Blog archive

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Proactive Governance and Citizen Engagement

By Nilanjan Raghunath – Social inequalities exacerbated by job losses due to automation and the pandemic can be mitigated by seeking collaborative and inclusive work policies.  This requires proactive governance, a model which includes multiple players providing feedback to create opportunities such as upskilling for people of all ages.  One such example is Singapore, where tripartite consensus plays a significant role in job creation and skills evolution.  Each country should create its own inclusive model.

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The Forum of Young Global Leaders and overlapping fields of power

By Julia Bethwaite – The Forum of Young Global Leaders brings together leaders from different fields across the globe, including acting ministers of state. How does the YGL programme relate to the idea of national representative democracies?

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Trade and Labour: Friends, Foes, or Frenemies?

By Maria Mexi & Andrew Silva – Exceptional events, like the Covid-19 pandemic, and broader trends, like the acceleration of new technologies and growth of trade in services, are raising further questions about the relationship between trade and labour. This piece revisits our understanding of and the possible institutional mechanisms to forge positive linkages between trade and labour.

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Third World Analogies and First World Solutions

By Francisco-José Quintana – Third World analogies have long become a favoured resource of U.S. critics of Donald Trump. This essay explores the references to “banana republics” and Latin America in the analysis of the storming of the U.S. capitol and argues that these analogies are normatively, historically, and analytically deficient.

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Informed dissent or misinformed rebellion? Making sense of India’s farmer protests

By Lys Kulamadayil – This post reviews the 2020 agricultural reforms in India from a legal perspective. In doing so, it seeks to make sense of farmers’ adamant opposition to the reforms. It suggests that their protests should be understood as a rejection of food capitalism.

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Business and Human Rights: a global trend towards mandatory due diligence?

By Jerome Bellion-Jourdan

As the world continues to face the COVID-19 health threat and its economic and social impact, the trend towards mandatory human rights due diligence, possibly coupled with environmental due diligence, could contribute to “level the playing field” and to “build back better”. This blog post offers a bird’s eye view of legal developments at the national, regional and global levels.

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20 years of Women, Peace and Security: A Call for the Perpetual (Re)Problematization of a Problematic Agenda

By Miriam Engeler & Marissa Fortune – On the 20th anniversary of UNSCR 1325, this piece unpacks feminist critiques of the Women Peace and Security Agenda and argues that applying critical methodologies to studies of peace and security can help diagnose the flaws in WPS implementation and help reclaim the radical foundations that the Agenda was built on.

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A Nobel for the WFP: A non-political Peace Prize for humanitarian multilateralism?

By Kristin Bergtora Sandvik et al – This contribution puts the award in context, showing how food is framed as an instrument of peace. It then focuses on the very political nature of the WFP as a multilateral humanitarian organization. Finally, it discusses one example of the WFP at the operational level: the politics of humanitarian technology.

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Why more inclusive measures are needed to address COVID-19?

By Michèle Audrée Ndedi Batchandji – COVID-19 widens inequalities even within specific sectors, like in Education. Fragile countries, and their most vulnerable populations in particular, have seen their situation deteriorate. Country and context specific solutions to the pandemic should therefore be adopted.

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Capitalism, COVID-19… and then?

By Pablo Martín Méndez – Is the COVID-19 crisis the end of free market capitalism? To answer this question, we don’t necessarily have to look to the future. On the contrary, we could explore the history of the free market ideas.