Navigating turbulent times: Geopolitical risks in an uncertain world

June 16, 2023

It was a real pleasure participating in a panel discussion – ‘Navigating Turbulent Times: Geopolitical Risks In An Uncertain World’ – at the first ever flagship event hosted by Pan-Asia Risk and Insurance Management Association (#PARIMA), in Mumbai, last Friday. Geopolitics poses poly and permarisks aggravated by serious trust and leadership deficit – thereby leading to a serious state of flux.

Emerging from a cold war – we are conditioned by the ‘luxury’ of an extended unipolar world. However, today’s #multipolar world has an overlapping interplay between the #BRICS and the six ‘swing states’. The rules-based order of the west is dysfunctional, its monopoly over information and history seriously challenged by social media and the internet. With multilateral agencies tottering, alternate vision for a new financial order emerge from visionaries like Premier Mia Amor Mottley of Barbados. We struggle to reconcile with emergence of #China. As it speeds towards the top slot – will we continue ignoring ascendancy of the #yuan?

#Riskmanagement can no longer operate from #silos, #linearity is dead as is #retrospective#riskmodeling. If the first chip to fall was the #pandemic, it will surely not be the last nor will a new avatar take another 100 years to reappear. Arctic melt could be the next and who knows what lies in store under the permafrost? Could it be anthrax? Rising seas; the US-China-Taiwan saga; Iran-China-Russia triumvirate; weaponizing supply chains; action in cyber space; artificial intelligence; outer space or the sub-sea? The list does not end here.

Preparedness surely calls for nimbleness, imagination and anticipation. Whether #climate scenarios till date were used appropriately and #stresstesting robust? These are questions to be addressed in good time. By hindsight it may all appear too obvious, but in 2020 having an infectious disease extension in place proved Wimbledon to be farsighted. Likewise, University of Illinois (Urbana Champaign) deemed it fit to protect its balance sheet from a potential loss of significant revenue in case students from Mainland China did not turn up for some reason. Today we all know why!

Let’s not mistake a #grayrhino for a #blackswan. We need to know one from the other.