The global order is fragmenting into an archipelago world. A world where globalization is a story of fragmentation and not integration, and where capital, technology, talent, goods and services all become weaponized in a competition of superpowers and middle powers. This shift must be seen as structural, secular and not cyclical.
This new geopolitical order means businesses and organizations must understand and act on fast-evolving sets of risks and opportunities. For businesses, the pace of disruption is accelerating. Issues influencing firms’ long-term strategies (global economic growth, labour, energy transition, generative AI, geopolitics, supply chains, etc.) are increasingly governed by ambiguity rather than mere uncertainty. Unthinkable scenarios are increasingly probable. Each area of risk and opportunity interacts with one another and jointly influence business decisions and strategy.
How companies and organizations hedge against a complex risk landscape in a period of accelerating fragmentation and crisis is existentially important. This session helped attendees, who are simultaneously shapers of global trends and subject to them, to begin to understand opaque risk landscapes across geographies, how to identify opportunities and how to operate in ambiguity while minimizing downside risks in the years ahead.
The keynote speech was followed by a discussion with Ivan Krastev, IWM Permanent Fellow.
Nader Mousavizadeh is the founding partner and CEO of Macro Advisory Partners. Since establishing the firm in 2013, he has led engagements across the firm’s entire portfolio of clients. From 2010-2013, Nader was Chief Executive of Oxford Analytica, a leading global analysis and advisory firm. Previously, he was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, where he worked in the Financial Industries M&A group in New York and in the Executive Office in London. Before entering the private sector, Nader served at the United Nations, first as a political officer in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and subsequently in the Executive Office of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan from 1997-2003. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford where he received his M.Phil. in International Relations from Christ Church College, Nader received his MBA as a Sloan Fellow at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nader is a widely published contributor of essays to The Financial Times, The New York Times and Foreign Policy. In 2012 Nader authored, with Kofi Annan, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, and is the editor of the Black Book of Bosnia, published in 1996. Nader is a member of the Global Board of Directors for the World Resources Institute and is a Member of the Council of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Geopolitics and was elected by the WEF as a Global Leader for Tomorrow.
Ivan Krastev, IWM Permanent Fellow and Director of the Centre for Liberal Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria.
