It is often said that democracy is in retreat around the world, and there is no shortage of data to make that case: electoral quality has been on the decline for years across the globe, while polls are increasingly followed by protests, legal challenges, and violence. But a global trend can obscure significant national variation, and a focus on past trajectories can blind us to the reality of sudden, seemingly unexpected changes in a country’s politics.

We can take the case of South Asia, where years of democratic stagnation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were met with uprisings where the public demanded major reforms, resulting in the ousting of long-serving Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the former and a decisive victory for a leftist party in the latter in 2024. What’s more, sharp changes in national trajectories such as these attest to the value of the adage that past performance does not guarantee future results, and that understanding the development of inherently complex systems requires us to add to our methodological toolbox.

It is this challenge that has led International IDEA to adopt foresight and futures methodologies, a set of practices that in an “organized, systematic way of looking beyond the expected to engage with uncertainty and complexity.” Our aim is to ask questions like: what could democracy in South Asia look like in 2040? What can government reformers do to reverse the trend of slow decline? How should civil society activists and citizens engage with each other to revitalize civic life? Which global or regional forces are likely to constrain democratic expansion and where are the spaces for action? What can be done to ensure that we will be able to say in 15 years that South........

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