In this episode of Boardroom Statecraft, we unpack Risk 8 in our Top 10 Geopolitical Risks for Businesses in 2026: Revolutionary Violence in the new Gilded Age. We revisit our earlier report on this theme and explain how inequality, collapsing trust in institutions and rapid technological change are combining to lower social and moral barriers to violence, both online and offline.

We compare today’s environment with the original Gilded Age, explore how political and ideological grievances are converging on corporations and their leaders, and look at what this means for protests, online harassment campaigns and targeted attacks.

We close by focusing on the practical implications for corporate security and executive protection teams, and why they now need to integrate political and geopolitical analysis into their protective intelligence.