Political unrest hits home

“Activated societies.”

According to global risk consultancy Control Risks, they are a key threat for companies to be alert to in 2026. “Across the world, entire generations animated by grievance are raging against injustice, inequality, and sheer incompetence,” the authors of the consultancy’s Risk Map report wrote. “Companies in 2026 will need to monitor and react to an increase and diversification of social protest and targeted violence.”

Global unrest has traditionally been a greater risk to businesses outside of North America and Europe, but it’s increasingly a concern in advanced economies as well. “What was once considered political risk confined to emerging and frontier markets has really spread more broadly to developed markets, including the US,” Control Risks partner Clinton Carter told CFO Brew. “That’s just part of the broader geopolitical trend of instability that’s accelerating.”

Actions related to immigration policy in the US, for instance, have affected some of the nation’s largest companies. Protestors have staged sit-ins and “shop-ins” at Target and Home Depot stores in response to what they view as the retailers’ cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Employees of Salesforce, Google, Meta, and Amazon have petitioned their employers’ CEOs to speak out against ICE. And some 50 protestors demonstrated outside the home of Hilton president and CEO Christopher Nassetta, speaking out against the chain’s decision to lodge ICE personnel.

In some cases, the responses to government or corporate actions may have affected business decisions. Budget airline Avelo, a target of protests and boycotts for its deportation flights with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in January canceled its contract with DHS. Amazon’s smart doorbells subsidiary Ring ended its partnership with surveillance service Flock amid backlash from civil liberties and privacy groups, as well as consumers, following its Super Bowl ad. In parts of the country, communities have successfully prevented the sale of warehouses to DHS.

Crisis management: Carter believes that political actions can be enough of a risk that US CFOs should plan for them. Crisis management is “a skill set and a process that every CFO should be thinking about and investing in,” he said. Even if a company never becomes the target of a protest or boycott, planning for such an event can prepare it for other types of crises, Carter noted, likening it to “geopolitical muscle building.”

Plan for a crisis before one occurs, Carter suggested. The goal is to "build the right systems and process now, rather than after a particular crisis,” he said.

That planning can expose critical gaps. In some companies, crisis management “doesn’t really have a clear home,” Carter said, which can lead to its being “isolated from other functions” and mean that it never gets integrated into strategic plans.

Build a team: Make sure your crisis plan has “designated team members, defined roles and responsibilities, [and] documented decision making” and that it outlines the communications that need to take place and the communications point of contact within the organization, Lucy Straker, focus group leader for the US in political violence and deadly weapons protection at insurance firm Beazley, told CFO Brew.

Depending on your industry, Carter said the team might include representatives from legal, supply chain, procurement, strategy, customer relations, industrial relations, HR, physical security, and government affairs. It may be appropriate for a CFO or for their direct delegate to join, and there should be a “two-way flow of information” from this team down to employees at lower levels and up to the C-suite or board, he said.

The crisis management team needs to be multidisciplinary, contain people at various levels of a company, and communicate “throughout every level of the company,” Straker said. “Because there’s no point in having crisis management plans that sit up top,” as often employees will be the ones responding to events.

Board interests: Geopolitics has risen in prominence as a risk, Carter said, and “moved much more towards the corporate center,” with both C-suites and boards taking a keen interest. CFOs may want to perform scenario forecasts and prioritize their top five risks—the kinds of areas boards may ask about, Carter said—and monitor them.

The financial toll of a crisis may be hard to measure, he acknowledges. “We’re dealing with qualitative inputs most of the time. There’s going to be ambiguity,” he said. But a forecasting exercise can still help. CFOs can envision an end state “and work backwards from there to understand what the financial impact would be for a certain outcome,” Carter said.

At minimum, he said, a CFO should at least be able to point out where in the company key information exists and be able to “contextualize” what the crisis is, how large it is, and whether it’s likely to “intensify or continue,” Carter said.

Though crises are by their very nature unpredictable, planning ahead can still go a long way, Straker said. “The best insured are the ones that think ahead of the game,” she observed.