Global chaos isn’t spreading, but is highly localized, a new report argued.
The impression in foreign policy circles, a former US ambassador to NATO wrote, is that “the erosion of the international rules-based order is a uniform, global trend.”
But the reality, according to the Atlas of Impunity report, is that almost half of all recorded military battles in 2025 took place in Ukraine, and nearly a third of all state violence against civilians was in Myanmar.
Outside of “a handful of highly repressive, war-torn states… collapsing into total systemic lawlessness,” Ivo Daalder wrote, most nations are “incrementally tightening their legal and institutional guardrails.” For the median global citizen, “daily life has actually seen a post-pandemic cooling of civil unrest.”