Deconstructing rankings and ratings

The emerging world security structure presents a complex picture wherein different entities are being used for maintaining influence and control over countries and regions. In the post-World War II order, the superpowers supported leaders of different countries to perpetuate their aims and objectives. Then came the era of regime change when the global forces installed and supported leaders of their choice in key areas of the world.

With the passage of time, they started facilitating individuals in different fields within a country to voice their objectives and goals and executing the same in private and public spheres through them. Currently, the internet and social media have given a new dimension to the regime change strategy through public involvement and cyber-based mass mobilisation mechanism to capitulate a country so that she could come to terms with the developed states.

Nowadays, chief executive officers (CEOs) of different informal institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) wield extraordinary power through release of rankings of each and every country around the globe. These ratings improve or distort perception about a country in different fields and accordingly its acceptance or rejection is enhanced or diminished among the international citizenry.

These rankings and ratings tend to influence the countries to change their policies in a particular field or impact their policymaking processes significantly. The countries which refuse to fall in line with the criteria have to face extreme situations of global seclusion and international isolation.

The rankings and ratings also alter the investment portfolio of a country. Moreover, data is accumulated in all fields through various methods and then analysed and examined by adopting different approaches. These fields include demography, urbanisation, economy, population, education, policy, conflict, war, strategy and others. For example, the data on conflict war & strategy indicates documentation of armed conflicts, including acts of terrorism.

As a result, global terrorism index (GTI) has been prepared and countries are categorised accordingly. The GTI provides impact of terrorism in each country and accordingly a reader or viewer formulates his or her opinion about the particular country. Similarly, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an informal organisation, placed Pakistan in grey area in 2018 which has negatively impacted its image and outlook. Since then a number of steps have been taken by the government which map the desired standards of the task force.

Interestingly, the non-government sector was the eighth largest economy by the turn of the century. Moreover, their development funds run into billions of dollars which are spent in accordance with the wishes of their donors and in line with their ideology and practice. The heads of top-notch NGOs were emulated by different CEOs of private domain firms. These CEOs have tremendous ingress in national institutions of a country and hence exert considerable influence over public servants at key positions in these organisations.

The global institutions which periodically issue rankings of countries in different fields are informally linked with NGOs so that a poor performer may aptly be embraced for multiple interventions, including training, financial assistance and excessive impact-oriented approaches on their policymaking. In other words, the international organisations have strengthened their control and regulation over decision formulation of government institutions at national level.

These organisations form the building blocks of new global security order. The rankings and ratings may become more stringent as a number of sanctions or restrictions or limitations are going to be tagged with them in future. In other words, standardisation of working for national or sub-national institutions of a country may be imposed in the coming years, making it mandatory for them to comply with the benchmarks otherwise their ratings are affected. Such a practice may damage their reputation beyond repair.