Is it geopolitics, or is it economics?

Geopolitical risk has led the Oxford-GlobeScan corporate affairs survey for seven years running, and this year it did not move. What changed is what the category is made of.

Michael Reaney  ·  9 October 2026  ·  4 min read

A survey of 294 senior corporate affairs professionals across 51 countries, fielded between February and March 2026 by the Corporate Affairs Academy at Oxford University's Saïd Business School together with GlobeScan, found geopolitical risk named by 76 per cent of respondents as the area of greatest concern facing global business over the next two years. That is the seventh year running it has led the list, and the figure has not moved from 2025.

The movement sits underneath it. Macroeconomic impact fell to third place at 34 per cent from 51 per cent, and climate change fell to 19 per cent from 27 per cent, while the impact of AI and technology rose to 44 per cent from 17 per cent and took second place for the first time. The question was open-ended, so these are unprompted mentions rather than picks from a list, which is worth knowing before anyone reads a ranking into a single point of difference.

The report's own reading of the top of that list is the part worth carrying into a planning conversation. It takes the first and third placed risks together, geopolitical and macroeconomic, and calls them a return to geoeconomics: the expression of political aims through economic means, by way of trade policy, regulation, sanctions and industrial strategy. Geopolitics is the competition. Geoeconomics is the instrument.

On that reading the leading category has not grown, it has changed character. What the authors describe as a general unease about the world now arrives as supply chain disruption, affordability, tariffs and energy costs. Those are specific, and specific pressures have to be answered in specific sentences, at a speed the pressure sets rather than the approval chain. A function whose quality gate is already built for that speed is in a better position than one assembling the gate again under each new pressure.

Three questions worth asking corporate affairs this quarter

1. If a geoeconomic event broke tomorrow, a tariff, a sanction, an export control, who holds the authority to approve the first external line, and how long would that approval take?
2. Has anything on the function's own risk list actually moved in the past eighteen months, or does it still read as it did then?
3. Where AI and geoeconomic risk now compete for the same communications capacity, which one is prioritised, and who decided that?

Worth reading

• Oxford-GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey 2026 (seventh annual edition; the Corporate Affairs Academy at Oxford's Saïd Business School with GlobeScan; 294 senior practitioners, 51 countries, surveyed February to March 2026, published 20th July 2026). The figures above come from this survey, from an open-ended question on the biggest risks for global business over the next two years. One caution for anyone quoting it: the report carries a second, separate climate figure, 40 per cent, which is climate's standing as the leading ESG reputational risk and not its place on the risk list. The two numbers answer two different questions. Oxford-GlobeScan, 20th July 2026
• 10Fold, "The Communications ROI Reset: What B2B Leaders Measure, Trust and Act On" (research by Sapio Research; 400 B2B technology marketing and communications leaders; covered by O'Dwyer's PR, 18th August 2026). Fifty-four per cent of respondents measure AI referral traffic, and the same share look at AI search visibility or brand citations in AI-generated content. Only 38 per cent measure how pipeline or revenue correlates to any of it. The gap between what gets counted and what gets tied to a business outcome is the one comms measurement has not closed in years, now restated with AI metrics added to the dashboard. O'Dwyer's PR, 18th August 2026
• Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, "Governing AI: Corporate Oversight and Shareholder Engagement" (Subodh Mishra, Global Head of Communications, ISS STOXX; 6th October 2026, drawing on an ISS STOXX paper by associate researcher Joseph Hong). The argument is that AI governance is moving from a specialist technology question to a mainstream board, strategy and stewardship one, and that investor engagement now reaches data privacy, misinformation, human rights, workforce impacts, energy and water use and emissions, none of which a board can answer without the communications function in the room. Harvard Law School Forum, 6th October 2026

The moves

• Helvetia Baloise: Eva Caroline Mairinger took over as Leiterin Corporate Communications on 17th August, announced in May, with internal and external communications and public affairs in her remit, steering the merged group's editorial direction and advising top management, and reporting directly to Deputy Group CEO Michael Müller. She joins from Deutsche Bank in Zurich, where she was Head of Communications for the Private Bank's international markets and Global Head of Content and Social Media; earlier she held senior roles at Holcim and at UBS in Zurich and London.