inc.
The transition from a liberal to a post-liberal order has been characterized by the return of the state. Contrary to the belief that the economy and economic requirements will shape and limit political agency, we can observe the re-establishment of the supremacy of the state over the economy. However, differing from experiences of the 20th century, where economic planning was strongly state-led, the 2020 the 2020s have witnessed a radically different composition and self-conception of the state. Neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and 2000s have capitalized and marketized the state. This has not reduced, but increased the financial resources of the state, i.e., the funds available for redistribution.
The capitalization of the state has weakened the role of public institutions. States tend to be increasingly run like private companies. “State Inc.” therefore describes the entanglement of political authority and economic interests. This intertwining has, in many countries, facilitated the resurgence of informal, neo-patrimonial mechanisms of redistribution, such as patronage networks. Patrons—typically individuals or groups loyal to the ruling party, faction, or leader—allocate public resources through informal channels to their clients, thereby securing their loyalty. “State Inc.” describes a trend where political power, personal economic interests, and the interests of clients increasingly overlap, and the bureaucratic and judiciary apparatuses are at command. Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Serbia, and the United States under Trump II illustrate how political power has been turned into economic profits for the rulers, and how the ruling elites “own” the state and its institutions.
As a result, the trend towards “State Inc.” has further weakened liberal democratic values, democratic processes, and checks and balances. It has supported the emergence of “neo-royalist” cliques—an amalgamation of political, economic, and tech elites—who engage in heavy rent-seeking, not just to enrich themselves, but to cement their authority (Goddard & Newman 2025). The leader commands the complex politico-economic ecosystem. Leader-centric governance and impunity from prosecution—guaranteed by the control and manipulation of the judiciary—help protect the patronage system (Lubrani 2026). The trend towards the corporatization of the state reduces the rights of citizens to the status of passive clients. In return for economic security, they lose democratic agency.
This makes popular change incredibly difficult, especially if it threatens the ruling class. And yet, it is important to highlight that these systems are fragile. Economic turmoil, internal fractions, and the question of leadership succession can severely weaken and even threaten these seemingly stable systems. Although civil society and grassroots initiatives face severe defunding and hostility from above, they remain a potentially impactful political factor. Change will take place as the result of new forms of protest and unlikely alliances across traditional political divides, as seen in the example of Hungary, where a broad electoral coalition around the newly established TISZA party was able to win a landslide victory and remove Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party from power after 16 years.
The Making of a New International Order
Power shifts on the international level, such as China’s rise to a superpower and the emergence of middle powers, have entailed the waning of Western hegemony and the erosion of the institutional “hardware” of the post-WWII order. The United Nations and other multilateral organizations reflecting the power logic of the second half of the 20th century have increasingly lost influence. Trust in multilateral institutions, rules, and norms, and their potential to deliver stability and wealth, has been undermined.
International, multilateral organizations are increasingly taken hostage by geopolitical power struggles and hardline, confrontational policies. The paralysis of international organizations coincides with an ever-accelerating pace fueled by continuous crises and the rise of new technologies. While the world around us is changing faster than ever, international organizations, often characterized by over-bureaucratization and slow, consensus-based decision-making, can hardly keep up with the pace of change.
Moreover, funding for multilateral projects and institutions, first and foremost the United Nations itself, has been cut drastically, with an “imminent financial collapse” of the UN on the table (Davies & Foulkes 2026). Such an abandonment of multilateralism and the rules and norms that come with it has materialized particularly in the security realm, where the era of “diplomatic restraint” is being systematically dismantled. Hardline security elites are actively “narrowing the political space for negotiated compromise” (Simonet & Agapov 2026). In this new landscape, institutions of collective security are hollowed out: the US under a second Trump administration redefines NATO as a “transactional” and conditional arrangement rather than a foundational alliance, while the EU is forced to abandon its normative “civilian power” identity for a posture of permanent readiness to respons to global crises..
These developments have generated seemingly unprecedented levels of unpredictability. Beyond the erosion of existing, shared rules and their implications, this environment makes it near-impossible to formulate new norms to structure the international sphere. After all, they can only emerge and consolidate when being adhered to. Of course, the faltering order has never brought basic security or welfare to all. And disillusionment with the “Liberal International Order,” accordingly, is not new in the Global South. The “retiring” order operated by no means as a fully functional, integral, let alone egalitarian force. A global majority has been systematically exploited in neoliberal markets, and colonial, racializing, as well as patriarchal principles continue to shape global systems of interaction. Even so, the distribution of hard as well as soft power proved sufficient for the privileged Global North to defend the status quo until relatively recently.
Going forward, we must expect to see any multilateral cooperation remaining sectoral and limited. Global challenges—most importantly climate change—that require wide-ranging coalitions willing to compromise will be sidelined or postponed. Not least, the primacy of power as an ordering principle suggests smaller, less powerful states will struggle to make their interests heard.
The global AI race has centered this technology as a new geopolitical axis, reshaping the international balance of power more effectively than traditional diplomacy. Gulf States are leveraging “digital geopolitics” by converting capital into computing power and data centers. The EU, too, is technologizing its management of sovereignty, shifting from physical, territorial borders to automated border control, where the right to move is determined first and foremost by data. This is the technologization of statecraft itself, where influence is measured in AI capacity on top of—and in conjunction with—traditional military hardware. Israeli-American warfare in Iran, as has been widely reported (Copp et al., 2026; Booth & Milmo 2026), represents an emblematic case for this merger.
Concluding Remarks—and a Case for Human Agency
The world of 2026 appears to have abandoned trust in cooperation and institutions. Leadership has become increasingly personalized and marketized, with conciliatory tones banished from the highest levels, exposing societies to the profit-driven interests and erratic behavior of states run like companies. The void left by the loss of trust and subsequent deinstitutionalization is being filled by technological and personalized “solutions,” all in an effort to securitize and make the world around us predictable. Well beyond the year 2026, these trends are bound to shape the next decade of international politics.
Talk of international disorder is nothing new. So, what makes 2026 a watershed? The answer lies in our agency. The overarching trends elaborated upon in this analysis all push toward a world where a few powerful individuals and opaque digital systems decide and enforce, exempt from the constraints of any rulebook, taking agency away from civil society and dismantling democracy. While it appears that the “easy solutions” sought after in this environment will not be found within the existing system, their implementation and management might well require multilateral, trust-based cooperation once the ongoing, unsustainable craze has simmered down, suggesting that this path is not lost forever. And while the emerging world order is unlikely to take the shape of a nostalgic vision of order and peace, we should view these developments through the lens of Ernst Bloch et al. (1986): “The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.” While current political debates prioritize the fear of losing security, we must refocus on the ability to imagine alternative futures. The imperative for thinking about contemporary politics is thus perhaps best guided by Gramsci (1971) and the distinction between pessimism by intellect, and optimism by will.
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