It may not seem like the best time to publish yet another global ranking of nations. The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) have recently come under fire for being vague and biased. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset, a Swedish academic project, touts an advanced methodology blending surveys with supercomputers, yet its results clearly indicate a greater interest in de jure liberalism than de facto democratic practice. Objectivity seems impossible—yet we try.
We should strive to improve rankings because they shape how we evaluate states and how states behave. For example, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report (CGR) series enjoyed decades of success by awakening the competitive spirit among nations seeking to elevate their ranking—knowing full well that investors use the scores in asset allocation.
Today, we have a plethora of indices ranking states according to metrics such as military power, financial wealth, industrial capacity, technological innovation, democracy, economic freedom, sustainability, reputation, and more. But looking at each indicator in isolation doesn’t tell us much about the robustness of the state as a whole. Meaningfully categorizing states requires curating a meta-index of these diverse quantitative and qualitative variables across the strategic, economic, technological, social, and other domains.
To that end, we are pleased to present the first iteration of the Periodic Table of States (PTOS). Just as natural elements are scattered around the planet in varying degrees of abundance or scarcity, their salient characteristics are elegantly captured in the periodic table of elements.
The analogous PTOS has been designed as a meta-index of more than two dozen fundamental metrics grouped into the categories of strength and stateness, with the sum of those scores representing a state’s overall stability.
This methodology is designed to capture the traditional emphasis in international relations on a state’s latent capabilities (strength) stemming from its territorial size, population, military assets, industrial base, and economic weight, as well as the more contemporary concerns of political science with institutional capacity (stateness) as measured by public service efficiency, rule of law, and social development. It also takes advantage of new datasets that capture obviously important but historically neglected factors such as quality of life, food security, and climate resilience.
Scholars tend to generalize about “the state” as if reality could ever match the academic archetype. But there have never been as many states as we have today, and beyond the legal commonalities among them—similarities in form—there is a wide spectrum in function. Strength and stateness alone are useful metrics, but they are also means to an end: stability, which is the composite that results from adding up each country’s strength and stateness scores.
This is empirically appropriate: We should expect states that are both strong and robust to embody a durable stability. It is also normatively neutral: States don’t universally aspire to be more Western or democratic, but every state wants to be more stable. Indeed, in a complex world where sovereignty, state capacity, and societal cohesion are under constant stress from border conflicts, economic competition, fiscal strain, climate volatility, mass migration, and other challenges, stability is the cardinal virtue we should use as a yardstick in comparing states. Now we have a rigorous approach to actually measuring it.
The PTOS can serve many audiences. Students can learn to think more broadly about the actual criteria used to evaluate nations rather than buying into antiquated approaches that focus primarily on military factors. Scholars can incorporate the components into their analyses to get a richer picture of the ground truth of a society. Investors and ratings agencies can update their methodologies to include important new variables that impact state performance. Travelers, migrants, and digital nomads could use it to decide where they want to pursue a good life. Most of all, governments should look at how their states stack up in individual metrics and strive to become better versions of themselves.
States on a Plane
The PTOS wasn’t designed to frustrate students who don’t remember their high school chemistry class. It’s a heuristic to make spatial data relatable and create meaningful clusters according to indicators that are relevant in today’s world.
In order to mimic the periodic table of elements, the strength score is analogous to the atomic number, which represents the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus; the stateness score corresponds to the binding role of neutrons; and the overall stability score corresponds to the atomic mass, which captures the total number of protons and neutrons.
Mapping Overall Stability
This comprehensive meta-index approach offers several advantages over narrow rankings. It aggregates metrics that correspond to both international importance and domestic governance rather than treating them separately. It also corrects against the bias that privileges states simply because they’re large and/or populous and against the widespread presumption that democracies are better governed.
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Strength Stateness
Digging further into the two major themes of strength and stateness, several major findings stand out.
First, despite their small size, Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore punch above their weight in national strength while also embodying remarkably high state capacity. This should remind large states how much they can learn about good governance from countries that can’t afford to be inefficient. (Washington’s Department of Government Efficiency crusaders should take note.)
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Second, a high overall stability score carried by strength can’t mask weaknesses in governance—as exhibited by Russia, Turkey, and Mexico, for example. By the same logic, of greatest concern are countries whose geographic and demographic sizes confer an aura of strength but whose stateness scores are abysmally low—Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo stand out here.
These nations are a warning that the failed state problem isn’t confined to smaller nations. Indeed, most countries in the world rank low in both strength and stateness, with low governance and development scores. Most countries are fragile states.
The third takeaway is that we have to focus much more on good governance criteria than on democracy alone. Only a small handful of democracies in underdeveloped regions—Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Botswana, specifically—exhibit adequate progress in delivering a respectable quality of life. Meanwhile, the largest set of countries rank higher in democracy than in development, which is a worrying sign given how long most of them have been democracies without achieving strong development. If elections fail to deliver a decent quality of life, is it any wonder there’s worldwide dissatisfaction with democracy?
Though there is a strongly positive correlation between democracy and governance scores, those ranking highest in both categories are the usual Scandinavian suspects—Norway, Finland, and Denmark—as well as other small monarchies and parliamentary democracies. While their systems are admirable, they aren’t the likely future for most nations. Meanwhile, large democracies such as India, Brazil, and the Philippines rank poorly in governance and therefore are hardly role models for the rest of the world. For most people in the democratic world, then, there isn’t much to celebrate.
The good news is that far more countries do well in governance than in democracy, cutting well across the socioeconomic spectrum. One subset of these includes Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—states with middle to high incomes and diverse regimes. Other countries—notably Uzbekistan and Oman—rank low in democracy but high in development. Together with China and Vietnam, they make a strong case for exploring the wide range of pathways available to achieve robust stateness.
Diplomatic Chemistry
One important attribute of a state’s overall profile is its diplomatic orientation. States, like elements, have a propensity to form compounds, particularly regional associations such as the European Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. As U.S. hegemony fades and new multilateral groupings arise, the intensity of state participation in diplomatic bodies could prove to be much more tangible and revealing of their worldviews than vague cartographic allusions to the “North,” “South,” “East,” or “West,” or voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly.
This visual format allows us to easily observe how the SCO and BRICS have muscled into the regions traditionally home to U.S. allies, such as West Asia and Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and India are at the forefront of practicing multialignment—building strong ties in all directions to get the best deal for themselves. If Turkey, a formal NATO member, were to one day join the SCO, heads would explode in Brussels. In fact, as we’ve seen in the dramatic first few weeks of the second Trump administration, there is even more fluidity across the Venn diagram’s regions than its partitions suggest. More states are multialigning, acting like high valence atoms with a propensity to form bonds with others.
Nonstate “States”: From Sovereignty to Authority
Across the postcolonial world, nebulous zones are as real as nations. Kurdistan’s de facto state is as or more “real” than South Sudan’s de jure one. The Islamic State isn’t a recognized political state, but it is nonetheless a geopolitical unit that controls territory—even if its terrain shifts daily or weekly.
The same is true of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, or Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and the various Wagner Group-backed militias across Africa. They—and the international financial and logistics networks that support them—can all be visualized even though they don’t meet legal definitions of statehood. Let’s map the “gray zones.”
The same is true of the holding companies that own and operate mining concessions, special economic zones, freeports, and other physical infrastructures that function in parallel to official sovereign jurisdictions. Commodities traders, shadow shipping fleets, global management consultancies, and, of course, social media platforms exist not to control land but to connect supply and demand, whether it’s resources to markets, goods to customers, or content creators to audiences.
The present era is thus not only one of structural change in powerful territorial states but also of systems change in terms of the nature of the units themselves: countries, companies, and communities across the physical and digital domains.
Within this emerging matrix, states and nonstate actors have bidirectional relationships characterized by leverage and symbiosis. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), such as BitDAO and the Ethereum Name Service, govern their own currencies (or tokens) and negotiate with states over where they’ll invest, where their members will reside, and other arenas based on their wealth, technology, and prestige. Governments from Wyoming in the United States, to the UAE, to the Marshall Islands are welcoming Web3-based DAOs to incorporate in their jurisdictions and raise crypto capital because such relationships are win-win.
It’s both backward and misleading to compare corporate revenue to the GDP of countries. Corporations and other influential nonstate actors possess forms of network power that are simultaneously physical, financial, and digital. If anything, this makes them far more important than many states whose influence is often confined within their own borders. Their autonomy from states enables them to be independent authorities, which is something they prefer to the trappings of sovereignty.
Google is both a physical and network power, presiding over a vast global internet infrastructure and massively influential in national and international regulatory affairs. (Like numerous tech companies, it consumes more electricity than many countries.) Meta is reportedly planning to spend $10 billion on a 24,000-mile private network of subsea internet cables that would be autonomous from sovereign authorities. As tech giants position servers in the oceans, Arctic tundra, and perhaps even outer space, we must ask: Do servers have sovereignty? And will Chinese and Russian ships one day target them if their owners make corporate decisions those regimes don’t like?
Conclusion: The Future of States
The PTOS isn’t meant to be predictive, but indices can shape and motivate behavior.
Watching its industrial base erode, Germany’s incoming government, led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is planning to unleash hundreds of billions of euros to reenergize its economy and defense sector. The CDU campaigned on precisely on what Germany has done best: reliable stability.
But stability doesn’t mean status quo. Societies must dynamically adapt to changing times. To remain stable—even antifragile—means being prepared for the world of tomorrow. That makes stability a moving target.
As such, the PTOS methodology will continue to expand to include new and worthy indicators that add value, such as GDP sensitivity to commodities prices, economic diversification, social mobility, and others. A table that evolves with the times is preferable than one that clings to outdated archetypes.
It’s time for a more sophisticated typology of the units that comprise our global system—an expanded redefinition of the state itself to encompass a wide range of forms spanning the territorial, financial, technological, and cultural domains.
Don’t be surprised by the resurrection of a neo-Hanseatic League of city-states, countries exchanging territory for cryptocurrency, or infrastructure governed by the Independent Republic of the Supply Chain.
Even a rudimentary PTOS can help us better categorize these units into more refined clusters according to a wider range of metrics, test how they respond to systemic volatility, and capture the novel formations that result from their entangled relations.
It can help overhaul our antiquated cartography toward a more dynamic realignment of borders, resources, infrastructures, and peoples based on shifting identities, ideologies, preferences, and technologies. Geopolitics does not contain a philosophy of progress, and so it is up to us to give it one.
The only “end of history” we have arrived at is the certainty that all territory on Earth will be governed by some type of state—whether a territory-bound political community or an extractive corporate authority—but which ones and where remain open questions. We can be sure, however, that the common denominator will be the state. Not all states have a future, but the state as an idea most certainly does.
Editing by Sasha Polakow-Suransky. Visualizations and creative direction by Lori Kelley and Sara Stewart. Copy-editing by Aryana Azari and Shannon Schweitzer. Development by Ash White.
