Beyond the Top 5: The Rest of WorldRelat's Biggest Movers
2026-09-19 · by Jordi Fuster
Our first State of the World post singled out two countries whose influence ranking moved the most over the past year: the Democratic Republic of the Congo climbing to 92nd, and Taiwan edging up to 22nd. That comparison — this year's ranking against the same month a year earlier — actually produces a full list, not just those two names. Here's the rest of it, and an honest note about how to read it.
The full comparison, briefly
Every month WorldRelat has enough comparable data for, we can rank all 204 tracked countries by influence and compare that ranking to the same measure roughly twelve months earlier. As of our latest full data pass, 203 countries have a clean ranking in both periods; 88 of them climbed, 88 fell, and 27 stayed exactly where they were. The five biggest climbers and the five biggest fallers are worth a look on their own, separate from whatever made September's cut.
The quiet climbers
Equatorial Guinea posted the single largest jump of any country we track, from 185th to 159th. Vanuatu wasn't far behind, up from 190th to 167th. Paraguay climbed from 130th to 111th, and Costa Rica moved from 160th to 143rd. None of these are dramatic headline countries — which is exactly the point. A ranking built from the volume and substance of a country's international coverage doesn't only move for wars and summits; it also moves when a smaller economy quietly signs more trade agreements, hosts more regional meetings, or simply gets written about more consistently than it used to.
The quiet fallers
The falls were sharper than the climbs. San Marino dropped 33 places, from 164th to 197th — the single largest move in either direction. Iceland fell 30 places, from 86th to 116th. Moldova dropped 24 places, from 98th to 122nd, despite a genuinely consequential year: Moldova held a closely watched parliamentary election in September 2025 that Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described as a test of Russian influence in the region, with pro-EU forces holding on against a heavy disinformation push. Holy See and Monaco rounded out the top fallers, down 15 places each.
The honest caveat
This is the part worth being direct about: a country falling in this ranking is not the same as a country becoming less important, and Moldova is the cleanest example why. Our influence score measures relative textual footprint across every country's documented bilateral relationships — if dozens of other countries' coverage grew faster over the same twelve months, a country can produce a genuinely significant news year and still lose ground in relative terms. The ranking tells you where documented attention is concentrated right now, not who had the more consequential year. Both of those are real signals, and they don't always point the same direction.
One climber worth watching specifically
Among countries already in the top 30 a year ago, Egypt made the largest gain, climbing three places to 25th. It's a modest move next to the DRC's 20-place jump, but it tracks with a consistent theme in Egypt's recent coverage: a continued central role as a mediator in the region's most consequential ongoing negotiations, alongside Qatar. Small, steady gains like this one tend to say more about a sustained diplomatic role than any single dramatic headline would.