Global Social Turbulence: Sources & Solutions: WAAS@65 Report

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Abstract

Humanity stands at a civilizational inflection point. A convergence of geopolitical conflict, ecological overshoot, technological disruption, and democratic decline has produced not a sequence of separate crises but a self-reinforcing polycrisis, now hardening into a metacrisis, in which the very structures meant to resolve our problems are themselves failing. This report, drawing on the deliberations of the WAAS@65 conference and related events, identifies eight structural drivers of global turbulence, traces these to six root causes spanning social, economic, ecological, and political dimensions, and sets out twelve integrated solution domains and the cross-cutting capacities required to deploy them. Its central finding is stark: the world is not short of knowledge, resources, or solutions. What is missing is the integrated vision, conscious coordination, and collective resolve to act at the scale the moment demands. The transition now underway—from fragmented, reactive crisis-management to conscious, cooperative, values-guided transformation—is the defining challenge, and the defining opportunity, of our era. Building on this diagnosis, the article outlines the three-theme framework of Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom that will structure WAAS@66 in September 2026, and the institutional initiatives through which this agenda is already being operationalized.*

1. Executive Summary

This report presents a work in progress by the World Academy of Art and Science and Force for Good on the conclusions of the WAAS@65 conference and related events on Global Social Turbulence: Sources & Solutions. The report addresses the root causes and symptoms associated with the great upheaval presently occurring in global affairs, and also seeks to identify essential components of an effective approach which humanity can adopt to address those root causes and symptoms at the global level. The report ends with highlights of the solutions which have been under study since the 2025 conference and will constitute the central focus of the upcoming conference on Solutions to Global Turbulence: Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom.

Humanity is traversing a period of global turbulence without precedent since the Second World War. The 2025 conference brought together 110 speakers across 28 panel discussions to diagnose the nature, sources, and deep drivers of this turbulence and to map the solutions required to address it. More than 300 participants engaged with an agenda spanning governance, economics, ecology, technology, education, peace, and human consciousness.

The central finding is that the world is no longer facing a sequence of discrete crises, but rather a self-reinforcing convergence that the Academy terms a polycrisis—now exhibiting the features of a metacrisis, in which the very structures of governance, economics, values, and leadership needed to resolve the individual crises are themselves part of what is failing. Piecemeal, sector-by-sector responses are not only insufficient; they can actively worsen systemic conditions. The report identifies eight structural drivers of the global turbulence:

1. Unprecedented speed of social change outpacing humanity’s intellectual, institutional, social and cultural adaptive capacity;
2. Paradox of progress in which globalization has simultaneously generated both growth and systemic fragility;
3. Multidimensional economic asymmetry concentrating wealth while excluding billions of people;
4. Ecological overshoot approaching irreversible tipping points;
5. Technology outpacing governance and generating new centers of power and growing influence over politics, public opinion, and social stability worldwide;
6. Concentration of social power across political, economic, media, and algorithmic dimensions;
7. Militarization and the breakdown of multilateral governance and global rule of law;
8. Moral and epistemic crisis eroding the shared ethical frameworks that collective action requires.

This interdependent complex of social drivers represents the root causes, source, foundation and undercurrent of the surging movement of global turbulence underpinning, feeding and aggravating the polycrisis which is impacting all sectors, levels and dimensions of global society today. None of the manifestations of the polycrisis can be effectively addressed without first taking into account and compensating for the impact of these root causes. Effective leadership requires a recognition, understanding and strategy to address these deeper currents of change and instability.

The report also identifies twelve solution domains which can stabilize global social order and reestablish the forward global momentum generated after the end of the Cold War. Since then, the Academy has been working on the development of effective strategies to implement these solutions. This will become the central focus of the upcoming conference on Solutions to Global Turbulence: Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom

2. Approach

The approach underpinning this report is qualitative, integrative, and transdisciplinary, reflecting the nature of the global turbulence it seeks to illuminate. Rather than relying on a single disciplinary method or a formalized empirical framework, the report draws on the accumulated experience, judgment, and insights developed during a multi-decade engagement of the World Academy in collaboration with a broad international community of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and institutional leaders. The intent of this report is not to produce a definitive model of global transformation but to articulate a coherent, collective understanding of the forces shaping the multi-decade engagement of the Academy in world transition and to frame a set of solution pathways for future action.

2.1. A Transdisciplinary and Multi-Sectoral Synthesis

The project is rooted in the belief that today’s global challenges transcend the analytic boundaries of any one field of knowledge or sector of global society. Contributions were drawn from experts in international security and diplomacy; economics and finance; climate science and ecological systems; technology and AI governance; education, psychology, and culture; human rights and humanitarian practice; and global governance and institutional design. This diversity enables an interpretive synthesis connecting political, economic, ecological, technological, and social dynamics into a single civilizational narrative. It is an exercise in sense-making, not model-building.

2.2. Collective Judgment and Experiential Insight

The project draws heavily on expert dialogues, roundtables, scenario discussions, policy consultations, and long-term intellectual engagement across partner institutions, surfacing lived experience from conflict mediation and diplomacy; institutional memory from multilateral governance; strategic judgment from leadership roles in finance, technology, and public policy; cross-cultural perspectives from diverse regional contexts; and historical patterns recognized through comparative analysis.

2.3. Interpretive Diagnosis, Co-Creation, and Living Agenda

The diagnostic component identifies recurring patterns and deep drivers across domains, situating the present moment within the broader arc of civilizational development. The twelve solution areas emerged through iterative dialogue among global experts, prioritizing direction-setting strategies over prescriptive formulas, ideas capable of mobilizing coalitions, and actions advanceable even in conditions of geopolitical fragmentation. The agenda is intentionally open and evolving: designed to grow as new actors join, inviting critique and expansion, and recognizing that transformation pathways must be continuously reinterpreted as global conditions change.

3. Global Context: The World at an Inflection Point

The world stands at a historic inflection point. A convergence of geopolitical conflict, environmental degradation, technological disruption, and democratic backsliding has produced what can only be described as an age of disorder. Trust in institutions has eroded, the effectiveness of multilateral cooperation has been critically undermined, and the global system strains under the weight of multiple interconnected crises that amplify one another in ways that defy conventional policy responses.

The post-Cold War era brought the acceleration of globalization, digital transformation, and multilateral institution-building. These developments generated real gains: expanded scientific collaboration, economic growth, and unprecedented human connectivity. But the same forces also created structural vulnerabilities: financial deregulation producing global recessions, fragile supply chains susceptible to cascading shocks, technological innovation accelerating faster than governance capacity, and ecological systems approaching and breaching critical thresholds.

The WAAS@65 conference concluded that the polycrisis is evolving into a metacrisis—a deeper systemic failure in which the underlying structures of governance, economics, values, and leadership are so misaligned that they simultaneously produce multiple crises and undermine the capacity to resolve them.

3.1. The Sources of Turbulence: Eight Structural Drivers

Eight structural drivers of global turbulence were identified across the conference sessions—not as a hierarchy but as an interdependent system in which each driver amplifies and is amplified by the others.

• Speed of change: The unprecedented speed of technological and social change has outpaced the adaptive capacity of individuals, institutions, cultures, and governance systems.
• The paradox of progress: Post-Cold War globalization generated aggregate growth while concentrating wealth, fueling financial instability, and creating fragile systems vulnerable to cascading shocks.
• Economic asymmetry and inequality: The global top 1% captured approximately 38% of all wealth growth since 1995, while the bottom half captured 2%. Widening disparities translate directly into unequal access to education, healthcare, and political representation.
Integration is not merely an analytical preference; it is the practical condition for effectiveness.
• Ecological overshoot: Global temperatures are approaching the 1.5°C threshold established by the Paris Agreement, threatening irreversible tipping points whose effects will cascade through every other dimension of the polycrisis.
• Technology outpacing governance: AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, and surveillance technologies are transforming economies and societies faster than governance frameworks can track, risking concentrated power, deepening inequality, and geopolitical competition.
• Concentration of social power: Power is concentrating both politically—through democratic retreat, polarization, and rising autocracy—and economically, as a few corporations and platform owners wield state-scale influence over politics, markets, and information, creating structural conditions for oligarchy.
• Militarization, governance failure and rising threats to human security: Record military spending—$2.9 trillion in 2025¹—is diverting resources from human security and sustainable development even as arms-control frameworks collapse and trust in multilateral institutions hits historic lows, consolidating a new security paradigm that reinforces the very instability it seeks to manage.
• The moral and epistemic crisis: The erosion of shared ethical frameworks—through consumerism, hyper-individualism, and algorithmic manipulation—leaves societies polarized and incapable of the moral consensus collective action requires, while AI-driven influence over attention, perception, and decision-making poses a deeper threat: the colonization of the mind.²

3.2. Interdependence as Both Challenge and Opportunity

The most important analytical contribution of WAAS@65 was the insistence that these eight drivers are not parallel problems amenable to sequential solutions. They constitute an interconnected system whose elements sustain and amplify one another. But this systemic interdependence is also a source of strategic leverage. When solutions are designed to address root causes rather than symptoms, and integrated across domains, interventions in one area generate cascading positive effects across others. Integration is not merely an analytical preference; it is the practical condition for effectiveness.

4. Sources of Global Turbulence: Root Causes

The drivers identified above are not parallel problems amenable to sequential solutions; they form an interdependent system of root causes.³ We identify six root causes, drawing out the linkages between them.

4.1. The Disruption of Social and Human Foundations

The global turbulence of our era is not, at its root, a political or economic crisis, though it manifests powerfully in both domains. It is the product of a deeper movement of social evolution that has placed enormous stress on the existing social framework. Increasing stress, uncertainty, and a pervasive sense of instability have made global society susceptible to extremist ideas, populist leaders, and the revival of failed historical responses. As consumerism, hyper-individualism, and algorithmic manipulation erode shared ethical frameworks, societies are left polarized and incapable of the moral consensus collective action requires—a crisis not only of doing but of being.

Cultural heritage and identity have become focal points of this anxiety. The accelerating pace of social change has destabilized long-established senses of collective identity, making communities vulnerable to manipulation by movements that promise the restoration of a simpler, more coherent past.

4.2. Multidimensional Economic Asymmetries

Post-Cold War globalization generated real growth while concentrating its gains and building in fragility—the paradox of progress. Economic inequality is not merely a social justice concern; it is a structural driver of political instability, institutional erosion, and governance failure. The growing application of AI, robotics, and automation as substitutes for human labor is intensifying these pressures, fueling the populism and institutional rejection now visible across both advanced and developing economies.

4.3. Ecological Threat Multipliers

Environmental degradation is both a product of and a structural amplifier of every other dimension of the polycrisis. Global CO₂ emissions reached 37.8 gigatons in 2024.⁴ Temperature rise has already crossed 1.5°C.⁵ The IPCC projects a rise of 2.5 to 3.0°C this century under current trajectories.⁶ The ecological crisis is simultaneously a food security crisis, a migration crisis, a public health crisis, and a source of geopolitical competition over diminishing resources. Its danger lies in transmission: crop failure and water stress drive displacement, displacement strains fragile states, and competition over land, water, and minerals hardens into geopolitical rivalry—loading fresh stress onto systems already near their limits.

4.4. Rising Concentration of Social Power

The accelerating concentration of social, economic, technological, and political power is destabilizing societies, eroding shared reality and trust, outpacing the adaptive capacity of existing governance systems, and seriously undermining the promotion of peace, human security and sustainable development. Four interlocking dimensions were identified: political capture by wealth; economic concentration through monopoly and oligopoly; media consolidation algorithmically amplified toward polarization; and algorithmic power exercised by a handful of global technology corporations over the systems that mediate social interaction. Through this last dimension runs a novel mechanism—cognitive colonization—as AI-driven systems shape attention, perception, and decision-making at the level of neural response, extending concentrated power inward to preference and judgment themselves.

4.5. Militarization and the Breakdown of International Coordination

Over the past decade, military spending has climbed to an all-time high. The INF Treaty is defunct; New START has been suspended; nuclear arsenals are being modernized. Simultaneously, there is a profound crisis of legitimacy in the existing global order, with public trust in political institutions declining across democracies and authoritarian models gaining ground. Underlying these trends is a deeper normative shift: the return of force as an accepted instrument of statecraft. As the rules-based order loses authority, might increasingly substitute for legitimacy, and the resort to coercion—military, economic, and technological—is once again treated as a normal exercise of power rather than a breach of international norms.

4.6. Unresolved Histories

Wars, border and resource conflicts have overspilled to shake stability and peace. This has been seen in the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Gaza war, the Sudan civil war and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), which recorded 65 active conflicts in 2025—the highest number since researchers began collecting data in 1946. Of these, the number of direct conflicts between individual states doubled from the previous year to eight in 2025, also a post-1946 record. Unlike the newer drivers, these represent unresolved pasts spilling into the present—which is why the diagnosis points toward root causes rather than symptoms.

Taken together, these six root causes form a single, self-reinforcing system—which is why no one of them can be solved alone, and why the solutions must be as interconnected as the crisis itself.

5. Solutions: An Integrated Agenda for Transformation

The solutions presented in this section emerged from the full breadth of WAAS@65 deliberations among WAAS Fellows and partner organizations (referred to in Acknowledgments). They are organized across twelve domains that form an integrated architecture rather than a menu of independent options. This helps us to identify high potential areas where thought that can lead to action. It is intended to lay the foundations and outline the scope for continued research to formulate effective strategies, foster a shared sense of collective global identity, build a consensus and harness the energies and efforts needed to address the root causes identified above.

CIVILIZATIONAL SCALE

5.1. Conscious Social Transformation

The central focus of the Academy’s current work is humanity’s need to make a first-of-its-kind evolutionary transition—from the haphazard process of subconscious social change to a clear, stable pathway for conscious social evolution. In the absence of valid theory, social development remains largely trial-and-error: a process with a high failure rate, needless destruction, and a vast wastage of time, resources, and life. The dismal outcomes of transition strategies across Eastern Europe in the 1990s, the halting progress of many African and Asian economies, and the persistent linkage between rising incomes and environmental depletion, crime, and violence all reflect one fact—humanity is pursuing social development without the knowledge or power needed to guide it.

Global society is now so complex that a deep understanding of social development is itself essential knowledge for effective leadership. WAAS@65 affirmed the development of a comprehensive theory of global social evolution as one of the Academy’s most pressing intellectual responsibilities, reviving the initiative launched under WAAS President Harlan Cleveland in 1998–99. Grounded in the interaction of human social processes with institutional, technological, ecological, and psychological forces, such a theory is the foundation without which conscious transformation cannot be systematically guided.

Its formulation could rank among humanity’s greatest discoveries; an effort to become more fully conscious of ourselves, our capacities, and our potential. It would require inquiry into the forces underlying social evolution, the patterns determining its speed and direction, the causes of reversals and retreats, the means by which leaders can guide movement under conditions where no person, nation, or institution is in control, and the ultimate power of the collective will of all nations for peace, security, and prosperity.

Human beings at the center. The theory would place human beings at its center. The ultimate determinants of development cannot be the instruments themselves—technology, capital, infrastructure, policies, institutions—for none exists independently of society. The power of determination lies with the human beings who create and use these instruments; all else would be viewed in relation to human capacity, motivation, and action.

Realizing the transition depends on six enabling conditions: embedding this knowledge in the education of youth and current and future leaders; integrating solutions across all dimensions of social reality; ensuring inclusive participation of all stakeholders; pursuing innovation in its broadest organizational, institutional, and cultural sense; shifting mindset from zero-sum to interdependent thinking; and anchoring governance in universal values.

Present circumstances make the initiative urgent: technological innovation compresses major social transitions from decades into years; revolutionary technologies are reshaping every sector of society and the aspirations of individuals worldwide; humanity is converging from a collection of relatively independent groups into a single interdependent global community; and its power to destroy itself and other life is growing—forces whose combined impact is the turbulence now taking shape.

5.2. Changing the Way We Think

Conceptual Shifts. Every dimension of the solutions agenda depends on a prior transformation in the concepts through which leaders, citizens, and institutions understand the world—the domain that most directly answers the moral and epistemic root cause of Section 4. Ten shifts emerged from our dialogues as characteristic, spanning how we define security, sovereignty, value, knowledge, democracy, time, identity, freedom, power, and accomplishment (see inset 1).

Integrated Knowledge and Systems Thinking. Addressing the nexus of issues confronting humanity requires integrating fields of knowledge now siloed in narrow disciplines. Systems thinking—transdisciplinary by nature—maps the interconnections between governance, economies, technology, ecology, and culture, and should inform every stage of policymaking. One wetland-restoration project can simultaneously sequester carbon, protect against flooding, create jobs, enhance biodiversity, and build civic trust; education reform combining environmental literacy, peacebuilding, and digital skills can strengthen governance, economic resilience, and conflict prevention at once. Coherence requires interministerial councils, integrated budgeting, and sustainability impact assessments, underpinned by an Integrated Global Data Platform consolidating climate, health, economic, and conflict data.

Objective and Subjective Knowledge. WAAS was founded on the recognition that subjective dimensions of knowledge cannot be measured yet are essential to decision-making. Several of the Academy’s founders helped build the atomic bomb and spent their lives regretting the genie they released—the founding lesson that correct objective measurement of science and subjective perception of the arts are both essential. AI, already deployed across society from social interactions to war, is potentially that moment again for the world at large. A symbiotic model combining AI’s range and speed with human judgment can aid decision-making: AI cannot know our subjective reality, but it can ask the right questions to ensure we consider every subjective dimension, placing moral decision making back in the hands of people.

The Moral Crisis. A moral crisis is a deep driver of global turbulence. While institutional failures, governance gaps, and inequality are widely acknowledged, the erosion of shared ethical frameworks draws less attention—reducing morality to social convention and leaving society vulnerable to emotive subjectivism, polarization, and paralysis over justice and fairness. Drawing on Elena Mustakova’s theory of critical moral consciousness, moral motivation, agency, and discernment can be cultivated through education, leadership, and discourse; without ethical renewal, technical and institutional solutions will not hold. WAAS’s role is to embed universal values in governance and citizenship and mobilize thought leadership.

Science in the Service of Society. Science is humanity’s most powerful instrument for discerning truth, solving its hardest problems, and unlocking new possibilities to advance—yet its standing at the center of public and political life has eroded, and its findings no longer reliably move decisions. Decades of research on climate, public health, and ecological systems have failed to generate political will at the scale required. The gap is relational, not informational: more data and louder warnings cannot close a distance built from lost trust and the disconnection of expertise from the lived experience of those who must act. The task is therefore twofold—to restore science to its rightful place in collective decision-making, and to sustain its forward march as the engine of truth, solutions, and human possibility. WAAS has begun to pursue this with two initiatives: EXTRA, mapping the full interdependent spectrum of existential risk so converging threats are seen whole; and Science & Society, rebuilding trust through projects where science and governance visibly deliver together for the public good.

5.3. Leadership and Education

A Global Leadership Academy. Neither prevailing social theory nor established educational practice has prepared leaders for the civilizational-scale transition now underway—and new theory will not take hold unless it is assimilated by those at the helm of government, multilateral institutions, business, civil society, and academia. WAAS proposes a Global Leadership Academy to develop and disseminate a transdisciplinary curriculum grounded in conscious social evolution, the dynamics of systemic transition, and the integration of scientific knowledge with human values. It can be built with partners such as AE4RIA, AMEU, ASU/GFL, CoR, EASA, F4G, GPEN, GPOC, and IAC, and delivered through partner universities via WUC.

A New Paradigm in Higher Education. Education is at once the slowest and the most fundamental lever for civilizational transformation. Global higher-education enrollment is projected to double to 500 million by 2050, and AI-powered hybrid systems can deliver personalized, multilingual, self-paced learning at roughly a quarter of conventional cost. The transdisciplinary paradigm—linking sciences, humanities, and arts around real-world human-security challenges—should form its intellectual foundation, and person-centered pedagogy, recognizing the vast untapped potential within each individual, would displace the transmission model that focuses on the subject rather than the student.

SOCIETAL TRANSFORMATION

5.4. Technology as Structural Architecture

Direction, not invention. Science and technology have always been among humanity’s most powerful agents of change, but their influence is now planetary in pace, scale, and scope. Technology is not destiny: its outcomes depend on the governance, ethics, and consciousness that shape its use. The same capabilities that could solve humanity’s most intractable problems can equally deepen inequality, erode democracy, and destabilize society—so the challenge of our era is to ensure that exponential capability evolves in tandem with social wisdom and ethical maturity. Rising distrust of AI, in the absence of adequate oversight, has itself become a source of instability; WAAS, and its partners examining the future of core and systemic technologies, Force for Good, and ISII, work with governments, industry, civil society, and academia to identify the sources of that distrust and co-create governance models and corporate best practices.

Scalable solutions for the SDGs. Failure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals is among the most significant sources of global turbulence—yet the obstacle is not the absence of solutions but the inability to scale them at the pace the crises demand. Only 16% of SDG targets are on track, over 80% are off-course or regressing, and the annual funding gap has grown beyond US$14 trillion. The deficit is not one of resources: unlocking even a fraction of global wealth, paired with the right solutions, can reverse the trend, because the SDGs are market-making opportunities, not merely obligations. Drawing on Force for Good’s 2025 research with WAAS, a coherent set of technology-enabled solution areas could together advance nearly 90% of SDG targets if deployed worldwide—climate and energy transition alone closing up to 15% of the gap, and AI-enabled universal connectivity a further 14%.⁷ These solutions follow a hierarchy of human needs (see inset 2): essential life-support systems at the base, then digital financial infrastructure and connectivity, then education and decent work, then climate resilience, then systemic shifts such as pricing natural assets—all underpinned by the precondition of global peace.

Cognitive Sovereignty. The information era marks a shift from territorial domination to domination over cognition, as AI-driven platforms shape neural activity, emotion, and belief at scale—with the power to erode autonomy and political agency, or, directed otherwise, to expand human potential. The next world order will be defined not only by who owns the AI-enabled platforms and commands their algorithms, but by whether humanity can align them with its highest capacities for reflection, empathy, and collective self-determination. Protecting cognitive sovereignty is therefore a structural design goal, not an afterthought (the governance dimension is developed in 5.8).

5.5. Human Security for All

A Language Everyone Speaks. Human security is the most powerful organizing framework available for connecting the macro-level ambitions of the SDGs to the lived experience of ordinary people. The Human Security for All (HS4A) campaign, launched by WAAS with UNTFHS in 2022, has demonstrated this reach— from 130,000 technology leaders at CES in Las Vegas (sustained four years running), to parliamentarians representing 170+ nations through the Inter-Parliamentary Union, to school children in India through SpellBee International’s Classroom-to-Community initiative.

The Investment Imbalance. The central distortion would need to be confronted directly: defense spending keeps rising while investment in the SDGs declines. Shifting resources toward the root causes of human insecurity is not a charitable aspiration but the most effective and durable form of security investment available—a theme that recurs across peace (5.9), finance (5.6), and climate (5.7).

5.6. Finance, Economy and Markets

Capital Exists; Direction is Missing. The global financial system administers roughly US$433 trillion in assets without adequately accounting for the social and environmental consequences of how that capital is deployed. The constraint on sustainable development is not money but architecture: Force for Good’s World Investment Plan identifies US$123 trillion in investable assets to 2035—across energy, digital infrastructure, healthcare, education, and affordable housing—of which 72% offer commercial returns, against an SDG funding gap of US$92–112 trillion that is modest beside global wealth of some US$700 trillion.⁸ Embedding the pricing of externalities into financial reporting standards, beginning with the ISSB framework, would reshape investment calculations and redirect capital at scale. The real challenge ahead is to turn needs, which are likely to remain unfunded, to markets, which continue to seek risk-return opportunities across the world and fund that at scale.

Democratizing Finance. Three-quarters of the world’s population remains unbanked or underbanked. Digital wallets, blockchain, and AI-based microcredit scoring can democratize access while embedding sustainability criteria—F4G’s ‘finance for all’ aligning directly with WAAS’ ‘human security for all.’ Responses would need to operate at every level: globally, reforming trade and tax systems, a global minimum corporate tax, and debt relief; nationally, progressive taxation and universal digital public infrastructure on the model of India’s, which has financially included over 500 million people in about a decade, building on China’s earlier lead in mass inclusion at scale; and locally, cooperative enterprises, community-owned renewables, and circular-economy initiatives.

Pricing the Commons. The next frontier in financial innovation is valuing the global commons—the shared natural, social, and cultural assets on which all economic activity depends—through externality-linked instruments: biodiversity bonds tied to measurable carbon outcomes, impact-weighted equity indices ranking firms by net externality performance, tokenized natural-asset markets for transparent trading of ecosystem services, and credit-rating adjustments reflecting externality performance.

Full Employment and Reduced Inequality. Enhancing the future of job and income security is an essential condition for peace, human security, social stability and effectively addressing global social turbulence. Fifteen strategies in five themes are identified for achieving these objectives. Additional work is needed to develop these opportunities into effective implementable solutions.

5.7. Restoring Climate and Ecological Integrity

Climate change and ecological degradation are systemic amplifiers of every other dimension of the polycrisis (see Section 4.3). Military expenditure diverts resources from climate investment, while climate breakdown generates the conditions for further unrest, conflict, and forced migration. Climate strategies would therefore be integrated, equitable, and systemic—mainstreamed across all policy domains rather than confined to an environmental silo—and innovative financing would be urgently scaled. Nature-based solutions are especially powerful because they deliver simultaneous co-benefits across carbon sequestration, biodiversity, jobs, and public health. The Public Peace Offensive for Climate (developed under 5.9) treats ecological restoration as a pathway to rebuild trust between divided communities: joint reforestation and water-management initiatives can foster cooperation while addressing the environmental stressors that drive conflict, supported by a proposed Global Climate Resilience Council and instruments such as green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, and climate insurance.

GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE

A stable global architecture cannot be built at one level alone. It ascends through widening circles— from the values held by individuals, through the distribution of power within societies, to the security arrangements between nations, and finally to the collective institutions that bind them. Each circle enables the next: values without distributed power are sentiment; distributed power without inter-state security is fragile; and security between nations without durable institutions cannot last.

5.8. Peace as a Human Value

Redefining Security from the ground up. WAAS@65 placed the inseparable relationship between peace, social stability, and human security at the foundation of the solutions agenda, and redefined security itself: not the protection of states by force, but a human value realized from the level of communities and individuals upward. The competitive security paradigm is not only morally corrosive but strategically self-defeating. AI-based weapons and drone warfare have drastically reduced the strategic advantage of large-scale weaponry, democratizing violence and leveling the battlefield, so that no accumulation of arms now buys the security it once promised. The pursuit of national security through military preparedness— rejected at the end of the Cold War and now revived amid rising turbulence—has failed. We are therefore compelled to address the root causes of violence and eliminate war at that level, through a commitment to peace, human rights, and human security extending down to communities and individuals.¹¹

5.9. Distributing Social Power

Four dimensions of concentration. The concentration of social power—political, economic, media, and algorithmic—is among the deepest structural drivers of global turbulence, and it is self-reinforcing: each form of concentrated power can be used to entrench the others, so rebalancing must act on all four at once (see inset 4). Political power is captured when concentrated wealth finances democratic processes, calling for caps on donations and public campaign finance. Economic power distorts when markets become instruments of dominance—monopolies restricting entry, finance favoring speculation, corporations shifting profits to avoid tax—and rebalancing means reasserting the public purpose of the economy through antitrust and fair taxation. Media power concentrates as ownership narrows viewpoints and engagement-driven algorithms spread polarization and misinformation, demanding pluralism, independent journalism, algorithmic transparency, media literacy, and verification tools such as blockchain time-stamping. Algorithmic power, held by a few technology corporations, arises from the asymmetry between those who design digital systems and those who depend on them—requiring human-centered governance built on accountability, transparency, and ethical use.¹²

Evidence from practice. Rebalancing political power is not theoretical: across most European and other established democracies, public financing of parties is the norm and corporate money is tightly constrained (see inset 5). The contrary case of the United States, where Super PACs and independent expenditures have weakened existing limits, demonstrates the need for stronger, not weaker, controls.

Giving Voice. Beyond constraining concentrated power, rebalancing means widening who holds it. Universal citizen participation—especially of youth and future generations—is essential to express the aspirations of the global public, supported by remedies such as citizen assemblies and participatory, transparent democracy.¹³ A joint WAAS–F4G initiative proposes a transnational digital platform to give voice to the silent billions and empower them to support systemic change.

5.10. Security Between Nations

From Competitive to Cooperative Security. A society that has redistributed power inward must still secure itself outward, and the same logic applies between nations as within them: security built by excluding others is self-defeating. As the 1994 International Commission on Peace and Food recognized, the more secure an exclusive bloc feels, the more insecure the excluded become. The long-term destination is therefore a Global System for Cooperative Common Security that strengthens each nation’s security without raising others’ threat perceptions, grounded in the principle that force is no longer a legitimate instrument of national policy.¹⁴

The Global Peace Offensive. Translating that principle into method, the Global Peace Offensive (GPO)— institutionalized through GPOC and established in Slovenia in September 2025 as a joint venture of WAAS, EASA, and AMEU—operationalizes the theory of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT): credible, incremental, publicly visible acts of goodwill that alter the psychological climate of confrontation. Reciprocity works where deterrence cannot, because it changes the other side’s expectations rather than merely raising the cost of attack. Its three tiers move from confidence-building measures, through cooperation for human security, to long-term resolution via cultural and educational diplomacy. Sustaining peace also requires rebuilding institutions, restoring livelihoods, reconciling communities, and delivering justice through transitional mechanisms—truth commissions, reparations, inclusive constitutional reform—as an ongoing process, not a one-time event; recent events in Gaza and the Gulf illustrate both the urgency and the difficulty. WAAS, EASA, and AMEU are also developing AI tools to support scientific diplomacy for peace talks and conflict prevention. Regional bodies matter too: while the UN remains the central platform, the African Union, ASEAN, and the OSCE are often better placed to mediate locally, and strengthening their capacity and coordination with the UN can enhance their effectiveness.¹⁵

5.11. A Reimagined Multilateral System

The widening circles culminate in their binding institutions—but the UN, World Bank, and prevailing development model were built for a more unified world and have adapted only marginally while the world fragmented. The result is a system that increasingly cannot act, because it rests on a single brittle premise: that everything requires everyone.

The way forward is not to abandon universality but to differentiate it, matching the consensus a decision requires to what is being decided—a system of three tiers rather than one. At the level of values—human rights, dignity, the renunciation of force—the standard stays universal: all or none, with no legitimate opt-out. At the level of action, where unanimity is neither available nor needed, coalitions form around common interests—climate, security, health, trade—and proceed without waiting for the slowest party. At the level of legitimacy, authority can no longer come from governments alone: institutions must mobilize the publics of the world, beginning in their ivory towers but ending diffused into the field, merged with the people they serve.

So conceived, transformation is a redesign of how consensus, action, and legitimacy are organized, not a single act of reform. The obstacles to reforming existing institutions are daunting, but it would be an error to delay achievable actions until reform arrives; visible success on scalable solutions, and visible diffusion of institutions into the publics they serve, builds the momentum that makes deeper reform possible. Despite the retreat from the UN founders’ vision, no better formula has been embraced by humanity—193 nations reaffirmed it only a decade ago in Agenda 2030 and the Paris Accord—and an inclusive system, tiered and diffused rather than monolithic, remains in the end the only durable solution.

CROSS CUTTING ENABLERS

The preceding domains deliver solutions; their deployment depends on a set of cross-cutting capacities that no single domain owns. Drawn together from across Section 5, these are the standing enablers—the knowledge, human capability, infrastructure, and coordination—that build humanity’s collective ability to implement change at scale. They are what turn a portfolio of solutions into a capacity to act.

5.12. Cross-cutting enablers drawn from Section 5

These twelve domains are not a list of programs but a single architecture of transformation. They ascend in deliberate order—from the civilizational foundations of how we think and lead, through the societal work of economy, technology, and security, to the global architecture of power, peace, and multilateral order. Beneath them lies a further layer: the knowledge, capability, and infrastructure that turn any one solution into the collective capacity to act. What unites them is a single shift—from fragmented, reactive responses to conscious, coordinated transformation aimed at root causes rather than symptoms. That shift is the work the Academy now sets before the world, and the agenda WAAS@66 is convened to advance.

6. The Three-Theme Solutions Framework for WAAS@66

The World Academy of Art & Science will convene its 66th Annual Summit in September 2026, building directly on the diagnostic and analytical work of WAAS@65. WAAS@65 charted the interwoven dimensions of global turbulence and identified their root causes and deep drivers, and also identified a considerable number of scalable solutions and the capacities required to address the sources of global turbulence. WAAS@66 is designed as a solutions conference to build on the work of WAAS@65. Taken together, these are required to support three civilizational themes for the success of human civilization: Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom. WAAS@66 is convened as a solutions conference around them, to turn this analysis into shared action.

The three-theme structure reflects the Academy’s conviction that the challenges facing humanity are civilizational in scope and cannot be addressed through sector-by-sector policy reform alone. Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom are not separate agendas; they are mutually constitutive conditions for the conscious social transformation that the moment demands. Peace without prosperity is fragile; prosperity without freedom is hollow; freedom without peace cannot last. They stand or fall together, on the common foundation of humanity’s collective capacity to transform itself and its environment for shared progress.

6.1. The State of our World: Why Global Turbulence and Why Now?

Day 1 of WAAS@66 will provide a summary of the conclusions of this report identifying both the sources and symptoms of global turbulence and identifying key issues that would need to be addressed in order to deliver effective solutions.

6.2. Peace: The Architecture of Global Security

Day 2 will address the structural conditions for durable peace in the twenty-first century, developing concrete proposals across: the architecture of global leadership and preparation of leaders for civilizational transition; the operationalization of the GPO across active and potential conflict zones; the transition from competitive nationalism to global common security through nine scalable strategies; the redesign of multilateralism and revitalization of global rule of law; strategies to reverse the retreat from democracy; the strengthening of universal human values and new narratives for global cooperation; the democratization of social power; and the integration of the arts and humanities through the Planetary Arts initiative.

6.3. Prosperity: The Economics & Technology of Human Security

Day 3 will address the economics of the transition, examining how the world’s resources can be directed toward building the assets that address pressing challenges while unlocking new opportunities. Proposals will cover the World Investment Plan and the nine transformative solutions capable of advancing 90% of SDG targets; global financial reform including externality pricing and democratization of access to finance; strategies for full employment and reduction of economic inequality; bridging the science-policy gap; integrated climate and ecological strategies; mobilizing science and technology as a force for good; and the operationalization of HS4A at national scale.

6.4. Freedom: Liberating Minds and Restoring Democracy in the Human Agency

Day 4 will address the battle for human consciousness—ensuring that technology, and AI in particular, serves human freedom and dignity rather than concentrating power and colonizing minds. Sessions will examine threats to society in the age of AI; technology as structural architecture; the near future of AGI; the creative and symbiotic potential of AI as a partner in human flourishing; the limits of rationality and new cognitive frameworks required for civilizational transformation; rethinking education for human security and conscious social evolution; and the full spectrum of existential threats through EXTRA.

7. Conclusion

The WAAS@65 conference made three foundational propositions that now define the Academy’s work. First: the world is not short of knowledge, financial resources, or technical solutions—what is lacking is the integrated vision, knowledge of the process of global social evolution, and conscious coordination and political will to deploy them at the scale the moment demands. Second: effective responses must address root causes at depth, not merely manage symptoms at the surface. Third: the transition underway—from fragmented, reactive, crisis-driven evolution to conscious, cooperative, values-guided transformation— represents both the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our era.

This report has presented the evidence and expert deliberation that grounds these propositions: the eight structural drivers of global turbulence, the twelve integrated solution domains, and the cross-cutting capacities that enable them, the portfolio of concrete projects through which the Academy is beginning to translate analysis into action, and the outline of the programs WAAS seeks to further develop in 2026.

The WAAS community—its Fellows, partner institutions, and the wider network of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers—is well positioned to contribute to this civilizational task. Not as the sole actor in a vast and complex field, but as an intellectual anchor, a convener of diverse expertise, and a catalyst for the coalitions and commitments that the scale of the challenge requires.

The collective resolve to solve is now the work. WAAS@65 named the task; WAAS@66 must galvanize to discharge it; and the years that follow will measure whether our era chose transformation while the choice was still ours to make.

Acknowledgments

Over the course of fifteen months, more than 100 Fellows of the World Academy of Art & Science (WAAS), together with Force for Good (F4G) and other collaborating partner organizations, contributed ideas, insights, and perspectives to the work that culminated in the WAAS@65 conference on Global Social Turbulence: Sources & Solutions, held July 21–24, 2025. The original impulse to focus collective attention on the macro-level phenomenon of global turbulence can be traced to a conference conducted by WAAS and the UNOG in June 2013, and was sparked anew by a discussion at the XI Global Baku Forum in March 2024 in Azerbaijan, organized by NGIC. The ideas discussed in this report were further developed at a side event of XII GBF in March 2025, in partnership with NGIC, F4G and UNESCO Bridges, bringing together fifteen WAAS Fellows to examine the subject in depth. On April 30, 2025, WAAS and ASU/GFL co-organized a further online workshop that sharpened the framing of the conference program.

The WAAS@65 conference was organized in collaboration with a remarkable network of partner institutions whose engagement, intellectual energy, and organizational support made it possible. These included F4G, NGIC, ASU/GFL, UNESCO Bridges, AE4RIA, IAC, EASA, CoR, SDSN, BSUN, IACP, AMEU, the MP, GSI, GPEN, and WUC.

Special acknowledgment and gratitude to the research team at Force for Good, a WAAS strategic research partner, for sustained engagement across all preparatory events and for contributing many of the most consequential perspectives contained in this report—particularly on finance, technology, and the architecture of civilizational transition. For a complete list of contributors to this report, please see Annexure.

Notes

1. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2026). Trends in world military expenditure, 2025 (Stockholm: SIPRI, April 2026), https://www.sipri.org/publications/2026/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2025
2. Ketan Patel, “The Rising Age of Cognitive Empires: Colonising the Mind,” SSRN, January 20, 2026, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/
3. Francis O’Donnell, “Root Causes and Deep Drivers of Global Turbulence,” Cadmus 5, no. 4 (2025): 33–51
4. Susan Frame et al., Global Energy Review 2025 (Paris: IEA, 2025)
5. World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate 2024 (Geneva: WMO, 2025)
6. UN Environment Programme, Emissions Gap Report 2025 (Nairobi: UNEP, 2025)
7. Force for Good, Capital as a Force for Good 2025 Report (London: Force for Good, 2025).
8. Force for Good, Capital as a Force for Good 2025 Report
9. World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025 (Geneva: WEF, January 7, 2025)
10. Cristina Enache, “Digital Taxation Around the World,” Tax Foundation, April 30, 2024, https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/ .
11. International Commission on Peace and Food, Uncommon Opportunities: An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2004/2005), preface.
12. Garry Jacobs, “Money, Markets and Social Power,” Cadmus 2, no. 6 (2016): 20–31.
13. L. Munn, “Angry by Design: Toxic Communication and Technical Architectures,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7 (2020); W. J. Brady et al., “The Rise of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks,” Science Advances 7, no. 6 (2021).
14. International Commission on Peace and Food, Uncommon Opportunities: Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development (London: Zed Books, 1994).
15. Donato Kiniger-Passigli, “The Peace Offensive: A New Strategic Framework for Conflict Resolution,” Cadmus 5, no. 4 (2025): 52–61.

Contributors