Where the state cannot price security: Conflict, crime, corruption, and terrorism under the global polycrisis. Evidence through 2025. The century file is a birth map, not a battle-death forecast.

This report argues that conflict, crime, corruption, and terrorism should not be read as a single global trend but as different expressions of a deeper institutional divide: whether a society can still post and enforce a public "security price." It introduces a two-cell framework consisting of an order cell, where security is provided through state institutions, budgets, and courts, and a predation cell, where armed actors, gangs, militias, or corrupt networks replace the state as the effective provider and collector of security. The central claim is that the contemporary polycrisis does not raise all forms of disorder equally. Instead, it sorts societies according to institutional capacity, producing different patterns of violence, corruption, and instability across regions.Drawing on evidence through 2025, the report shows that record conflict counts, concentrated terrorism in the Sahel, persistent homicide hotspots, entrenched corruption, and accelerating autocratization do not represent a common wave of global violence. Rather, each reflects the condition of the local security publisher. High-capacity states increasingly experience disorder through interstate war, rearmament pressures, cyber-enabled fraud, and institutional erosion, while weaker states experience territorial crime, insurgency, corruption, displacement, and armed predation. The report argues that climate stress, debt burdens, demographic growth, and food insecurity act primarily as multipliers of existing institutional weakness, not as independent causes of violence.The analysis further contends that the twenty-first century's most important security question is demographic rather than military: where future population growth will occur relative to institutional capacity. With Africa and Southern Asia projected to account for an increasing share of the world's population, the report proposes a "birth map" framework that highlights where future security pressures may accumulate. It concludes that understanding global disorder requires distinguishing between order cells and predation cells rather than averaging violence into a single global measure. The decisive variable is not the volume of conflict alone, but who controls the security price and whether that authority remains publicly accountable.