Global Affairs & Political Theory Review — May 2026
The nation-state was, at its founding, a beautiful fiction — a collective agreement that a people sharing a territory, a language, a history and a set of aspirations would constitute themselves as a sovereign unit, capable of determining their own laws, collecting their own taxes, waging or declining war, and ultimately deciding what kind of society they wished to become. For roughly three centuries after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, that fiction held tolerably well, even through the industrial revolution, two world wars and the collapse of European empires. What it could not survive without fundamental transformation is the triple-force collision of economic globalisation, technological revolution and digital transformation that has accelerated with particular intensity since the early 1990s. The nation-state has not disappeared, and it is not about to. But it has been hollowed out — gradually, structurally, and in ways that its citizens can feel in their daily lives but rarely have language adequate to describe.
The democracy data are unambiguous in their trajectory and alarming in their acceleration. The Global State of Democracy 2025 report by International IDEA documents that 2024 was the ninth consecutive year in which more countries showed a net decline in democratic performance than improvement — the longest consecutive fall since IDEA's records began in 1975. In that electoral super-cycle year, when more voters went to the polls than in any previous year in history, the global score for democratic Representation fell to its lowest level since 2001. Ninety-four countries — representing 54 per cent of all nations assessed — suffered a decline in at least one factor of democratic performance compared with their own performance five years earlier. Only 55 countries, 32 per cent, advanced. Meanwhile, research published in Democratization in 2025 using the V-Dem dataset confirms that the average level of liberal democracy globally has receded to 1985 levels by population-weighted averages, that freedom of expression is worsening in nearly a quarter of all countries — setting a new absolute record for the 25-year measurement period — and that 45 countries are in ongoing episodes of autocratisation. Nearly half of autocratising countries are increasingly deploying disinformation as a state tool. These are not statistics about distant authoritarian regimes. They describe a global democratic system under simultaneous stress from multiple directions.
"Democracy faces a perfect storm of autocratic resurgence and acute uncertainty, due to massive social and economic changes. To fight back, democracies need to protect key elements like elections and the rule of law, but also profoundly reform government so that it delivers fairness, inclusion and shared prosperity."
— Kevin Casas-Zamora, Secretary-General, International IDEA, Global State of Democracy 2025The relationship between globalisation and this democratic stress is not coincidental. Economic globalisation — the integration of production, capital and trade across national borders — has systematically relocated decision-making power away from democratic national governments and toward transnational institutions, markets and corporations that are accountable to no electorate. When the International Monetary Fund imposes structural conditions on a government receiving emergency financing, the citizens of that country did not vote on those conditions. When a trade tribunal rules that a national environmental regulation violates an investment treaty, the democratically enacted law must yield to a process in which the affected population had no voice. When global bond markets punish a government's fiscal choices through elevated borrowing costs, the penalty falls on citizens who had no representation in the market's deliberation. Globalisation has, in this sense, created a vast zone of de facto policy-making that sits formally outside democratic oversight — a shadow parliament of capital, markets and international bureaucracy that exercises enormous power without accountability to the people it affects.
The technological revolution has compounded this de-democratisation in ways its pioneers neither intended nor anticipated. The internet was born from an ideology of radical liberation — John Perry Barlow's 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace proclaimed that governments had no sovereignty in the digital realm, that in the new territory of the mind a civilisation of the mind was under construction. What actually emerged was something considerably less utopian: a digital architecture that concentrated economic value, data and political influence in a handful of platforms whose market power now exceeds that of most national economies and whose decisions about content moderation, algorithmic amplification and advertising targeting affect the information environments of billions of people without any democratic authorisation or oversight. As of April 2025, an estimated 5.64 billion people — approximately 68.7 per cent of the world's population — are active internet users, and 5.31 billion social media accounts are in active use. Average daily engagement on social media platforms runs between 143 and 147 minutes per day. These numbers describe a communications infrastructure of genuinely civilisational scale, governed primarily by private corporations whose primary accountability is to their shareholders.
The arrival of artificial intelligence has intensified these dynamics to a qualitatively different level. AI's most immediately visible democratic threat is the industrialisation of disinformation. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has documented how the intersection of AI systems and social media platforms empowers both autocratic governments and non-state actors to generate misleading content at a scale and speed that outpaces both governmental oversight and society's collective capacity to manage the consequences. Peer-reviewed research on the 2024 US presidential election found that the influence of social media platforms in spreading deepfakes was dramatically greater than in 2016, and that cyberwarfare involving foreign state actors spreading manipulative narratives had become more serious than at any prior point in democratic history. In India — a country with nearly a billion voters — AI tools were used during elections to create deepfake videos of deceased politicians, which were screened at public rallies to influence voter behaviour. In Mexico, synthetic audiovisual content manipulating candidate profiles circulated at scale on platforms whose moderation systems, calibrated primarily for English-language content, were structurally incapable of responding adequately. The problem, as Frontiers AI research documents, is not merely the existence of disinformation — political disinformation is as old as politics — but the fivefold rise in deepfakes and the enabling of low-cost, scalable, personalised content production that makes truth epistemically indistinguishable from fabrication at the speed of a news cycle.
The surveillance dimension of AI is equally corrosive to democratic norms, and it operates across the full spectrum from authoritarian regimes to ostensibly liberal democracies. Digital authoritarianism — documented in a major 2025 study in Democratization — has become a defining characteristic of modern autocracies but is also increasingly deployed by democratically elected governments, including through official disinformation on social media, abuse of defamation and copyright laws to suppress speech, systematic surveillance of social media platforms, and government access to personal internet data without adequate judicial oversight. In March 2025, the United States State Department launched an AI-powered social media surveillance programme described by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as capturing the dynamic by which AI's promise of behaviour prediction and control fuels a surveillance cycle that ultimately triggers abuses of power. When a liberal democracy uses AI to monitor the social media footprints of hundreds of thousands of visa holders for evidence of political sympathy, the architecture it has built is not qualitatively different from that used by authoritarian governments — it is the same architecture with a different justification, for now.
Citizenship, meanwhile, is being reconstituted — not abolished, but made simultaneously more fungible for some and more precarious for others, in ways that map precisely onto existing patterns of global inequality. The International IDEA GSoD 2025 report notes that 304 million people are now international migrants — three times the 1970 estimate — representing 3.7 per cent of the world's population and raising profound questions about the nature of political membership. The transnational professional and investor classes can now acquire multiple citizenships through golden passport programmes that convert political membership into a commodity purchased rather than a status earned through residence, contribution and belonging. The markets for investment-based citizenship have ballooned, with wealthy individuals treating national passports as portfolio assets: a European citizenship for travel convenience, a Caribbean one for tax efficiency, perhaps a residency in a Gulf city-state for business access. For this stratum of globally mobile capital, the nation-state has become a service provider from which one selects amenable packages, rather than a community to which one is committed and accountable. The social contract, which democracy presupposes — that citizens invest in a shared project, accept redistributive obligations and hold each other to collective commitments — corrodes when those best positioned to fund it opt out of it.
At the same time, at the opposite end of the economic spectrum, citizenship is becoming more contingent and weaponised. The same IDEA report documents that between August 2024 and March 2025, approximately 42,000 people in Kuwait lost their citizenship following amendments to nationality law — women who had acquired nationality through marriage being most severely affected — in a context of executive dissolution of parliament and suspension of constitutional safeguards. The use of citizenship revocation as a tool of political control is not unique to the Gulf; it has accelerated across both authoritarian and democratic contexts, disproportionately targeting migrants, minorities, dual nationals and political dissidents. The digital infrastructure that was supposed to democratise access to civic participation instead generates a detailed data trail about political affiliations, associations, religious practices and dissenting opinions that states with sufficient surveillance capacity can use to adjudicate membership in the national community.
More than 1.5 billion people globally now earn income through digital labour platforms — classified as self-employed "independent contractors" rather than employees, placing them outside the labour protections, social security contributions and collective bargaining rights that citizenship in a welfare state traditionally provides. The Transnational Institute notes that without a local presence in the countries where they operate, platforms operate beyond the tripartite system of accountability that underpins national and international labour law. Human Rights Watch's 2025 Gig Trap report documents how DoorDash's $10.72 billion in 2024 revenue was generated through a regulatory framework that reduces corporate tax obligations while leaving public coffers — and therefore public services — structurally depleted. Sources: NativeTeams 2025; HRW 2025; TNI 2025.
The platform economy — the vast and expanding ecosystem of digital labour mediated by algorithmic management — is constructing a new and distinctively post-national form of economic life that existing citizenship frameworks are almost entirely unprepared to govern. More than 1.5 billion people globally are engaged in some form of gig or platform work, according to 2024 estimates. Full-time independent workers in the US more than doubled from 13.6 million in 2020 to 27.7 million in 2024, and freelancers are projected to constitute over 50 per cent of the US workforce by 2027. Globally, the gig economy generates approximately $3.8 trillion in annual revenue — more than the GDP of most nations. Yet the workers who generate this value occupy a legal no-man's-land: classified as independent contractors, they receive no employment protections, no employer pension contributions, no unemployment insurance, no right to collective bargaining, no sick pay, and no legal standing to challenge the opaque algorithmic systems that determine their working conditions, pay rates and access to assignments. The digital platform has created a labour relationship that extracts the productive benefits of employment while negating every social protection that citizenship-in-a-welfare-state was designed to provide. The corporation exists in a cloud of legal fictions — headquartered in a tax-efficient jurisdiction, operating in dozens of countries without legal presence, paying a workforce that it insists is not its workforce — and no single nation-state has the jurisdictional reach to hold it fully accountable.
The question of data sovereignty cuts to the heart of whether nation-states can reassert meaningful authority over the digital environment their citizens inhabit. As of 2025, approximately 6 billion people — 74 per cent of the global population — use the internet, yet the infrastructure through which this connectivity flows, the algorithms through which it is mediated, the data generated by it, and the economic value extracted from it are overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of technology corporations headquartered in the United States and China. As research on digital sovereignty and data colonialism documents, advertising revenue generated by users in São Paulo enriches shareholders in Silicon Valley; e-commerce transactions in Rabat swell profits in Seattle boardrooms; mobile payment data from Jakarta flows to servers in Northern Virginia. The digital divide, far from narrowing as internet access expands, is deepening in its economic dimension: more of the global south is online, but more of the value generated by that online presence is captured by northern corporate entities that those countries cannot effectively regulate or tax. The geopolitical expression of this tension is the accelerating fragmentation of the internet — what observers call the "splinternet" — as nations including China, Russia, India, Nigeria and the European Union impose data localisation requirements, algorithmic content rules and platform licensing conditions that reflect attempts to reassert national sovereignty over digital infrastructure they do not own and cannot fully control.
The theory of democracy always contained a tension between universalism — the idea that human rights and political entitlements belong to persons, not citizens — and particularity, the idea that self-governance requires a bounded community with shared stakes. Globalisation has detonated that tension without providing a replacement framework. The movement of 304 million people across borders, the circulation of digital identities that exist independently of physical location, the emergence of transnational communities whose political solidarities are shaped by shared religion, ethnicity or ideology rather than shared territory — all of these erode the territorial grounding that existing democratic institutions presuppose. You cannot hold a referendum on the decisions of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. You cannot vote for or against the algorithmic amplification choices of a social media platform's content policy team. You cannot hold an election about the interest rate decisions of the Federal Reserve, whose effects cascade through the monetary systems of countries whose populations had no say in its deliberations. The democratic deficit at the global level is not a design flaw awaiting correction — it is a structural feature of the system, and it is growing.
What responses are conceivable, and what has begun to emerge? The European Union's regulatory project — encompassing the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act and the General Data Protection Regulation — represents the most ambitious attempt by any polity to reassert democratic governance over the digital economy. The Brussels Effect, as it is called, describes how EU regulatory standards, by virtue of the bloc's market size and legal coherence, effectively become global standards for companies that wish to operate in Europe and cannot afford to maintain entirely separate product architectures for different jurisdictions. South Korea's Anti-Google Law, requiring Apple and Google to accept alternative payment systems, set a precedent that other governments are beginning to follow. Nigeria is requiring data localisation from major platforms. The Global Digital Compact, adopted in September 2024 by all 193 UN member states, acknowledges that digital technologies are transforming the world in ways requiring strengthened international cooperation — and that achieving the SDGs requires closing digital divides both between and within countries. These are genuine steps, but they are regulatory responses to a structural shift of civilisational depth, and their adequacy remains deeply uncertain.
There is, embedded in this panorama of democratic erosion and institutional stress, a more granular and more hopeful story about how citizenship is being actively reinvented by people who have not waited for states to catch up. The expansion of out-of-country voting — documented by IDEA as a contributor to democratic resilience — allows diasporic citizens to maintain political engagement with their countries of origin. The GSoD 2025 report finds that expanding political participation, including for citizens living abroad, contributes to democratic resilience and can spread democratic norms across borders, accruing benefits to both home and host countries. Transnational social movements — climate activism, labour rights advocacy, feminist networks, press freedom organisations — use digital platforms not merely to disseminate content but to construct forms of political solidarity that cross national borders without dissolving the particularity of local struggles. Digital tools that were designed to extract behavioural data are being repurposed for collective organising, mutual aid, civic accountability and participatory governance. The same technology that empowers surveillance and disinformation can, under different institutional arrangements, empower transparency, democratic participation and cross-border citizen power. The question is always who controls the architecture and in whose interests it is designed.
The twenty-first century is, in this sense, a contest between two incompatible visions of what the digital transformation of politics means. In one vision, it is the story of how exponential increases in information, connectivity and computational power will eventually produce more inclusive, participatory and accountable governance — a technology-enabled deepening of democratic life that transcends the limitations of the nation-state without abandoning its commitment to self-governance. In the other vision, it is the story of how those same capabilities are concentrated in the hands of a small number of states and corporations, used to surveil, manipulate, and de-democratise populations whose attention is a commodity and whose citizenship is a legal formality rather than a meaningful claim on power. The data, as of 2025 — nine consecutive years of democratic decline, 45 countries in autocratisation, 5.64 billion people on platforms governed by private corporations, 1.5 billion workers outside traditional labour protections — does not vindicate the optimistic vision. But the contest is not over. Democracy has survived structural crises before, by being reformed rather than preserved unchanged. What it has never survived is the absence of citizens willing to insist, against considerable resistance, that it is worth the effort of saving.
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