In Europe, officials raised the banner of 'digital sovereignty' at a recent summit. In Africa, regulators have ordered U.S. cloud giants to host data on local servers. Data has become the new battleground. Governments and tech companies now face off over control of the digital realm. The borderless Internet they once promised is under siege.

A family of migrants waits at a fence on the U.S.–Mexico border, underscoring the human stakes of today’s migration pressures. The world is in motion. Thousands of migrants crowd makeshift camps at borders and news footage of boat crossings is common. Meanwhile, governments in capitals respond by building fences, tightening visas, and upgrading checkpoints. This tension – record migration clashing with hardened borders – defines the present crisis. For instance, the U.S. logged 3.2 million migrant encounters at its southern border in fiscal 2023, a historic high. Globally, an estimated 304 million people lived outside their birth country by 2024, nearly doubling the 1990 figure. These flows are driven by wars, poverty, and climate shocks: by mid‑2025, 117 million people had been uprooted by conflict and persecution and an astounding 250 million displacements occurred due to climate disasters in the past decade.