A crucial difference between previous years and our own time is that in our Anthropocene era, as the present era is now being called, the growing impacts of human interactions, the outputs of human industry and all our other activities are affecting Earth’s environment and climate.

Routinely, now, we observe record-smashing, trendline-accelerating global temperatures – especially in the oceans. We measure rising sea levels, record melting ice caps, note dramatic changes in global weather patterns and recognise the effects of these trends in massive summer forest fires that spread across whole regions. People are experiencing increasingly intense flooding and other severe weather exacerbated by humanity-provoked climate change, even as many still insist on living on floodplains and threatened seashores.

The year AI changed the world

Big implications of artificial intelligence (AI) in tandem with the Internet of Things, globally connected networks and a shift to electric vehicles (EVs) came into clear focus in 2023. There were two major labour strikes in America with global impacts. Both focused on the effects of AI and automation, the first one in the massive American entertainment sector and the second on the shift to EV manufacturing in the American automobile sector.

For thousands of entertainment sector workers, the question is whether AI will replace actual human actors and writers. In the automobile sector, the question of job security is linked to the manufacturing of EVs. Because such vehicles are simpler to manufacture than internal combustion ones, here, too, fewer workers will be needed in future.

Billionaire Elon Musk. (Photo: Maja Hitij / Getty Images)

Further, the knock-on effects on supply chains for the essential rare earth elements used in battery manufacture – versus the heretofore dominant petroleum sector – are already becoming important international relations and trade questions.

Some are already arguing that developments in the past year have brought us closer to a “singularity” moment – that is, when the networked machines have independent decision-making powers and capabilities – and, crucially, the ability to enforce such decisions upon humans.

Further, the accelerating capabilities and utilisation of electronic warfare (increasingly demonstrated in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine) are adding an even more unnerving possibility – and that is a growing debate about the employment of AI-powered, autonomous military equipment capable of making decisions. Despite his pre-teen-style temper tantrums, Elon Musk’s great fear about the future and the singularity may not be entirely without merit.

The world at war

Women walk along a dyke protecting internally displaced persons from further flooding on 28 November in Bentiu, South Sudan. (Photo: Luke Dray / Getty Images)

Independent of the planet’s physical crisis, 2023 has been the scene of widely reported conflicts with vast human suffering, although others at least as horrific receive scant media attention. 

The Swedish University of Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, which has been tracking wars globally since 1945, identified 2022 and 2023 as the years with the most conflict in the world since the end of the Cold War.

Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Starting with the ones rarely breaking into daily news feeds or television broadcasts, in Africa the return of a resilient guerrilla insurgent group, M23 (significantly supported by Rwanda), in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has revived its reign of terror and destruction. Beyond killing sprees, it has driven hundreds of thousands of Congolese on frantic journeys to flee the fighting. Realistically, no end to this conflict is in sight and any peacekeeping efforts in the area are virtually unengaged.

Sudan

Meanwhile, a few hundred kilometres northeast, civil conflict erupted in Sudan in 2023 between the government’s official military and the so-called Rapid Support Forces. Between them, they are turning the country’s capital into a charnel house and the fighting is generating waves of refugees fleeing Khartoum into an inhospitable countryside, and spilling over into neighbouring nations.

Britons board a plane during the evacuation from Wadi Seidna Air Base on 28 April in Omdurman, Sudan, following an outbreak of violence between warring factions. (Photo: MoD Crown Copyright via Getty Images)

Even as this has been happening, another wave of brutality against the people of the Darfur region is generating more killing and further waves of refugees, similarly seeking safety in neighbouring states, even as such nations can barely provide any help. Humanitarian crises in Sudan are now inevitable.

Nevertheless, we barely see reporting of these conflicts and their rapidly escalating death tolls, perhaps because reporting from such combat zones is dangerous and difficult.

The Sahel and Nigeria

An accelerating wave of civil wars, insurrections, competing military factions and coups across the Sahel, as well as the continuing hostage-taking of hundreds of civilians in northern Nigeria reinforces a view that much of Africa is part of a so-called “arc of instability”.

Ukraine

In 2023, the conflict that arose out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the previous year has continued without let-up – and with growing ferocity. The fighting also means Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and deaths among civilians continue to rise, even as the conflict results in growing army casualties and the destruction of military materiel. Almost incidentally, this conflict has also given the world vivid glimpses into how social media disinformation and cyber warfare campaigns are changing the nature of armed conflict and the way we interpret events.

The Russian economy increasingly feels the pain of its leader’s misadventure, even as Western nations are struggling to meet Ukraine’s desperate needs for its resistance against an invader.

In the US, support for the appropriation of Ukrainian aid remains the subject of congressional wrangling, as does aid to Israel and heightened border control.

The Ukrainian war continues to tempt fate with the possibilities of fighting that may spill over into yet other nations. In 2024, that may depend on Vladimir Putin’s desperation to bring the fighting to a favourable conclusion for Russia. Already, this conflict has become the largest land war in Europe since 1945.

Israel/Palestine

Israeli soldiers wait next to their tanks at a gathering site near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on 3 December 2023. (Photo: Atef Safadi / EPA-EFE)

Since the first week of October, the latest eruption of conflict in the Middle East – in one of the most violent versions of the long-running trouble in many years – is taking place between Hamas and Israel.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War

Missile launches from Gaza and a surprise cross-border attack by Hamas that killed about 1,200 people inside Israeli territory as well as the kidnapping of more than 250 people – from small children to the elderly – provoked a vicious attack on Gaza through a major aerial bombardment and attacks by ground forces in retribution. This has been undertaken, even if the Benjamin Netanyahu government in Israel has no real sense of what will happen once this fighting ends. According to Gaza Health Ministry figures, more than 17,000 Palestinians have been killed.

A Palestinian woman crosses an empty street during a general strike in the West Bank city of Nablus on 11 December 2023. Palestinian activists and grassroots organisations called for a global protest on that day to demand an immediate ceasefire amid the ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict in Gaza. The strike was a show of solidarity with Palestinians who are enduring relentless Israeli attacks. (Photo: Alaa Badarneh / EPA-EFE)

Israel aims to destroy Hamas as an effective fighting force, recover the hostages and enforce new power arrangements in Gaza, but it has already exacted a massive cost on the people there even as it has not yet succeeded in its objectives – and has, in turn, provoked furious global criticism. Here, too, there exists the dangerous possibility of a major escalation in the fighting, with the involvement of Hezbollah forces to the north and even that group’s sponsor, Iran.

As with the Ukraine war, escalation is a real possibility.

Elections

Looking forward to 2024, more than 70 nations are scheduled to have elections – including, of course, South Africa, the US, India, Indonesia and Russia (although the latter’s results are already known).

Meanwhile, repression of women in countries such as Iran remains in place and ethnic repression in China, Myanmar and elsewhere is still a constant.

Further, with right-wing victories by Javier Milei in Argentina and Giorgia Meloni in Italy (at the end of 2022), and a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, coupled with sluggish economic growth a likely reality for many nations (including China), the success of the democratic model will remain under threat globally for 2024. Not a happy thought on which to end the year. DM