As 2023 comes to a close, here are the top ten most notable world events of the year.

Blog Post by James M. Lindsay

December 8, 2023 9:21 am (EST) CFR

You are not alone if 2023 has you feeling worn down. It has been a trying year on the world scene, as the forces of disarray grew stronger. Ongoing wars ground on, while new ones erupted. Geopolitical competition increased, to the point where a meeting between rival heads of state became front-page news even though their talks yielded little tangible progress. In all, good news has been in short supply. So here are my top ten world events in 2023. You may want to read what follows closely. Many of these stories will continue into 2024 and beyond.

And if you would like visuals to go along with the list, here is the companion video my colleagues in CFR Digital have created recounting all ten events.

Ten Significant World Events 2023

10. The global democratic recession continues. Optimists are predicting a fourth wave of global democratic expansion. That prediction was a bust in 2023.Freedom House started the year by announcing that 2022 marked the seventeenth straight year in which global freedom and democracy declined.As if to prove the point, Africa’s coup epidemic continued. In July, Niger’s military ousted the country’s democratically-elected president. Neighboring states threatened to intervene if the coup wasn’t reversed, but the military juntas running Mali and Burkina Faso threatened war in response. In August, Gabon’s military took power and made vague promises to eventually hold elections. A new progressive party won the most seats in Thailand’s May election. However, a backroom deal produced a pro-military government that left the election’s biggest winner on the outside looking in. India’s government continued to use the law and intimidation to silence critics, and many other democracies restricted freedom of expression. The trend of candidates claiming they would lose their election only if the vote were rigged continued. Far-right parties fared well across Europe, reviving memories of how European democracies collapsed a century ago. Guatemala’s attorney general tried to keep the country’s president-elect from taking office, while Peru’s attorney general used corruption investigations to pressure lawmakers to help her allies. Donald Trump called his opponents “vermin,” said that if he regained the White House he would not be a dictator “except for Day One,” and suggested he would use the presidency to target his political enemies. All in all, not a good year for democracy.

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CNA Insider – 26-10-2023

Some 70 countries are in or at risk of debt distress – a record number that has the World Bank sounding the alarm. Debt defaults by these emerging and developing countries could lead the world into a global financial crisis perhaps even on par with the Great Depression of 1929. The pattern is clear from three previous debt waves: the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, Asian financial crisis of the 1990s, and the global financial crisis triggered by the 2007 US subprime crisis.

00:00 Intro & three previous debt waves
01:16 The fourth debt wave
02:07 Countries in debt: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Laos
03:40 Impact on education, healthcare
04:21 How did the debt crisis start?
05:19 China’s Belt & Road Initiative
06:12 Climate change and debt

It hasn’t been this threatened since the 1930s.

By Walter Russell Mead

Sept. 25, 2023 6:06 pm ETS, WSJ

The most important fact in world politics is that 19 months after Vladimir Putin challenged the so-called rules-based international order head-on by invading Ukraine, the defense of that order is not going well. The world is less stable today than in February 2022, the enemies of the order hammer away, the institutional foundations of the order look increasingly shaky, and Western leaders don’t yet seem to grasp the immensity of the task before them.

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September 21, 2023  Topic: Authoritarianism  Region: Eurasia  Tags: AuthoritarianismDemocracyRussiaChinaCold WarGreat Power Competition

Across much of the world, the ideas of a democratic liberal political order, of multilateral international collaboration, and of liberal free-market capitalism are now in retreat.

by Azeem Ibrahim Follow Azeem Ibrahim on TwitterL , nationalinterest.org

The world is in turmoil. Only thirty years after the fall of the USSR and the collapse of its proxy network in Eastern Europe, a land war is being fought in Europe between a democracy and a dictatorship. 

When the Cold War ended, we could have scarcely imagined that in just three decades we would be where we are now. We know now that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did not bring about “the end of history” as prophesied. Instead, it bred complacency among the leaders of the Western democracies, great complacency which has sowed the seeds for the current global anti-democratic reckoning. 

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Opinion by Frida Ghitis, CNN

Video: Fate of Putin’s enemies

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.CNN — 

When an airplane owned by Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin plummeted in a fiery crash northwest of Moscow last week, observers in Russia and around the world immediately recalled two indisputable facts. First, that Prigozhin had openly challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin, and second, that countless others who had defied Putin have met untimely, violent deaths.

Frida GhitisCNN

In the quest to understand what happened, one other fact was clear: The Kremlin was not the place to seek straightforward, credible answers. The Kremlin’s word is, shall we say, not a good source for independent, reliable truth.