We Are Living in the Interregnum

I’ve been thinking lately about a word I came across again recently. It comes from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker who wrote from a prison cell in the 1930s while trying to make sense of a world in upheaval. He called it the interregnum: the time between one order and the next, when the old world is dying but the new one hasn’t arrived yet. He said this is when the strange symptoms appear. When things feel off in ways that are hard to name.

Gramsci wrote from a prison cell because Mussolini's government had put him there. He had been one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and the regime considered him dangerous enough to lock away for eleven years. The prosecutor at his trial reportedly said: we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years. They could not stop him because he kept writing.

That word has been following me. I think it describes exactly where we are, and I suspect many of you feel it too. A kind of unease that isn’t quite panic. The sense that the ground has shifted even when your daily life looks more or less the same. That feeling is real. It deserves to be taken seriously.

Look at what has happened. Peace negotiations over Ukraine have continued through early 2026 with no breakthrough. European defence spending hit a record €381 billion in 2025, and NATO allies have now committed to spending 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. The United States, for the first time in living memory, is a source of uncertainty for its closest allies rather than a source of reassurance. And in January 2026, UN Secretary-General Guterres sent a letter to all 193 member states warning that the United Nations faces imminent financial collapse. Outstanding dues had reached $1.57 billion, more than double the year before. The Trump administration had not paid a single dollar of its assessed contributions in 2025. The institution that was built to prevent the worst from happening is struggling to pay its own bills.

That last point matters more than it might seem. The UN funds peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, nuclear monitoring, pandemic preparedness. When its budget runs short, those things don’t happen, or they happen poorly, or they don’t happen at all. It’s not dramatic news. It doesn’t make headlines the way a battle does. But the slow withdrawal of support from shared institutions changes the conditions of life for millions of people, and it changes the environment in which every responsible business and investor now has to operate.

And yet life also continues. Children go to school. People start companies, fall in love, plant gardens. There is a whole generation turning away from the overcomplicated and reaching for the honest and the simple. Sardines on toast at a kitchen counter. A well-made dress that will last ten years. A long walk instead of another hour online. I find that genuinely hopeful. It suggests that something in us still knows what matters, even when everything around us is struggling to show it.

The interregnum is also, if you look at it honestly, a moment of real possibility. The old order was never as solid as it looked. It produced extraordinary stability in some places and extraordinary suffering in others. It allowed economic growth to be decoupled from accountability in ways that are still catching up with us. What comes next could be more honest about those trade-offs, if we pay attention and make good choices. That is a big if, but it is a real one.

I think about this a lot in relation to the people who read The EcoLeader. You make decisions that matter: where capital flows, what gets built, which values actually show up in practice. The interregnum makes that harder. The frameworks you could once rely on are less reliable. The rules are shifting. The people who tend to navigate this kind of period well are the ones who stay close to their values, keep a longer time horizon than the news cycle, and build things that will still matter when the dust settles. That is a different skill than managing in stable conditions. It is also, I think, a more interesting one.

In conversations over the past year I have noticed a particular kind of fatigue. The exhaustion of being expected to sound confident about things that are genuinely uncertain. The pressure to have a clear position when clarity isn’t available. I understand that fatigue. The honest response to an interregnum is to acknowledge what you don’t know, act on what you do know, and keep building carefully toward the world you want to see arrive. Precision matters more than certainty. Values matter more than forecasts.

That is what The EcoLeader is here for. We think carefully about what is actually happening, and about what it means to lead, invest and live with integrity when the map is being redrawn. We write about leadership, culture and capital as two sides of the same conversation, because they are. And that conversation matters more now than it has in a long time.
This week, we map the geopolitical shape of the moment. And across the week, we ask what the interregnum demands of leaders, investors, parents, and anyone trying to live with intention when everything is shifting. I hope you read it slowly. There is a lot in it, and it rewards your attention.

We are navigating this together. That is, among other things, why this publication exists.