2025: A year without alibis

The year ends without resolution.

What remains is a long list of things the world chose to tolerate: more than 18,457 children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza; a two-and-a-half-year war devastating Sudan, trapping it in a cycle of violence; only 6.6% of the world’s population living under full democracies; and fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of humanity – holding three times the wealth of the entire bottom half of the global population.

In Ukraine, Russia’s war drags into its fourth year.

Some crises demand explanation. Others disappear through neglect. Sudan, Haiti, and Congo belonged to the second category.

It isn’t exactly clear why Sudan slipped from attention. Was it the speed of the smartphone scroll, where suffering must compete with novelty? Was it familiarity, shaped by racialised assumptions that conflict in Africa is cyclical, local, unsurprising? Or was it power deciding what qualifies as urgency?

The question is not only why Sudan received fewer headlines, but who benefits from that silence. In Sudan’s case, the answer can be measured in gold.

The United Arab Emirates, the gold digger in this conflict, has supplied weapons to the Rapid Support Forces militia, a fact documented by several United Nations and other international agencies.

The international order, long reduced to ceremonial gestures, fractured further in 2025. The United States wielded power on a whim, bending the global rules it frames at pleasure.

The US imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court for pursuing investigation and trial against Israel. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, was sanctioned for investigating abuses and war crimes in Gaza. European civil society leaders and former European Union commissioners were sanctioned for challenging hate and holding US tech companies to account. Migrants in the US were chased in courts, hounded in streets and kidnapped. They were and are chained, beaten and deported under questionable circumstances.

The logic and the sanctioner were the same, but the noise was selective.

European leaders cried out when their own were sanctioned by their ally, the United States, but remained silent when the International Criminal Court, an institution they helped create, was sanctioned for holding Israel accountable. For them, it would appear, justice is optional and accountability is conditional. It depends on who is hurting and who is hurt.

Of course, the international order and rule of law were never applied equally. And it was not US President Donald Trump who shattered this notion in 2025. He merely revealed its design. The system was never neutral; it was engineered to serve power. Its hypocrisies are now impossible to ignore.

Democracy and freedom continued to recede. Recent assessments from the Economist Intelligence Unit and the V-Dem Institute show that fewer than one in ten people now live under a full democracy. Nearly three-quarters of the global population, around 72%, now live under autocratic systems, the highest level recorded since the 1970s. People’s participation has narrowed and trust in institutions has weakened.

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk moved closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Over the course of the year, his wealth almost doubled. Musk’s reach across media, defence contracting, satellite infrastructure, and political discourse blurred the line between private capital and public authority. Scholars increasingly described this as a form of private governance. His monies and platforms re-inventing authoritarianism and streamlining them around the world.

Musk wasn’t the only beneficiary of the perverted economic order. The World Inequality Report 2026 found that the top 10% of income-earners take home more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half capture less than 10% of global earnings.

Wealth – the value of people’s assets – was even more concentrated: the richest 10% of the world’s population own 75% of wealth, while the bottom half hold just 2%. During the same period, real wages stagnated or fell for large sections of the global workforce. By any historical measure, this level of inequality is extraordinary.

India, world’s largest democracy and most populous country, reflected these pressures at scale. The top 1% now holds roughly 40% of national wealth, placing India among the most unequal societies in the world, worse than during British Raj.

But yes, there was a measure of hope.

From Nepal and Bangladesh to Bulgaria, Georgia, and Madagascar, younger organisers disrupted political status-quo through strikes, student movements, and sustained protest. Governments fell, and new political structures are taking shape.

Georgia became a symbol of the moment. Young protesters are holding the streets despite force.

In the United States, a social democrat, Zohran Mamdani, despite disapproval from his party, showed that holding firm positions on Gaza, trans rights, and social justice did not foreclose electoral success. Politics can still work with principle. As Mamdani won the election to become New York mayor, he did not dilute language or trade away commitments. He won without seeking permission.

The year also recorded insistence.

Women in Europe, organised through the My Voice, My Choice campaign, collecting over a million signatures to push the European Parliament to recognise safe abortion as a matter of choice rather than geography. The campaign shifted debate from morality to access and legislators were forced to respond.

Energy data offered a different register. Wind and solar farms generated more electricity than coal plants for the first time this year, a turning point for the global power system.

This review exists to leave markers. The year showed how easily norms thin out. It also showed how pressure accumulates, how refusal travels and how power adjusts when challenged from outside its own terms.

What comes next will depend on which of these pressures settle into structure. The record remains open.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and an international media studies scholar at the Deutsche Welle Akademie.