[Reflecting on the recent tumult of Trump’s visit to Davos, I have concluded that global activism is in a state of deep malaise. Trumpism has exposed its over-reliance on discourse management. As discourses splinter at the seams, salvation lies in a new mode of conversation in which we are comfortable, hopefully in a less chaotic way, of blending narratives from politics and insights from policy to tackle complex problems.]
Introduction: The Ride to Davos
I was still hours out when Trump took to the stage to ruffle the Davos Set.
The chaotic flurry of conversations in elite WhatsApp groups I monitor contrasted vividly with the passive vistas framing the peaceful road from Zurich to Davos.
I wondered where the protesters were. I distinctly recall their ranks being much thicker and their voices far louder a decade ago when I used to frequent this spa town perched like a gem in the crown of the Swiss Alps (“highest town in Europe”, as they like to brag).
This week, the activist crowds have been few and far between. Where are they now: the massed forces that used to turn every G7 and WTO confab into siege warfare and molotov cocktail parties?
It made me think about what Alfred Zimmern and Inessa Armand, revolutionaries and radical-liberals of bygone eras rumoured to have loved the healing freshness of the Davos climate, would have made of the contrast.
Both Zimmern’s internationalist and Inessa’s proletarian instincts might have bristled at this final victory of the billionaire class. But I reckon that the forceful intrusion of geopolitics into international capitalist intrigues would have made for a spicier dinner conversation on the Talstrasse for the two thinkers than the fickleness of activism.
Though one came from Marxism and the other from Liberal internationalism, a Zimmern-Armand lens on Foreign affairs would definitely have been more interesting than mainstream views in contemporary times.
For most of our generation, foreign affairs used to be a kind of theatre with a remarkably stable cast.
There were diplomats who spoke in polished abstractions, journalists who specialized in “the world,” analysts who translated crises into doctrine, and a small audience trained to treat geopolitics as a chessboard. In places like Davos, these strands came together neatly like brush-strokes in a renaissance painting, sublimely tame.
For most citizens, international relations arrived as a finished product: the state, apparently coherent, making moves against other states, apparently coherent.
What the Trumpian interruption has been trying to get across is that this coherence was never fully real.
The helpful delusion of coherent wrappers
It was an accomplishment produced by institutions that wrapped messy domestic disputes inside grand banners. National interest. Containment. Non-alignment. Liberal order. The sort of brushstrokes that made art so amenable to aristocrats until the fauvists showed up.
Even when domestic politics was chaotic, foreign policy could still be trusted by the middle and upper middle classes to look curated, condensed, and dignified.
But we now live under a different condition: the compression of time and distance, which we have known about for a while now, and also of discourses.
Long before social media became a political fact, theorists of modernity described the way capitalism and technology compress space and time. They illuminated how distances shrink, cycles accelerate, and institutions struggle to keep pace.
David Harvey’s “time-space compression” language captured a sharp structural shift: what used to be far away is suddenly near, what used to take months now takes minutes. Hartmut Rosa later described modernity itself as an “acceleration society,” in which technological speedups, faster social change, and intensified pace of life interact to reshape politics and ethics.
In international affairs, the consequences are more radical than we have admitted. Because discourses that used to belong to different orders have been collided on purpose. Compression has shattered the old wrapper. A wrapper of a very peculiar design and constitution.
When diplomacy and global news were slower, the state could afford closure. A political crisis could be framed, negotiated, communicated, and, crucially, packaged as resolved even if its policy innards remained unfinished.
Today, policy non-closure is no longer private. Loose ends do not stay loose in one jurisdiction. They spill. Across borders, across platforms, across activist networks, and back into domestic politics at high frequency. Political bandages tear before they set. Diaspora Christian Activists from Nigeria in America suddenly interpenetrate fringe discourses in Nigeria and political-elite proceedings in the American Congress. And, before long, the old foreign affairs set watch totally stunned as missiles fly and screwdriver salesmen appear in the pages of the New York Times as objects of elite stupefaction.
All shapes shifts at will
This is the Age of Proteus: an era in which the strategic identity of states becomes shape-shifting, improvisational, and persistently contested. All because the internal tensions of governance are now overexposed to the world.
Media transformations are central to this unwrapping. The old foreign affairs ecosystem was not just about information; it was also about form. Gatekeeping and editorial hierarchies did far more than merely select stories. They stabilized narratives. Even the “CNN effect” literature, which debated whether real-time coverage could force policy responses, assumed a media environment with recognizable intermediaries and a shared agenda-construction rules.
Now gatekeeping itself has weakened. Attention is allocated through hybrid systems across platforms, algorithms, influencer networks, and direct-to-audience political communication. The result has been overanalysed as “polarization”. The more interesting frame is that it has led to the collapse of a single, coherent, wrapper that made foreign affairs legible as a state-to-state contest.
In a network society, power is exercised through communication infrastructures as much as through formal institutions. Manuel Castells argued that communication networks reorganize power and counter-power, enabling new forms of mobilization and new vulnerabilities. Under such conditions, the state’s foreign policy persona cannot be maintained as a unified mask if domestic policy conflicts are constantly breaking through in full view.
The Trump Disruption
The Trump phenomenon, whatever one thinks of it morally, can be read as an extreme expression of Protean politics. The full optimisation and maximisation of proteanism. It is not only a matter of populism or ideology. It is the culmination of a world in which the four poles of international politics, international policy, domestic politics, and domestic policy are forced into collision without adequate time for packaging and closure. A world in which once wrapped essences are suddenly in a mad combustible dance with each other.
In the past, even in the recent past, politicians aggregated structured and coherent frames within digestible wrappers. And with such smoothness they sought to convince voters that they had everything important figured out. Meanwhile, away from the soapboxes, wonks of a thousand shades hammered the messy policy shards into something far less smooth but nonetheless manageable.
Mr. Trump has upended all that. Domestic politics, international policy, domestic policy, and international politics all burst out of their wrappers into his mighty cauldron from which his brew of demands and proclamations, boasts and grievances, issue forth in jarring streams. Those weaned on the old broth of managed variety find themselves buried under sheer confusion.
Consider the signature Trumpian move in foreign affairs: withdrawal. It is a politics of rupture that treats agreements as props in a domestic identity contest. Analysts like Richard Haass have described this as a “withdrawal doctrine,” a systematic skepticism toward multilateral commitments. Whether the target is climate institutions or other international bodies, withdrawal functions as a public demonstration that the state is not bound by the old wrapper of global managerialism.
This is why the disintegration of “strategic identity” feels so visceral. In earlier eras, citizens could disagree intensely about domestic policy while still believing the state had a coherent external strategy and purpose (even if they passionately disagreed with it). The wrapper allowed that separation. In the Age of Proteus, separation collapses. Foreign affairs become another arena of domestic performance, amplified instantly, contested continuously, and revised without the slow rituals that once produced coherence.
Greenland/arctic, tariffs, UN reform, “spheres of influence”, these are all deep and broad and contested policy domains that used to be neatly organised separately from political speech about America’s role in the world.
It is really not that Mr. Trump is inventing anything new in his hardball performances. Even some of his wildest sounding ideas have some lineage in American strategic thinking. The first serious American offer to buy Greenland was in 1867. The first sustained American efforts to withdraw from UN institutions occurred during the Bricker hysteria in the early 1950s, as Alexander Uhl helpfully elucidates.
What is new and terrifying is that he is forcing discourses from the world of policy into the world of politics, from the world of international debate into the homefront, and in a way that no other American President of the modern era has done before. His is a variant of what I call Katanomics, a phenomenon in which the policy – politics bridge is not merely fractured but violently combusted.
Global activism is experiencing its own Protean crisis.
For decades, activists could build movements around monolithic targets: “globalization,” “militarism,” “neoliberalism,” “corporate power.” Those banners worked because they were legible and digestible. They were near-perfect for coalition-building across borders. But connective action in the digital age has changed the organizational substrate of movements, enabling large-scale mobilization through personalized participation and looser institutional control. This can scale quickly, as manifested, for instance, by synchronous global WhatsApp outrage. But it can also fragment quickly.
Zeynep Tufekci’s work on networked protest captured the contradiction in a neat paradox: digital tools can mobilize crowds rapidly, but movements often struggle to convert visibility into institutional leverage, strategic coherence, and durable negotiating capacity.
I want to suggest in this essay that, under Protean conditions, the target itself is unstable. What looks morally simple – “ban plastic,” “cancel debt,” “stop war”, “don’t touch Greenland,” “don’t mention Iceland” – disaggregates into multiple policy surfaces, each activating different stakeholders, legal constraints, and economic trade-offs. Coalitions splinter quickly along those fault lines. The policy details, across domestic and international lines, mixed into the political slurry, combusts and pulverises smooth coalitions.
The End of Convenience
The result does not spell the end of activism, I must hasten to add. What I am observing, instead, is the end of an older activist convenience: the ability to treat global politics as a contest against singular villains. The rails of attack become slippery because the object of attack is no longer a single object; it is an ecosystem. Even a force that seems made for old-world concentration of activist ire like Trump no longer serve as the lightening rod for mass activation.
Meanwhile, states and corporations learn to survive by shifting forms – meeting one demand symbolically, rerouting another into a separate technocratic process, conceding on one surface while entrenching on another.
If the Age of Proteus is real, the implication is sobering: international affairs will not become coherent again simply by restoring better leaders or better messaging. Coherence was historically produced by wrapping institutions that required time, distance, and discourse gatekeeping to function. Compression across every layer has now reached a critical threshold and gravely weakened each of them.
The Katanomic International Affairs paradigm
As a domestic activist, I coined the term “Katanomics” to discuss a related phenomenon at country level, whereby policy and politics behave like water and oil. Overtime I came to realise that international political activists, like debt relief campaigners in Europe, and domestic policy activists, like myself and others, had fiercely divergent views about what was required to ensure fiscal progress in African countries like mine.
The aggregative frames of international politics that enabled cohesive global debt relief movements to form led to demands and recommendations that seemed ill at ease with the disaggregative realities of domestic governance. Policy Activists at home saw a thousand opportunities to sustainably fix problems through governance reforms. International political activists abroad coalesced around a few global moves that could spin the needle of genuine international action on debt relief.
This was a tolerable Katanomic-international order until compression brought many different pieces into contact. The global activist movement that had successfully delivered HIPC and MDRI (though, of course, they had hoped for more) tried to galvanise another round of momentum for debt relief. But it soon became clear that things have changed. Flux now dominates. The kaleidoscope that offered smooth transitions from policy to politics and from domestic to international had shattered and scrambled the imagery.
The Age of Proteus throws the settled choreography of politics’ dance with policy into a frenzied mayhem on the stage of foreign affairs, in a theatre of confusion full of grotesque domestic props. When you try to hold down the plot, you miss the point. The message shape-shifts to deny you a ready punchline.
Each act collided into the next when the new performers, like Mr. Trump, are on the stage. We cannot catch our breath much less respond in concert. But the theatre of international affairs does not allow us to walk out. And therein lies the gravest risk: the audience has now scrambled onto the stage. A free-for-all pandemonium threatens to drown every seedling of organised response.
Conclusion: let’s embrace a new form of discourse
But there is also an opportunity. If we accept that coherence is a packaging achievement, we can build new forms of packaging that do not depend on old discourse-monopolies. States can invest in institutional closure: transparent, credible mechanisms for tackling policy complexities rather than endlessly deferring it. Canada’s Carney seems to have grasped the moment in his Davos speech with talk of differentiated but contained responses (even if his “middle powers” proposition is naïve about what really aligns, say, Turkey, with, say, Australia).
Movements can innovate “wrapping substitutes”: frames that survive disaggregation by explicitly acknowledging trade-offs and sequencing demands across policy surfaces.
And analysts can stop pretending that foreign affairs is chess when it increasingly behaves like dance marathons under constant public scrutiny.
Proteus, in mythology, could not be defeated by argument. He could only be held firmly for long enough until he stopped changing shape and told the truth. Such patience and endurance, however, require a certain honest pragmatism about shedding false consensuses and focusing on holding down a particular opportunity to collaborate across domestic and international lines. To enable such collaboration until the politics and policy innards of each particular opportunity has crystallised, however, may require a new form of discourse. One that traverses policy and politics without all the theatrical chaos. We need this kind of new discourse whether the opportunity on the horizon is AI or global minimum taxation.
The old activist approach of overwhelming consensus on a simplified frame which drives momentum to override domestic policy complexities simply won’t work anymore. The failed plastic treaty makes that fact very clear. We need to aggregate from domestic level upwards, stitching each strand of policy clarity to the next stage of political simplification.
That may be the political task of our time: to hold our systems long enough, through institutions built for acceleration, to finally force a series of coherent frames out of the perpetual motion of contestation.