Halfway Through 2026

For thirty years, location was treated as a solved problem. The first six months of 2026 were an extended argument against that assumption.

The vocabulary of the long globalisation was flat, frictionless, borderless. Supply chains were designed as though distance were a rounding error. Capital moved toward the highest return and asked few questions about the route it took to get there. Software promised that the office, the factory and the customer could sit on three different continents and no one would feel the difference. Where something happened became a logistics detail, delegated downward.

Read the largest numbers of this half year and the same variable keeps surfacing. The International Energy Agency expects global electricity demand to grow at 3.6 percent a year through 2030, adding roughly 1,100 terawatt hours annually against an average of 700 over the previous decade. All of that demand has to land somewhere specific: on a grid, beside a substation, inside a jurisdiction that issues the permit and sets the tariff. SEMI now expects worldwide chip equipment sales to reach a record 165.9 billion dollars in 2026. Those tools go into buildings, and the buildings sit in countries chosen for reasons that have very little to do with cost curves. SIPRI counted 2,887 billion dollars of military spending in 2025, an eleventh consecutive annual rise, with Europe up 14 percent in a single year. Armies are the oldest expression of the conviction that territory is worth paying for.

Everything else in these pages flows from that single rediscovery. Artificial intelligence turns out to be a physical industry wearing a software costume: it needs power, cooling, land, fibre, silicon and people, all of which have addresses. Industrial policy stopped being an emergency measure and became an operating system, because a state that believes location matters will pay to own the locations that count. Capital concentrates, because when geography is priced back into the model, the number of places that clear the hurdle falls sharply.

Africa's own quarter carried the same signature. The African Development Bank released its 2026 African Economic Outlook in Brazzaville in May with growth of 4.2 percent projected for the continent, moderating from 4.4 percent in 2025, and a financing gap it put above 1.3 trillion dollars a year. Those headline figures conceal more than they reveal. East Africa is expected to grow at 5.9 percent this year, West Africa at 4.7 percent, Central Africa at 3.8 percent. Twenty two economies posted growth above 5 percent in 2025. Twelve of the world's twenty fastest growing economies were African. The continental average describes almost none of them.

Washington's trade posture told the same story from the other direction. AGOA lapsed at the end of September 2025, was restored by law on 3 February 2026 with retroactive effect, and now expires again on 31 December 2026. The preference survived. The predictability did not. TRALAC recorded a 32 percent fall in AGOA exports in the year to November 2025. South African vehicle exports to the United States collapsed by roughly three quarters, from 25,544 units to 6,530. What a one year renewal communicates to a factory owner in Nairobi or a plant manager outside Gqeberha is that the terms of access to the largest consumer market on earth are now an annual political decision. Duration became the instrument.

There is a version of this argument that curdles into fatalism, where geography is destiny and the map has already decided. That reading is wrong, and the evidence against it is in the same data. South African automakers lost three quarters of one market and still finished 2025 with record total exports of 414,268 vehicles, because they found other buyers faster than most observers, including us, expected. Geography sets the terrain. It does not choose the route.

What the terrain does is raise the cost of being wrong about place. For most of the last three decades an organisation could hold a mediocre view of where it operated and survive on the strength of its margins. That grace period has closed. The institutions that came through this half year in reasonable shape were the ones that knew which grid, which port, which regulator, which corridor, which election. They had specific answers about specific places.

Which brings us to the question this issue is organised around, and the one we would ask of any organisation reading it at the midpoint of a difficult year: not where the world is going, but where you actually are. The first is a forecast. The second is a fact, and almost nobody knows theirs.