This summer I had the privilege of working with the World Justice Project (WJP) to support the launch of its 2025 Rule of Law Index – through the generous support of the Freeman Spogli Institute and the MIP program. Tracking sub-indicators such as corruption, access to justice, regulatory enforcement, fundamental rights, security, and open government, WJP’s Rule of Law Index is a leading original data source evaluating the rule of law in 142 countries and jurisdictions around the world.

As a Singaporean democracy researcher who has spent the past seven years working on democracy building in local Southeast Asian civil society and public policy, I have been eagerly looking forward to this summer opportunity to contribute to the critical work of WJP, one of the still active civic NGOs in DC at a global scale. Being based in Washington D.C. – a global epicenter of civic development – was also valuable to better situate my work in this challenging historical moment. 

With a small nimble hierarchy at the WJP, I had the opportunity to contribute across the many functions that sustain a tightly run organization. My work ranged from the analytical, such as in data and research, to the operational, managing stakeholder relations with thousands of expert partners who support WJP’s annual Index. It also extended to the strategic through probing conversations with senior colleagues, where we confronted the perennial challenge of how to sustain, adapt, and expand mission and impact in the face of an unprecedentedly hostile political and funding climate.

WJP’s rule of law data is gloomy. For the past eight years, global rule of law has been in an incontrovertible decline. We exist in yet another post-pandemic year of acute civic and democratic backsliding around the world. Precipitated by an onslaught of authoritarian innovation and resilience across multiple poles, the recent abdication of American leadership of the liberal world order has further fanned this conflagration. And beyond just WJP’s data, the view from ground (of the Washington DC epicenter) is sobering. Across the dozens of coffee chats and lunches I have had with policy practitioners and civil society doers this summer, demoralization and bewilderment is a unified consensus. 

What is to be done?

In a project that I was co-leading at the World Justice Project with a fellow graduate student colleague from Princeton, we conducted a deep open-ended exploration of global electoral dynamics and the how’s and why’s of their correlation with WJP’s rule of law data trends. Pulling from both qualitative desk research and third-party datasets, we managed to build a robust dataset to make sense of our world.

Our early pilot findings suggests that where rule of law is stronger, societies have proven more resilient to the exogenous global shocks that have rocked our global political economy in the past half-decade. This trend is consistent across income and types of political regimes – both developed and developing worlds, and of both democracies and those less-than-democratic. 

Therein this nugget of hope are some meditations on the ways forward for global democracy and rule of law:

• Democracy is a win-win: Democracies come in many shapes and hybridized forms. But its fundamental tenets of open and accountable systems of governance, when done right, yield appealing dividends to both their people and their governments alike. These dividends span the gamut of economic growth, social stability, lower incidences of conflict, and resilience to external shocks. Democracy builders need to articulate this fact stronger in winning back their societies and elites who have since tired of political dysfunction.
• De-westernizing the liberal world order: Even as America pulls out from its leadership of the liberal world order, the fundamental global demand for the functional dividends of open societies has not waned. This is clear in my experience at the World Justice Project where the support and interests of its European and Global South partner governments and civic groups have prevailed. The path forward for global democracy and rights development is perhaps then to de-center and diversify towards the multipolar local, allowing for indigenous-led paradigms of democracy and governance, over a previously American-led crusade.
• Broadening the coalition for democracy from neglected partners: The rapid collapse of USAID and multiple democracy-promotion work in the last six months has revealed just how dependent the entire apparatus of global democracy and international development has been on US government funding. The revelation of this vulnerability and dependence should provoke new thinking around how to build broad-based and diversified coalitions of funders, influence, and support for international civic development. One long untapped area is the private sector. Amid a deteriorating political climate, the private sector might themselves increasingly find aligned incentives to step up and contribute public goods that civil society and the public sector have long since provided.

Even if the current political climate stabilizes down the road under successive US administrations, we will not be returning to a status quo paradigm of global civil development. That paradigm is perhaps gone forever. But it is precisely in its debris that we have an opportunity to rebuild a better and stronger global community for democracy.