'Turning ploughshares back into swords' – experts dissect the Global Risks Report 2025, on Radio Davos

“The last 30 years, people have talked about us living in this golden era of turning swords into ploughshares, to use the biblical phrase. Now we're on the eve of a world that is turning ploughshares back into swords. And that's got real consequences for the world and for our economies and for our governments.”

This sobering assessment from Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and Professor of global economic governance, comes as the World Economic Forum’s newly released Global Risks Report 2025 names conflict as the biggest risk facing the planet this year.

"This is ranked top by almost one-quarter of respondents," says the Head of the Forum's Global Risks Initiative, Mark Elsner. "Compare that to just two years ago when it wasn't even in the top 10 of two-year risks. This just shows how, unfortunately, the world has changed over the last couple of years."

Defined specifically as “state-based armed conflict”, this rise in the rankings comes as Russia’s war on Ukraine is on the brink of entering its fourth year, the Israel-Gaza conflict continues and threatens to spill into the wider Middle East, and Sudan’s civil war shows no sign of ending.

Woods and Elsner discuss this and other threats facing the world on the latest episode of the Forum’s Radio Davos podcast. They were joined by Azeem Azhar, Chief Executive of the AI and technology newsletter and platform Exponential View, who shared his insights on the rising risks of cyber warfare and how the spread of disinformation could foment conflict. Here are some highlights of the podcast:

The rise of conflict – and worries about conflict – is driving large shifts in policy by countries around the world in a way that will impact even people living outside war zones, according to Woods.

"If we look at what's happening to defence spending across every category of country in the world, we see countries that are fiscally constrained," she says. "Governments are trying to cut expenditure, but they're massively increasing their defence budgets."

Coinciding with the need to fund decarbonization, the budget burden of ageing populations, and record government debt levels following the pandemic, this will squeeze the amount leaders have left to allocate to welfare and social spending and could exacerbate another kind of conflict—societal polarization, ranked fourth on the list of risks for the next two years.

Wood explains it as follows: “For super-ageing populations, there become fewer and fewer workers, higher and higher healthcare costs because your ageing population has access to ever more wonder drugs that will keep them alive even longer – but cost even more – and then pension systems designed for people who die younger … [which start] costing more as they live [longer].

"All of that can breed some nasty politics, some intergenerational friction and resentment among the young, who feel they're having to work twice as hard to support the elderly. If you've got really strong economic growth, you're fine. The problem is if you're stagnating, which is what a lot of countries are."

Super-ageing societies are defined as those where at least 20% of the population is aged 65 and over, Elsner adds, noting that Japan, Spain, Italy, Germany and South Korea are all either at this point or very close to it.

This shift in demographics as birth rates fall alongside increased longevity at the other end of the population also raises much deeper questions, according to Azhar: "If a country's population is coming down, it says something about that country's purpose. Our nationhood has come from people knowing a national anthem, rallying around a symbol, and finding shared history. I'm really curious about what [this demographic shift] means for that idea of nationhood. I think it adds a little bit of fuel to the fire of difficult politics."

While armed conflict is seen as the top risk this year, misinformation and disinformation are ranked as the top risks over the next two years, as was the case in the 2024 report.

Another technological risk—cyber espionage and warfare — ranks fifth on the two-year list, and for Elsner, this is a “huge part” of why state-based conflict is deemed the top risk for the world in 2025.

"We're seeing it around the world. We've seen it [with the pager attacks] in Lebanon – the link between cyber and physical warfare really coming out into the open. Militaries have been working on it for a long time, but this was perhaps the first time that the world in general has seen how effective that can be."

Recent events in the Baltic Sea provide another example of this, according to Azhar. "We've seen physical infrastructure that supports a digital economy, in terms of cables between Finland and Germany, being destroyed, likely deliberately, by third parties. I would consider this a state-based conflict. The issue here is nation-states’ ability to secure every part of what's called the attack surface, which is not just your airspace but the cables … that bring the internet and the digital economy to your nation's websites and the payment systems that your economy and the firms in your economy rely on.

“Amazon recently disclosed that it gets nearly 1 billion cyber incidents per day. A lot of those will be coming from criminal gangs who are tacitly or sometimes explicitly supported by adversarial nations. It's part of an overarching picture of applying pressure to represent your interests.”

Attacks on cyber pathways are also opening up routes for the spread of disinformation (which Azhar notes means the “deliberate use of communications messages across platforms to confuse or change opinions”, whereas misinformation refers to the mistaken spreading of falsehoods – often on social media – in the belief that they are true).

“The changing media landscape, the changing technology landscape creates these new vulnerabilities which can get exploited by actors with a range of different ambitions,” he explains. “Some of them are adversarial, geopolitical, and some are just for the sake of making a little bit of money through the advertising funnel that is the internet.”

Woods shared how various scientists who develop vaccines had told her they were becoming dispirited by the fact that “no matter how hard they work at making things that help human beings live better lives, misinformation or a disinformation campaign can render it hopeless and leave society untrusting [of] scientific advances.

"The platforms have worked out that what really sticks, the clickbait that really makes the money, is emotional. It's playing to people's anger, fear, etc… So you can have the most trusted scientists in the world saying this vaccine is safe, and then you have one fearmonger saying, my neighbour took it and turned into a monkey, and that will stick. That will be what people send around all their friends."

Disinformation campaigns and how they help embed a lack of trust in traditional authority figures are also having an impact on the world’s ability to tackle the climate crisis – another risk that ranks highly in this year’s report, with extreme weather events seen as the second-highest risk in the next two years and the biggest risk in the next ten (with another three climate-related risks filling out the top four).

Heat pumps have been one target of disinformation, according to Azhar. “The right wing press in the UK is quite unscientific in its assessment of this, which is essentially: these things work in cold countries.”

Yet the fact that climate change is real now seems to have been largely accepted, note Woods and Azhar, both of whom consequently feel largely optimistic about the prospects for tackling the crisis.

"A few years ago, China had really terrible air pollution problems in its cities," says Azhar. "It doesn't now, and it was able to do that through a combination of policy and regulation, but critically through technology. In a few years, what seemed to be intractable problems … have been addressed, and I think the lesson that comes out of that is that technology creates policy space because technology is things getting cheaper."

Improvements in technology also promise to help unlock ways to prevent shortages of the critical minerals needed for the energy transition, according to Azhar. “Incentives, innovation, and commercial partnerships come to bear, and supply will expand. It’s the old adage that the cure for high prices is high prices. A looming shortage creates incentives and innovations for alternative approaches.”

Woods adds: "The other thing that gives me optimism is that some of the largest oil and gas exporters in the world are starting genuinely to plan how they're going to celebrate exporting their last barrel of oil.

“As for the new administration in the United States, the president has selected as his main advisor one of the world's largest producers of electric vehicles. Let's see the positive upside. I wouldn't give up on the United States staying to some degree on a cleaner pathway.”

Overall, Elsner sees “four structural forces that are essentially driving a whole range of risks, particularly when these four structural forces interact with each other. These are demographic bifurcation, tech acceleration, climate change and geostrategic shifts”.

Similarly, Azhar sees “fragmentation … coming from a number of different forces” that will make it hard to reach “a stable equilibrium in a five- or ten-year period”.

For Woods, the friction that these forces create when they come up against one another means that “the biggest challenge for the next decade is … to rebuild how it is that human beings come to trust each other and trust the people in whom they give authority so that they can actually work as a society positively”.

Things can change quickly, however, and often in unexpected ways, as we’ve seen on many occasions in the 2020s alone. “Will these four structural forces still be structural forces in 20 years, or will some of them – maybe climate change – no longer be driving structural forces?” Elsner asks. “Then the question is, which new structural forces might come along?”