From the Gulf to Ukraine to the Sahel, today’s conflicts are not isolated events but cascading shocks in a hyper-connected world, yet our institutions remain built to react to yesterday’s wars.

The most striking feature of today’s crises is not their severity. It is our surprise.

Once again, the world is watching escalation in the Middle East. Markets move. Energy corridors, are scrutinised. Diplomatic channels strain. The familiar rhythm begins: shock, reaction, saturation — and then, gradually, normalisation. Until the next time.

And yet even as attention fixes on the Gulf, this week brought a different kind of alarm. The World Health Organization has declared an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern. The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, for which there are no approved vaccines or therapeutics. Infectious disease researchers believe it has almost certainly been spreading undetected for weeks or even months. 

We are responding, again, after the fact. and doing so in a world that, after years of pandemic-era austerity and the dismantling of early-warning capacities, is measurably less prepared for infectious disease emergencies than it was when Covid-19 struck in 2020.

Two crises. Two domains. One systemic failure.

But the deeper question is not about either crisis in isolation. It is about why the international system continues to be startled by events that follow a pattern we should, by now, understand.

In Sudan, a civil war has created what the United Nations describes as the world’s largest humanitarian emergency. More than 13 million people displaced, around 21 million facing acute food insecurity. In Gaza, tens of thousands killed, international diplomacy paralysed. In Ukraine, a war of territorial conquest into its fifth year, reshaping European security and disrupting global food systems. Across the Sahel, a cascade of coups and insurgencies has carved an arc of fragility across one of the world’s most insecure regions.

Different geographies. Different actors. Different grievances. The same pattern.

But "pattern" means something precise here. It describes a structural logic: in complex, hyper-connected systems, shocks rarely stay confined to the domain in which they originate. A military escalation triggers financial volatility. A food crisis accelerates political instability. A disinformation wave forecloses diplomatic space before facts can even be established.

This is the same logic that governs financial contagion, climate tipping points and pandemic spread.

I saw this first-hand during my years leading UN agencies. At UNEP, our 2007 Sudan Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment was among the first major UN reports to identify climate variability, declining rainfall and environmental degradation as underlying drivers that had contributed to the conflict in Darfur. These forces did not act alone — they interacted with political, social and governance failures, and they were largely invisible to security institutions focused on military and diplomatic dimensions. 

Later, at UNDP, the FSO Safer operation brought those consequences into sharp relief. A decaying oil tanker off Yemen’s coast held over one million barrels of crude, in the middle of an active conflict, surrounded by deep political mistrust. What appeared, on the surface, to be an environmental emergency was simultaneously a humanitarian crisis, an economic risk, a maritime security threat and a regional diplomatic challenge. A single rupture could have devastated Red Sea fisheries, disrupted food supply chains, closed vital ports and unravelled fragile diplomacy across the region. 

Eventually, a UN-led operation succeeded in transferring the oil — averting disaster. But getting there required negotiating across conflict lines and building a coalition of actors who did not share a common framework.

These are not anomalies. They are the signature behaviour of systemic and cascading risks, and they reveal a structural mismatch at the heart of modern security governance.

Our institutions were designed for a world of clearer frontlines, identifiable adversaries and slower-moving crises. The post-1945 order produced genuine progress: norms against violating sovereignty, multilateral channels for de-escalation, international law as a shared reference point. For all its imperfections, it often constrained the worst impulses of states.

But war today does not confine itself to battlefields. It moves simultaneously through financial markets, food supply chains, energy grids and digital ecosystems — where narratives travel faster than facts. Research published in Science found that false news spreads six times faster than truth. A single escalation now triggers market volatility across continents, disinformation waves that harden public opinion, and humanitarian spillovers that destabilise neighbouring states before any formal response mechanism has even convened.

There is something deeper still. We are living through competing narrative ecosystems. Negotiating parties may be operating from entirely different versions of events, each reinforced by the algorithms shaping what their publics see and believe.

The analytical tools to address this are more powerful than ever. The convergence of geopolitical analysis, data science, behavioural insight and systems modelling opens possibilities for anticipatory governance that simply did not exist a generation ago. But realising that potential requires institutions designed not merely to react to crises, but to recognise and interrupt the patterns that produce them — institutions built for the world as it is, not the world of 1945.

The real danger today is not that crises occur. History guarantees they will. The danger is that we continue to treat each one as a surprise. The next crisis will come. The question is whether we will recognise it in time — or once again be startled by what we should already have understood.
 

This opinion piece reflects the views of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the position of the Oxford Martin School or the University of Oxford. Any errors or omissions are those of the author.