So much is going on that it is hard to get a handle on it all, let alone to tie things together neatly in a simple framework.

But at Foreign Affairs, we have been carefully tracking the emergence and debating the significance of this new global context, as the World Economic Forum puts it, in real time. So we decided that it would be useful to put together this special collection as background reading for the Forum’s 2015 Annual Meeting.

Drawn from the pages of our print magazine and the pixels of our website, the articles gathered here trace major recent geopolitical events and debates from a broad range of expert perspectives. They give you the information and argumentation you need to make up your own mind about what truly matters, why, and what might come next.