CIRSD Recommends
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Will the Ukraine War Revive the WTO?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has heightened everyone’s appreciation of global issues and interconnectivity. In addition to geopolitical and defense concerns, there is a renewed focus on the state of international trade.
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Dispatch from Davos
My impressions from a very different World Economic Forum.
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A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
Since the identification of theSARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, in January 2020, the origin of the virus has been a topic of intense scientific debate and public speculation.
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The Lose-Lose Tech War
The increasingly bitter rivalry between the United States and China ultimately will leave both countries – and the world – worse off.
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Challenges for India’s upcoming G20 presidency
As India gears up to officially assume the G20 presidency this year, it must recognise and address the core challenges it is likely to face. There are several aspects that India will need to consider while setting up its agenda—how can it take forward the work done by the past presidencies? Which issues should it prioritise? How can it pursue its own agenda in the global context?
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Soft Power After Ukraine
While hard military power will decide the outcome of Russia's war in Ukraine, the power of values, persuasion, and attraction are hardly irrelevant. Though soft power tends to operate more subtly and over a longer time horizon, it has nonetheless emerged as a key feature of Ukraine's defense.
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Deforestation of Brazil’s Amazon Has Reached a Record High. What’s Being Done?
Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest is threatening to accelerate past a point of no return. Countries and international organizations have called on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to strengthen environmental protections and Indigenous land rights that he has weakened since taking office.
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World economy: the big factors to watch closely
Covid, inflation, politics and global trade all have potential for surprise as we get into 2022
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Clouds Over 2022
Although major economies and markets fared well in 2021 despite all of the uncertainties surrounding new variants of the coronavirus, 2022 will bring new challenges. In addition to central banks shifting toward policy normalization, geopolitical and systemic risks are multiplying
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Russian Foreign Policy: Shifting Gears
Right now, fears of a war in Ukraine are widespread. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned the Kremlin not to try to repeat what it did in 2014, lest it regret it. Will President Putin make the fateful decision? Is Ukraine that “unfinished business” that he will seek to complete before the end of his reign? Or is Putin just bluffing?
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Time to Overhaul the Global Financial System
For low- and lower-middle-income countries to pursue their development goals and do their part in tackling problems like climate change, they need to be able to borrow reliably on decent market terms. Yet the current two-tiered global financial system extends this privilege almost exclusively to rich countries.
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Why Italy's Presidential Election Matters
With its poor track record of managing EU funds, Italy’s recovery plan will be a major test for the future of EU policymaking more generally. While it is widely agreed that Prime Minister Mario Draghi must remain on the scene to oversee the plan’s implementation, in what capacity would he be most useful?
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World faces hunger dilemma in Afghanistan
The fall of the Afghan government to the Taliban has presented the world with some stark choices. In recent weeks, the international community has raised alarm about the rapidly escalating humanitarian emergency in the country, calling for an influx of aid to reach millions of Afghans ahead of the winter.
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The Taiwan Triangle
The goal of US policy toward the island should be to reduce uncertainty about America’s intentions and its ability to make good on them, while underscoring to Chinese leaders the economic and military costs of aggression
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Vaccine Producers Must Step Up
Governments of countries where vaccines are being produced – the United States, European Union members, the United Kingdom, India, Russia, and China – need to cooperate under United Nations leadership to ensure that a sufficient supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses reaches the poorest countries. Five steps are especially urgent.
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Sept. 11 and the Future of American History
Twenty years after the horrific attacks on New York and Washington, it’s clear that the biggest changes of our time were not ideological or geopolitical, but technological. They were also the hardest to foresee.
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The impact of September 11 on US-Russian relations
On September 9, 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin called his American counterpart George W. Bush with an urgent message: Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban and Moscow-supported Northern Alliance, had been assassinated in Afghanistan by two suicide bombers posing as journalists. Putin warned Bush of “a foreboding that something was about to happen, something long in preparation.” Two days later al-Qaida struck the United States.
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Will a ‘Digital Military’ Change War?
According to General Jay Raymond, the head of the U.S. Space Force, America’s newest military branch is also on its way to becoming the world’s first fully digital armed service. Rather than a Tron-esque idea of soldiers fighting virtually in a purely digital battlefield, what Raymond was referring to — previously laid out in a Space Force vision statement — is somewhat more prosaic, emphasizing the need for the new service to be interconnected and innovative. In other words, the actual ambition is more or less to have a military service that works within the frameworks created by the current state of digital technology rather than adopting them piecemeal.
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The Stagflation Threat Is Real
There is a growing consensus that the US economy’s inflationary pressures and growth challenges are attributable largely to temporary supply bottlenecks that will be alleviated in due course. But there are plenty of reasons to think the optimists will be disappointed.
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The darkest day of Joe Biden’s presidency
An already perilous withdrawal of U.S. personnel and allies from Afghanistan turned into something much darker on Thursday as the kind of catastrophe President Joe Biden had been warning about took place outside Kabul’s main airport.
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Afghan takeover reminds Europe: It has no unified refugee plan
Six years ago, the European Union descended into in-fighting as it struggled to process asylum seekers fleeing war-torn Syria. Over 1 million refugees and migrants crossed the sea to reach Europe in 2015.
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America's New Great-Power Strategy
During the Cold War, US grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union. China’s rise now requires America and its allies to develop a strategy that seeks not total victory over an existential threat, but rather managed competition that allows for both cooperation and rivalry within a rules-based system.
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Reforming global fossil fuel subsidies: How the United States can restart international cooperation
The United States now has a unique opportunity to lead this global effort. President Joe Biden’s executive order for government agencies to stop fossil fuel subsidies and the United States’ renewed commitment to the Paris Agreement serve as strong commitments to domestic reform.
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In Bitcoin We Trust?
Coordinated cross-border policies are needed to ensure that cryptocurrencies don’t do more harm than good in developing countries. Unless both the public and private sectors embrace critical reforms, people and governments will increasingly be attracted by low-cost, high-risk, and murky alternatives to traditional banking.
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Congo’s latest killer is the climate crisis. Inaction is unthinkable
For thousands of years, Lake Tanganyika was an exquisite sight that soothed and supported generations of Congolese people. Those living by its shores in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have snoozed in hammocks under the tropical sun, watching their children splash in Africa’s oldest, deepest and longest lake. In the evenings, when boats head out for fishing trips, local people would light campfires on the beaches to fry their catch and dance to rumba. But in the past two months, storms, torrential rain and flooding have killed at least 13 people and destroyed 4,240 homes and 112 schools along the DRC’s Lake Tanganyika coast. In less than a generation, the stretch from Uvira to Moba, 250 miles long, has become a place of catastrophe for the local people, who are dependent on the lake for food, trade, transport and their livelihood.
