The COVID-19 pandemic poses a once-in-a-generation threat to the world’s population. Although this is not the first disease outbreak to spread around the globe, it is the first one that governments have so fiercely combated. Mitigation efforts—including lockdowns and travel bans—have attempted to slow the rate of infections to conserve available medical resources.
To fund these and other public health measures, governments around the world have deployed economic firepower on a scale rarely seen before.
Although dubbed a “global financial crisis,” the downturn that began in 2008 was largely a banking crisis in 11 advanced economies. Supported by double-digit growth in China, high commodity prices, and lean balance sheets, emerging markets proved quite resilient to the turmoil of the last global crisis. The current economic slowdown is different. The shared nature of this shock—the novel coronavirus does not respect national borders—has put a larger proportion of the global community in recession than at any other time since the Great Depression. As a result, the recovery will not be as robust or rapid as the downturn. And ultimately, the fiscal and monetary policies used to combat the contraction will mitigate, rather than eliminate, the economic losses, leaving an extended stretch of time before the global economy claws back to where it was at the start of 2020.
CIRSD Receives High-Level Delegation from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
The Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD) welcomed a high-level delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for a strategic meeting aimed at deepening cooperation between the two institutions.
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CIRSD Co-Hosts Horizons Discussion on the Future of Warfare at Cambridge University
On July 15th, the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), in cooperation with the Centre for Geopolitics of Cambridge University, co-hosted a Horizons Discussion entitled “The Future of Warfare.”
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Power Projection in the Digital Age
When people think of geopolitical conflict, they often envision a war room with a map spread across the table—military generals and political leaders maneuvering plastic figurines in strategic formations, reminiscent of the board game Risk.
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Horizons Hosts James Dorsey for a Discussion on Middle East Escalation
The Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD) hosted an award-winning journalist and scholar Dr. James M. Dorsey for a special Horizons Discussion on June 23rd, 2025. In conversation with Horizons Managing Editor Stefan Antić, Dorsey unpacked the lightning-fast escalation between Israel and Iran, the Trump administration’s divided response, and the wider stakes for regional and great-power politics.
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