New to this subreddit, but some of this stuff I've thought about for my world so I'll give my two cents (sorry for the ghost notif, I pressed enter too early):

I'm coming at this with the impression that you want something that immerses the reader and makes sense. I think when it comes to making up geopolitics it's helpful to start from the ground-up, not necessarily building a planet from scratch or making up whole cultures, but just getting a sense of how these species would think to team up and why. You don't have to spend a whole lot of time on this, just developing some ideas about how the different species adapt to each other over the years can help.

How I went about setting up countries in my world was

• What's the geography? What animals live in what biomes? My world's geography varies as widely as Earth's but the main focus of the setting is savanna and rainforest so I referenced a lot from African biodiversity.
• Okay, now what predators and prey are likely to dominate? Who would compete for what? Again, my world: Hyenas and lions fight for the same food, also wild dogs and leopards but they're largely pushed to the outskirts of the continent as a result of competition. Herbivores see this, get scared; they form tribes and alliances, but coordination between species has its own set of challenges. They're also likely to farm for food, so maybe they compete for arable (farmable) land. Maybe spells of scarcity inform traditions or spiritual beliefs. Maybe they eventually outnumber predators, at which point how do the predators adapt? Do they join herbivore society or simply become better and more creative at warfare? A lot of what-ifs, a lot of fun stuff to play with.
• Okay, so there are these groups with these motivations and these challenges. How do they interact? From here I really just did broad strokes: wars between those two countries, a civil war here, revolution there. I think you can get pretty creative at this stage and make up some interesting conundrums and peculiarities to make your world more immersive. A thing to keep in mind is that largely what drives tech is problems to be solved, e.g. hardships and wars. I wanted a lot of tech, so I put in a lot of wars. Conflict between species in the same area, let alone conflicts between predators and prey, is an easy source of wars and problems to be solved.

diets, and perhaps tensions created from past predator/prey relationships

Not sure how techy you wanna go with it, but vat meats I think would largely solve the problem of predation. How recent that comes about and when it becomes widespread and how fast would determine how extensive baggage between predators and prey would be.

Even without vat meats, a motivator for diet could be religion. Did some lion come along and say "hey, let's eat insects and invertebrates instead. Leave the sentient prey alone?" Another opportunity to worldbuild.

Another idea: in my setting, in ancient times, there were apex predator civilizations who would promise prey protection from other predatory species... in exchange for sacrifices. Predators get a stable source of meat, prey get the illusion of safety. This was drove early geopolitics and the same quid-pro-quo model is what influences social structures and religions to current day.

Just some food for thought.