We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
What is the least corrupt country in the world? According to a Berlin-based nonprofit called Transparency International, that would be Denmark. Finland is close behind. At the very bottom of the list is Somalia, dead last out of 180 nations.
Founded in 1993 by a retired World Bank Official, Transparency International operates in more than 100 countries, promoting accountability and exposing public sector corruption.
The team, led by CEO Daniel Eriksson, attended the 2024 Munich Security Conference last week with a warning about the rise of “strategic corruption,” a geopolitical weapon involving bribes and disinformation to attain a political goal in another nation.
“Our definition of corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for personal gain,” Eriksson told GZERO’s Tony Maciulis.
This year is critical for democracy as dozens of countries head to the polls for elections that could determine policy and politics for the remainder of the decade. Among other projects aimed at rooting out political corruption, Eriksson’s team tracks foreign funding meant to influence the outcomes of campaigns or get certain candidates elected.
Check out the complete rankings list for 180 countries published yearly in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
See more coverage of the Munich Security Conference from Global Stage.
While I’ve read reports of protesters in the vicinity of the 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland I haven’t witnessed any activity near the Congress Center itself. That’s what made this demonstration stand out for me and why I wanted to speak to the participants.
A small group of Iranians, some of whom told me they had family members executed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, had created a memorial in an open courtyard on the promenade. It was filled with poster-sized photos of men and women who have been killed by the regime since widespread protests began last September, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini. She died in police custody after being arrested by Iran’s morality police for improperly wearing her headscarf.
I spoke to two organizers who conveyed that their mission was to have world leaders declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. They had come to Davos in the hopes of getting attention from the international delegations present here this week.
While they haven’t yet gotten any direct response from the WEF, Iran has been in focus on both the main stage and the sidelines this week. The Forum presented a panel on the future of women in Iran featuring actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi alongside Masih Alinejad, who appeared as a guest on our program GZERO World last fall after the protests started.
Also, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made headlines Tuesday when she told reporters here in Davos she would support listing the IRGC as a terrorist organization, which would criminalize membership in the organization. She said Iran’s regime is “trampling over fundamental human rights.”
A Swiss police officer looks through a binocular to monitor the area during the World Economic Forum 2023 in Davos, Switzerland.
Davos is back to being Davos in more ways than one. After two years of postponement due to the pandemic, and following a smaller, spring-ier version last May, the World Economic Forum is again booming. Organizers boast there are 2,700 leaders from both the public and private sectors in attendance from across at least 130 countries. And the weather feels like the Davos regular attendees remember: snowy, slippery streets, and sub-freezing temperatures.
But there are a few noticeable differences from years past. Thus far, only one leader of a G7 nation, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, is confirmed to attend. China’s Xi Jinping won’t be making the schlep to Switzerland, and neither will US President Joe Biden. By and large, the presence of big tech companies seems slightly subdued, and the word “crypto” isn’t being thrown around like rock salt on the streets this time. (Note: Apparently, actual rock salt is banned here – so you need to be Johnny Weir to cross the street.)
Nearly everyone we’ve talked to on the ground so far has found a way to slip the Forum’s central theme, “Cooperation in a Fragmented World,” into the conversation. That’s meant to conjure up public and private partnerships and the importance of multinational, multistakeholder approaches to what the WEF (and other big thinkers like Adam Tooze) have referred to as “the polycrisis,” a fancy geopolitical way of saying a ton of bad shit is happening to the world all at once.
There is another fragmentation on people’s minds beyond geopolitical divides: the widening inequality gap at a time when the cost of living continues to rise globally, and most indicators of human advancement and development have suffered serious setbacks over the last couple of years. Open questioning of the relevance of Davos, even over sips of free tea and coffee in lounges provided by the United Arab Emirates and India, is not uncommon.
On Monday, a headline from the Forum was a new “Chief Economists Outlook” report that found two-thirds of top economists believe there will be a global recession in 2023, and 91% expect weak or very weak growth for the U.S. this year.
Also, Oxfam released another side of the global story, called “Survival of the Richest,” detailing huge leaps in wealth made by the world’s richest people despite the economic downturn. A summary of the study stated, “During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together.”
Spoiler alert: The timing was not coincidental.
Can an elite gathering in the Swiss Alps produce meaningful solutions that put societies back on track toward progress? It’s only Day One, so we will keep you posted.
Follow GZERO Media on Instagram for our coverage of the sights and sounds of Davos 2023.
A member of the media and a Jersey City police officer watch the smoke from the remains of New York's World Trade Center pour from lower Manhattan as they stand a a media center established at the Liberty Scenic Center in Jersey City, New Jersey September 12, 2001.
My Motorola flip phone wasn't working. No signal, just those three piercing tones that indicate something is wrong.
Like everyone else in 2001, I had a landline phone in my New York City apartment and a dial-up modem connected to my laptop. Both proved to be a lifeline to the outside world as I watched the events unfold from inside my apartment.
At the time, I was fresh out of graduate school, freelancing as a reporter for an NPR program called On the Media. I contributed profiles of Broadway stars, a piece on the etymology of the word "diva" pegged to a VH1 concert series, and an interview about famous dogs on screen. All were captured on a Marantz cassette recorder that weighed nearly 10 pounds. I recently learned that those devices are described as "vintage" nowadays, should you want to buy one on eBay.
It was the summer of shark attacks and Chandra Levy. "Drops of Jupiter" and "Bootylicious" both played constantly on the Walkman sports radio I strapped to my arm for jogs around Central Park.
On September 10, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delivered a speech declaring that the greatest threat to US national security was Pentagon bureaucracy.
Less than 24 hours later, the world changed. Words like Kabul, Kandahar, and al-Qaeda would flood the airwaves.
Using that trusty dial-up modem, I blitzed my resume out to every TV station inbox I could find. Within a couple of days, I was working for MSNBC and a part of what was the biggest story of my lifetime.
As I think about the 20 years since, of course I remember first and foremost the people. The people I interviewed, like Paula Berry whose husband died in the South Tower that day; Alice Hoagland, mother of United flight 93 hero Mark Bingham; and also a little girl whose name I don't know, captured in a photo taken downtown after the towers fell. She was completely covered in dust, her tears creating streaks on her ghost-white face.
But I also think about the enormous changes in the media industry I've witnessed since, how technology and tools evolved at a breakneck pace almost immediately.
The goodwill and unity of the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks faded away in the subsequent months and years as we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no shortage of opinions spouted on cable news, but it was the voices emerging online that became increasingly important.
First came the blogs. As controversy and anger swirled around the 2003 invasion of Iraq, CBS News and its flagship anchor Dan Rather had begun an investigation into then President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The damning piece aired on television just weeks before the 2004 election. Within hours, a few emerging blog platforms (one whose name, I won't forget, was Little Green Footballs) dismantled the work and eventually the career of one of America's most established journalists. The fatal flaw? Rather and his team fell for fraudulent documents typed in a font that didn't exist in 1973.
Next came online video, and whole new world of storytelling. It's hard to believe that YouTube wasn't launched until 2005, and it's a challenge to remember life — or television reporting — without it. With the proliferation of these videos came an explosion of camera phones that captured broadcast quality images.
After I'd moved to CBS, as a producer for Evening News anchor Katie Couric, I covered the death of activist Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot in the streets of Tehran amid violent protests following the 2009 election in Iran. Neda's death was captured on cell phone video and shared throughout social media. Time magazine called it "probably the most widely witnessed death in human history," and the amateur images went on to win a prestigious journalism award.
By then social media itself, Twitter and Facebook primarily, were also in full bloom and became an ever-more important reporting tool. After launching a Twitter account for Katie Couric, one of the first US TV news anchors to have a presence there, I was accosted in the halls of CBS by Paul Friedman, then vice president of the venerated news division.
"It's beneath the anchor of the CBS Evening News to be on the Twitter," he said.
Katie felt otherwise, and apparently so did the rest of the world. Now it's a primary place for sharing and gathering information — for better or worse.
The uses of social media as both a tool and a weapon are obvious. It fueled the Arab Spring, but also became a recruiting ground for ISIS. Today, disinformation abounds — promulgated by state actors and individuals alike for personal or political gain. In this pandemic we've seen every conspiracy theory imaginable about vaccines, microchips, and even livestock medicine.
We've also seen videos of New Yorkers banging pots and pans at 7pm to cheer on healthcare workers, arias sung on a balcony in Florence as Italy confronted unimaginable suffering, and people pressing their noses against nursing home windows to come as close as was safe and feasible to their loved ones.
There was no social media on September 11, 2001, at least not as we now know it. Millions of us all watched together as Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and, yes, Dan Rather walked us though the stages of collective heartbreak.
If I had a Twitter account then, I would have shown you pictures from Ground Zero and clips of people I met as I roamed the streets booking guests for cable news. Maybe I'd become emotional after working a 14-hour day and quote a poem or show you a poster I found on 7th Avenue, a photo of a man with the words "Have you seen me?" written above.
But I'm glad we had only the tools we did on that day. Instead, I walked out into the street and hugged my friend Lea. My friends and neighbors all stood together on a pier in Riverside Park looking south. We gathered together in bars, often in silence, listening to the news.
The only blue light flickering was from the television screen, and all eyes were on it.
Tony Maciulis is Chief Content Officer at GZERO Media.
As the United Nations wraps two weeks of a (historic and unprecedented) 75th General Assembly, made almost entirely virtual due to the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, some clear themes and threads carried throughout, giving us a sense of what the next several years could look like for the organization. GZERO Media covered the world's largest diplomatic gathering extensively, receiving a great deal of access to delegates, world leaders, and policymakers.
In a wide-ranging interview with Ian Bremmer at this critical moment for the world and the UN, Secretary-General António Guterres spoke of the need for "inclusive multilateralism." Guterres defended the growing — and somewhat controversial — notion that multilateral organizations should be actively working with private corporations to solve some of the world's most pressing problems, such as climate change, bridging the digital divide, and cyber security.
"We need to adapt our multilateral institutions to be more inclusive," he said. "This is also an opportunity to change the power relations in relation to the different entities that we have in the international system, and to open up governments to recognize that they do not represent the monopole of political action."
On the macro theme of global coordination, we
learned from Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, about the early success of EU fiscal response — a rare glimmer of hope in a crisis otherwise lacking any true intergovernmental cooperation. Lagarde hopes that the example set by the 27 EU member states in agreeing on a $750 billion stimulus plan will inspire further multilateralism.
"At the global level I would hope that [the] international organizations that we have listened to... will come out of that hopefully stronger than they were when they went into the crisis," she said. "But the jury is out, we will see."
We also caught up with
Fabrizio Hochschild, a longtime UN insider who has been directly involved in a year-long survey asking people in 193 countries about what they want from his organization, and what issues will matter most to them in the future. Although he was optimistic about the future of the UN, Hochschild admitted that UNGA 2020 presented a challenge for the "contact sport" of diplomacy.
Normally, he explained, "there are literally thousands of bilateral meetings happening at any one time during the General Assembly. And it's done through a host of chance encounters. It's done over coffees, over drinks, and it's done at dinner parties and lunches. That's not something you can replicate easily virtually."
We also caught up with some delegates and thought leaders who were participating in UNGA from near and far, all of whom offered their take on the current state of global cooperation, and whether or not this moment will bolster support for the UN moving forward.
French Permanent Representative to the UN Nicolas de Rivièrediscouraged having an overly halcyon view of the earlier years of the organization, telling us that controversy and geopolitical battles have always surrounded the organization. But, he said, "we have no choice" but to continue to find ways to cooperate internationally.
De Rivière also addressed increasing isolation of the US within the Security Council, specifically discussing the widespread opposition to the recent US push to renew UN sanctions against Iran for alleged violations of the 2015 nuclear deal.
UN Ambassador
Kimihiro Ishikane of Japan talked about pandemic response, and how it has impacted the broader picture of US-China relations. Regarding a global fissure potentially caused by the world's two biggest economies, Ishikane said: "China is not like the former Soviet Union. Our system is completely intertwined and I don't think we can completely decouple our economy and neither is that desirable."
He also discussed the legacy of Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, who stepped down recently due to health complications, and described the road ahead for his country under its new leader, Yoshihide Suga.
Finally, if it weren't for the COVID-19 pandemic, climate action would have likely been the foremost topic of conversation at this year's UN General Assembly. Many delegates we spoke to had an optimistic view that the rebuilding necessary in the wake of the pandemic could lead to a strategy of "building back better" and greener around the world.
Mark Carney, former Governor of the Banks of Canada and England and who is now leading UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's COP26 effort, explained that large financial and tech companies are increasingly taking such a central role in climate action because the "doing well by doing good" model is pushing firms who have made net zero emissions commitments to top performance in their sectors.
"As companies have plans, it becomes more and more obvious what problems need to be solved, and what technologies need to go from uneconomic to economic," he said. "A problem [turns into] a huge opportunity if the world's doing what everyone's saying they're going to do, which is to go to net zero — and that is a powerful dynamic."
Colombian President
Iván Duque offered his insights on the current standing of Juan Guaidó, Venezuela's opposition leader and self-declared "interim president." Is he still the best hope for the country and its people?
Guaidó, Duque explained, is an expression of "pure democracy," but we should not expect him to defeat the Maduro regime on his own. Also, the Chavistas will need to be part of a transitional government that will take over when the current president leaves office.
You can see all of our coverage here.