If you follow geopolitics, you might have noticed that many of the world’s emerging markets are beset with fractious political dynamics, violence, protests, and any number of other tail risks that could at any time mushroom into black swan events with ramifications for the developed world.
Take Turkey, for instance, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on the PKK and determination to alter the constitution and consolidate power in his office have served to plunge the country into chaos and now, Ankara’s brazen move to shoot down a Russian fighter jet threatens to drag NATO into an armed conflict with the Russians.
Or have a look at Brazil, where an intractable political crisis and a nasty bout of stagflation have plunged Latin America’s most important economy into a veritable depression (yes, that’s right, a depression), and where the future looks even worse than the recent past.
And then there are less “consequential” nations that still have an outsized impact on how we see the world. Take Tunisia, which is supposed to be a beacon of hope for those who believe an Arab state can embrace secular governance. As we saw last week, extremists are determined to take every opportunity [7] to curtail progress, and thus demoralize those who point to the country as the antithesis of Libya and Egypt.
As we head into 2016, it’s worth taking stock of the geopolitical events that have shaped EM in 2015 and it's also worth cataloguing what we know about the landscape for the coming year. On that score, we present the following EM political heatmap from Barclays which tallies terrorist attacks, civil strife, protests, and elections across emerging economies. We would note that there are some rather glaring omissions (like the absence of a placeholder for the 1MDB protests in Malaysia which unfolded in August), but generally speaking, this is a decent summary and does a nice job of laying out important upcoming political events in 2016.
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The only real question, we suppose, is how many black circles they'll be on this map at this time next year...
