Part 2 for RandomWriterGuy (Conflicts, Democracy, Human Rights, Major Global Issues)
I'm wondering if you can cover the geopolitics, international relations between countries, major global issues, conflicts, poverty, democracy and human rights, the economy and population growth of the world.
In this world, most
conflicts have become more about economics and competition for diplomatic, political and social influence than the armed conflicts of times past, namely because modern technology makes it rather harder to attack another nation with a competent set of armed forces - better anti-aircraft missiles, advancement of radar systems and modern fighter and AWACS aircraft make air attacks harder even for the most advanced armed forces, while AIP-equipped submarines, fast-attack craft and anti-ship missiles make attacking from coasts harder and even heavily-armed and armored land forces can frequently find themselves faced with enemies armed with lots of anti-tank missiles, attack helicopters and better artillery which would make such attacks far harder and far more costly. In a very real sense, war is too expensive for nearly everyone to contemplate against other nations, regardless of the differences between them. This has in some parts of the world pushed for lots of unconventional armed forces like special forces units, and on the darker side some acts of supporting terrorism or even organized crime in an attempted to undermine a rival. The terrorism problem is most common in the Middle East from India to Morocco as well as in Central Asia and some parts of Southern Europe. Many of the more infamous terrorist groups of Europe - the Provisional IRA, Ulster Volunteer Force, Red Brigades, Red Army Faction, ETA, Action Directe - ceased to exist as a result of the end of communism, agreements in nations involved or both in the 1980s and 1990s. The first generation of Middle Eastern terrorist groups (Palestine Liberation Organization, Abu Nidal, Black September, PFLP) largely faded after the Ottawa Treaty and the Independence of Palestine in 1981 and second-generation Islamic terrorist organizations have in most cases faced similar fates - al-Qaeda largely faded into irrelevance after its top leadership was decapitated in the 2000s, while others such as the Taliban, Abu Sayyaf, Boko Haram, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani Network were wrecked by both campaigns against terror in their respective nations and by political agreements. The Tamil Tigers were finally defeated in 2007, though it took massive pressure from India to get Sri Lanka to begin reducing discrimination against Tamils in the years after that, and Israel's dismantling of Kach in the late 1980s (that coming after an amendment to Israel's constitution in 1986 with the specific goal of combating Jewish extremists) earned them a sizable amount of goodwill from its neighbors. The Americas have also seen economic prosperity and better government largely made groups like FARC, Shining Path and MS-13 less relevant in modern times. Terrorism remains an issue in the Middle East and many portions of North Africa and Central Asia.
Outside the terrorist / criminal element, one active way many nations have been striving to add to their power is in movements to support poorer nations and respond to disaster relief. Numerous air forces have developed dedicated disaster relief units and have sizable amounts of airlift capacities. The intervention by Canada in Rwandan Genocide in the summer of 1994 is seen by many as where the idea of humanitarian intervention was born, and many of the world's non-aligned nations and the better-regarded nations among both East and West pride themselves with their abilities to help those less fortunate in times of crisis. The Europeans have found themselves struggling in many areas in competition for allies in the less-developed world - India, Russia, Canada, Australia, Iran, Brazil, Argentina and the United States have had better luck in Africa, as many Africans still harbor memories of colonial exploitation - but other nations in the West have proven themselves more able to build goodwill in the less-developed world. The BRIICSA nations bloc, which began to serious coalesce into a forum for power and influence in the early 2000s, ultimately seek to provide an alternative to Western social, political and economic hegemony. As the two sides are ultimately intertwined with one another economically and prosperity has tended to trump many elements of geopolitics, the conflicts have proven to be more ideological and in peaceful pursuits than in armed actions, though many nations do retain a powerful armed deterrent in case of an unlikely of conflicts, as most among the nations feel that if there ever was to be a conflict to break out, it would be a truly massive one.
Democracy has become the dominant form of government operation in the world, though the local conditions and traditions influence many elements of democratic government in many nations in the world. While all modern democratic societies are universal-suffrage ones - South Africa's infamous system of apartheid which crumbled in the 1980s and 1990s was one of the last vestiges of democratic systems that did not include voices for all - where the nations stand on a spectrum of democratic nations varies from nation to nation. While countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Israel and Iran have legal political parties that promote ethnocentrism, in modern times few pay attention to such groups. What also proves different is that many unitary states prove to have very different politics than federal ones, and countries with far more central command and control of the nations involved like South Korea, Turkey and Singapore contrast with more libertarian nations like Russia and many of the former Soviet Republics, as well as federal states with massive and explicit separations of powers and responsibilities like the United States, Canada and Australia. Nations like Italy, Israel, New Zealand and Japan which use proportional representation (and countries with multi-faction political alliances like Canada, Australia, Iran, Germany, Greece and the Philippines) muddy the waters that much further.
Beyond these differences, most of the democratic world follows some form of a demand to advance all of the peoples of an individual society, and this makes for many nations having wide social welfare nets (though how wide varies by nation) and multi-aspect trade agreements, and most nations in the world in modern times loudly promote education as a way forward for people, though what direction this education takes depends on the nation in question. It is not unusual in some nations to have a single party dominate politics for many years (Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, which led Japan for all but seven years between 1947 and 2012, is one of the most extreme examples of this, but Japan's political system despite this domination is fairly good by global standards), this is usually not a result of political problems in most democratic nations.
Outside of this, the Human Rights Treaty of 2033, proposed by Canada and the United States to the United Nations, proved just how far
human rights have come in most of the world. The Treaty proposed would require members of the United Nations to protect a series of "fundamental freedoms", including freedoms of conscience, religion, belief, thought and peaceful expression, peaceful assembly and association and freedom of the press. The Treaty also required protection against discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, ethnic background and sexual orientation, and had a number of legal rights including those of life, liberty and security of person and rights against unreasonable search and/or seizure, arbitrary detention, legal counsel and habeus corpus, self-incrimination, any form of cruel or unusual punishment and the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. To most of the developed world of 2033, this was already a widespread reality, and even many nations of the developed world, particularly ones with dark pasts like Argentina, Russia, Iran and South Africa, were by this point pushed by their populaces and elements of their governments to expand the rights of individuals. (This didn't always work out perfectly, but it did result in a steady improvement in the rights of both majority and minority populations in most cases.) The most common differences in human rights in many places are based on differences over policies of racial equality and LGBT rights, but even those have started to decay as time moves on, even in nations once known for serious difficulties in these regards.
Major Global Issues in modern times primarily relate to the free movement of people, goods and capital in the world and the problems that global issues with regards to resource development and supply and climate change present. The fact that climate change has made for more-common examples of extreme weather has not gone unnoticed, as has the fact that climate change ultimately caused a vast growth in rainfall in many areas of the world, adding to the extreme weather difficulties in some areas of the planet. The advancement of technology and the enormous drop in carbon emissions from industry and substantial falls of carbon emissions from transportation has largely leveled off the changes in the climate of Earth that began to be seen in the 1970s, but the first half of the 21st Century in many parts of the world has seen many nations struggle to deal with the problems climate change has presented them with - from serious problems with regular flooding in the densely-populated Ganges River Delta in India to increasingly-powerful Typhoons and Hurricanes menacing parts of Asia and the Caribbean to major flooding issues in Australia, Brazil and North Africa to the United States having to move a city of two and a half million people to accommodate an endoheric basin's growth from additional rainfall - but the result of the greater rainfall in much of the world has included a massive growth of food production in some parts of the world (the American West, Patagonia, sub-Saharan Africa, southern and western Australia, North Africa, northern India, Iran and the Iberian peninsula being major beneficiaries of this) and the fact that water concerns in much of the world began to subside in the 2020s as a result of this and better food production made sure many in the world felt that climate change had both upsides and downsides. In modern times, many fossil fuel operations have to contend with massive changes in government regulations resulting from climate change as well as in many cases problems with product demand, which has caused huge diversification for many of these - Royal Dutch Shell, for example, by the 2030s had major synthetic fuel divisions, spent billions every year on the development of alternative energy development, operated a major nuclear operations division (which provided a complete nuclear fuel cycle from mining uranium and thorium to reprocessing waste) and operated huge chemicals and recycling divisions. Climate change also led to growing demands among populations for environmental protection, which led to a strengthening of many environmental regulations (especially those related to air and water pollution and contaminated land) in a process that largely began in the late 2010s and continues to the present day.
Resource exploitation, particularly that of fossil fuels, rare earth minerals and rarer metals like tin and antimony, was the other problem of the 21st Century. Rare Earth Metal usage had grown massively to deal with the advancement of computer and imaging technologies, and while the development of solid-state computer memories and better electric motors that did not require rare earth minerals did ultimately reduce demand somewhat, it was still a serious issues that was dealt with in most cases in increasingly-innovative ways, with supplies from space and nuclear reprocessing proving to be more and more economically viable. While there was lots of fossil fuels in the world, climate change and the growing use of vehicles powered by biofuels, hydrogen and electricity and the improvement of vehicle efficiency, as well as the growing popularity of electrically-powered rail systems reducing the demand for both air travel and truck transport of goods, the needs of oil producers slumped, a fact that caught some nations unawares but which many others were ready for. The production of natural gas and methane for fuel from calthrate deposits had come of age in the 2010s and 2020s, but the serious problems that accidents could cause there meant these companies were often regulated as heavily as any.
Energy is in this world a place where many make names for themselves. From the birth of commercial nuclear fusion in southern Ohio in May 2040 to the development of all kinds of environmentally-friendly sources of energy - Wind turbines, solar cells and solar thermal power stations, geothermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, tidal power stations and space-based solar power - and the massive advancement of power from nuclear fission (and the constantly-improving safety and efficiency of nuclear reactors), there is more ways than ever to harness energy for man's pursuits, and this has contributed when combined with the growing material prosperity and robotics and artificial intelligence into people having more time to pursue leisure pursuits and more money to pursue them. This has proven to be a major source of energy usage both for pursuits themselves and for travel and transport. Space tourism, which first began to grow in the 2010s, was by 2040 becoming a major business, as the single-stage to orbit spacecraft of the 2020s and 2030s made the development of such space tourism far more accessible, and the first complete space stations for commercial use are expected to be complete and in operation by 2050.
