2024 was the year of elections, change, and upheaval. Where citizens could, they voiced their dissatisfaction through the ballot box, bringing change by exercising their democratic rights. While the nature and state of democracies varies globally, in sum nearly half of the world’s population went to the polls in 2024.

In societies where authoritarians ruled — either through rigged elections or brute force — citizens also pushed back, successfully bringing about change that many political analysts did not expect at the beginning of the year. This year of action — through ballots, protests, and uprisings — is evidence that the status quo is no longer acceptable to citizens all over the world. What comes next remains to be seen, but the fact is that 2024 will be remembered as the year in which the status quo governing the world since the end of the Cold War came to an end.

The changes we saw in 2024 did not come about in isolation. The Global Financial Crisis had set in motion events that weakened the established order that had emerged since the end of the Cold War. The Covid-19 pandemic — a once-in-a-century crisis — further amplified discontent, despite the fact that governments spent trillions to prop up economies and protect their citizens.

Rampant inflation, caused in part by the scale of the stimulus that was unleashed all over the world, played a key role, as did the cost of living crisis caused by higher energy prices in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. .