Reconstructed from SIPRI military expenditure, COW Alliance Dataset, World Bank economic indicators, and UN General Assembly voting records
Just as Edwin Hubble observed that distant galaxies exhibit a redshift proportional to their distance, indicating an expanding universe, the GRS-z measures the structural expansion of the international system away from unipolarity.
A rising GRS-z indicates increasing systemic entropy, capability diffusion, and alliance fragmentation, the geopolitical equivalent of cosmic expansion.
The multipolar threshold at GRS-z = 0.50 represents the point at which no single power or alliance bloc commands sufficient structural dominance to maintain unipolar order.
The Iran War of March 2026 pushed GRS-z to 0.52, the first sustained breach of this threshold since the metric's construction. This represents a structural phase transition, not merely a cyclical fluctuation.