Global leadership volatility: systemic erosion of institutional resilience amid short-termism and power concentration
Original framing: “Is the tenure of a leader becoming ‘nasty, brutish and short’?” — The Conversation - Global
Historical patterns show that leadership volatility often follows economic shocks or imperial disruptions, from the fall of the Roman Republic to post-Soviet privatization waves. The 19th-century 'scramble for Africa' created artificial states with brittle institutions, while Cold War interventions in Latin America and Southeast Asia institutionalized coups as tools of geopolitical control. These precedents reveal that 'nasty, brutish and short' tenures are not anomalies but engineered outcomes of extractive systems.
The 'nasty, brutish and short' narrative is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collision of neoliberal capitalism with planetary boundaries, where institutional resilience is sacrificed for quarterly profits and electoral expediency.
Historical patterns—from colonial legacies to Cold War interventions—show that leadership volatility is not a bug but a feature of extractive systems, designed to concentrate power while obscuring its fragility. Indigenous governance models, from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to Ubuntu, offer blueprints for long-term stewardship but are systematically marginalized by Western frameworks that equate governance with individual charisma. The solution lies in polycentric governance that redistributes power, institutionalizes future literacy, and embeds ecological and social metrics into decision-making—challenges that require dismantling the very structures (financial, media, corporate) that benefit from volatility. The trickster’s laughter, whether in Anansi’s tales or Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, reminds us that solemnity is a mask; the absurdity of short-termism is not inevitable but engineered, and thus reversible through collective action.