State of the World — September 2026
2026-09-03 · by Jordi Fuster
This is the first entry in what's going to be a monthly series: a short, honest read on what actually moved in international relations over the past month, built on top of WorldRelat's own numbers and checked against what's being reported elsewhere. No filler, no recycled headlines — just what changed and why it's worth knowing.
The big picture: peace keeps getting harder to find
WorldRelat's own peace indicator — an aggregate built from the sentiment of every bilateral relationship we track — has slipped from 6.3 to 6.1 out of 10 over the past twelve months. That's a small move on our scale, but it lines up with a much bigger story: the 2026 Global Peace Index, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, recorded its twelfth straight year of declining global peacefulness, with 99 countries getting less peaceful over the past year — the sharpest annual drop since the index began two decades ago. Active state-based conflicts reached 61, the highest count since the Second World War, and the report puts the global economic cost of violence at $21.81 trillion in 2025, about a tenth of world GDP.
None of that is abstract. It shows up, relationship by relationship, in the data behind this site.
This month's biggest mover: the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Among the 203 countries with enough comparable data to track over the past year, the Democratic Republic of the Congo climbed further than almost anyone else — 20 places, from 112th to 92nd in our influence ranking. That's a real move, and it's not hard to see where it's coming from: in June 2025, the US brokered a peace and minerals framework between the DRC and Rwanda, tying Western investment in DRC's cobalt, coltan, gold, tin and tungsten to a promise of territorial respect and a Rwandan role as a processing hub. It put the DRC on the radar of every major trade and foreign-policy desk in a way it hadn't been in years.
What makes it worth flagging here specifically is the contrast: even as the DRC's overall standing rises, its bilateral relationship with Rwanda is still one of the worst on the entire site, scoring just 0.07 out of 10. Rising influence and a healthy relationship with your neighbor are not the same thing, and this pairing is a clean example of why. Human Rights Watch's own read on the deal is blunt about why: it does little to address impunity for the abuses — including summary executions and forced recruitment — that both M23 rebels and Rwandan forces have been accused of, and independent verification of any troop withdrawal is still missing. A minerals agreement signed in Washington doesn't automatically undo that on the ground, and our sentiment data agrees.
Rising power: Taiwan
Among countries that were already in our top 30 by influence a year ago, the one that gained the most ground since is Taiwan, up three places to 22nd. It's a small shift in ranking terms, but it fits a country that keeps punching above its size in how often it shows up in global coverage — semiconductors, and the ever-present question of Chinese pressure across the strait, keep it in the conversation.
The relationship data makes the shape of that story obvious. Taiwan and the United States score 9.86 out of 10 — about as warm as this site's sentiment model gets. Taiwan and China score 0.1. Same country, two of the most opposite relationship scores anywhere on WorldRelat, and that gap is really the whole geopolitical story of Taiwan in one comparison.
Also worth knowing: US–China, cooler than the headlines suggest
Trade tension between the United States and China has been a constant headline for most of 2025 and 2026 — tariffs that spiked as high as 125% in April 2025, a partial de-escalation to around 10% by May, and an October 2025 Trump–Xi meeting in Busan that produced a one-year suspension of rare-earth export controls, according to reporting from China Briefing. Despite the truce, Chinese exports to the US were still down close to 20% year-on-year as of late 2025, with no clear rebound yet.
Against that backdrop, our own relationship score for the pair — 7.62 out of 10 — probably reads as surprisingly high to anyone following the tariff back-and-forth. It's a useful reminder of what this site actually measures: the general tone of how two countries are written about, not a live scoreboard of trade disputes. Deep, complicated, mutually dependent relationships between major powers rarely read as simply hostile, even in a rough patch — and that nuance is exactly what a single "who's winning" headline tends to flatten.
That's the first State of the World. Back next month with whatever's actually moved by then.