Shahzeb Khan
A new decade begins with the passing of 2019,
presenting us with opportunity to recount the
salient events of the last decade and draw important lessons. During the last ten years, the world saw further developments in an age of connectivity, impacting thoughts and shaping global events. Decade’s most remarkable lesson is how three initially unknown individuals, Edward Snowden, Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg (the last two while still children), became the global heroes, influencing thought and action the world over. The highly eventful 2010sstarted with a catastrophe, the Haiti earthquake, and ended with US President Donald Trump’s impeachment. In-between, there was a constant stream of major events and groundbreaking developments. The last decade could be judged, in many ways, to be a history-making period.
The year 2010 was in itself noteworthy. It kept the news busy with calamities like the Haiti earthquake, the BP oil spill, the Iceland volcanic eruption, and a series of extreme weather events, including unprecedented wildfires in Russia and floods in Pakistan, signalling climate change. Movements in the West such as Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party set the stage for social discord throughout the decade. In 2011, America declared that it killed Osama Bin Laden, and an ‘Arab Spring’ started pro-democracy revolutions across the Arab world, raising hopes that were subsequently dashed as the Arab Spring led to instability and violence lasting through the decade. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan were huge disasters. A tragic mass shooting in Norway ignited fear of the rise of Western terrorism. 2012 was another eventful year. Anti-American protests broke out across the Muslim world in September, perhaps showing where the Arab Spring spirit ended up. “Superstorm” Sandy ravaged the US just before the presidential election, another strong sign of climate change. The horrific Sandy Hook school shooting galvanized the gun violence debate in the US. Pakistani teen activist Malala Yousafzai was injured in an assassination attempt, causing international outrage that transformed Malala into iconic global activist for girls’ education. In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings in the US heralded the high occurrence of terrorism during the rest of the decade. The whistle blown by Edward Snowden ignited intra-West tensions over US’ global surveillance tactics.
2014 saw Russia annex the Crimean Peninsula and support the separatist uprising in Ukraine, causing NATO to revert to old style war-mongering in Europe. ISIS rose in the Middle East and started taking territory in Syria and Iraq, creating a huge refugee crisis that sparked backlash in the West against immigration. An Ebola outbreak in West Africa highlighted the risk of global pandemic. 2015 brought two severe terrorist attacks to France. Countries around the world finally signed a deal to tackle climate change at the Paris Summit. Billionaire Donald Trump started his run for President of the US on a radical right-wing platform, beginning the Trump era, one of the most turbulent periods in recent American history.
In 2016, the hotly contested US presidential election subsequently turned out to be extremely divisive. More major terror attacks by Muslims struck the West, contributing to the anti-Muslim sentiment that Trump fostered. Trump’s electoral victory sparked huge protests in America. Britain voted to leave the European Union amidst great controversy. In 2017, Trump’s presidency began to be marred by controversy after controversy while America polarized further. The Atlantic hurricane season was highly destructive and badly affected America, highlighting climate change, again. The #MeToo movement spread across the world and caused a fundamental shift in social attitudes. In 2018, a school shooting in the US started a persistent and determined campaign for gun control called Never Again MSD. China and the US engaged in trade war with serious international political and economic repercussions. A global grassroots protest movement for action against climate change, led by Greta Thunberg, sprang up near the end of the year.
2019 was even more eventful. The Democratic Party swung far to the left in response to Trump as the 2020 US election race began. Trump’s controversial behaviour finally culminated in an impeachment trial and a vote to formally impeach him. The Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand highlighted the new global threat, Western terrorism. Protests in Hong Kong broke out against Beijing. Tension over India’s control of Kashmir within India and with Pakistan rose, as did peril of nuclear war. Throughout 2019, the worldwide climate protest movement gained momentum, bringing climate change to the forefront of the world’s attention. It has been a turbulent decade, leaving us with grim curiosity for what the decade ahead will bring as the entrenched issues of the 2010s move into 2020s. Two developments of 2019 may in particular set the stage for the next ten years, the US election race and the climate movement.
Whether Trump gets removed or not and whether the Republicans or Democrats win the election, the political polarization begun in America in 2016 could advance further and impact the wider world. Just witness how socially radical both the Trump phenomenon and the 2020 Democrats are. The conflict between them will be bitter and could deeply influence the future. Climate change and the protests against it have taken the world by storm. Climate Movement is bound to get stronger throughout the 2020s. Governments and societies will feel great pressure to take action. The opposition to action will also grow. Climate struggle will thus take centre-stage in the next decade. Challenging and transformative times lie ahead for us. It is up to us to define how the world will change. In the age of connectivity, each and every one of us has the opportunity to make a difference and influence the world. We can’t be certain of where the upcoming decade will take us. But as management expert Peter Drucker stated, “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. That is within the power of all of us. Happy New Year, cheers to a new decade!
—The writer is Director at Pakistan’s People Led Disaster Management.
