Malawi is only the second African country to annul a presidential election, after Kenya in 2017. It is the first in which the opposition has won the re-run.

The initial May 2019 vote had narrowly returned incumbent Peter Mutharika to the presidency. But in February 2020 a landmark ruling by Malawi’s constitutional court annulled the result citing ‘widespread, systematic and grave’ irregularities, including the now-infamous use of corrective fluid in vote tallying, and the Malawi Electoral Commission’s (MEC) failure to address complaints before announcing results. New elections were ordered within 150 days.

In a decisive contrast with the previous year, the fresh polls on 23 June saw the coming together of Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and running mate Saulos Chilima of the United Transformation Movement (UTM) to head a coalition of nine opposition parties - having fiercely competed as the leading challengers previously.

The constitutional court ruling had also changed Malawi’s electoral system, replacing a first-past-the-post model with one demanding an outright majority, which further encouraged the regional power bases of Malawi’s opposition to cast ego aside and work in alliance with each other.

In tandem with a slick digital campaign, the new alliance travelled widely to hold rallies across what is one of the world’s youngest countries, while the elderly Mutharika remained largely confined to the capital. It would be a strategy that ultimately delivered Chakwera to the presidency, polling 58 per cent of votes to Mutharika’s 39.

Political opposition elsewhere in Africa should take note from Malawi’s coalition - dialogue, not division, can offer a genuine path to change, especially in those countries with less favourable institutional conditions. Neighbouring Zambia would certainly do well to heed this example ahead of a pivotal election of its own in 2021.

A victory built on institutional precedent

Yet the story here is not only about throwing out an incumbent: Malawians had already done so twice before, rejecting sitting presidents at the polls in 1994 and 2014. It is also not unfamiliar to see public opinion and the judiciary work in parallel to uphold the constitution: former president Bakili Muluzi was twice blocked from abolishing term limits by popular demonstration during his second term, and again prevented from running for a third time in 2009 by the constitutional court.

The new result did not arise as the foregone conclusion of a judicial miracle. Rather, throughout the re-run process Malawi has had to repeatedly draw upon the strength of its broad-based institutional foundations. The image of the constitutional court judges arriving to deliver their annulment verdict in February wearing bulletproof vests under their robes was a stark reminder that this was never the easy route to take.

In contrast to many other African states, Mutharika was unable to call upon military support as the Malawi Defence Forces (MDF) had moved to shield protesting citizens and protect the judiciary since the 2019 election. The MDF also had previous form in this respect, having defended then-vice president Joyce Banda’s constitutional right to assume the presidency after the incumbent’s death in 2012.

And this institutional resilience from the army would facilitate a smooth and mostly peaceful election process during the re-run, despite Mutharika attempts to intervene by replacing the MDF’s commander and his deputy in March 2020.

Just ten days before the fresh vote the Mutharika government switched focus back to the country’s legal system by attempting to enforce the premature retirement of Malawi’s chief justice, only to be blocked by the high court. Even as unofficial tallies trickled in, Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) demanded the MEC annul the result: claiming their monitors were intimidated in MCP strongholds, and requesting unlawful access to scrutinise null and void votes.

Headed by a new chairperson, this time the MEC displayed enormous patience in the verification process and openly tackled complaints, now mainly from the DPP. On social media, Malawians celebrated the contrast between images of tally sheets from 2019 and the re-run.

Writing a new chapter

There are lessons here too for international partners. UK diplomacy played a subtle role in encouraging Mutharika to accept the legal process - he was invited to appear at the UK-Africa Investment Summit in January - while also helping promoting early dialogue among opposition parties.

At a time of pressure for UK engagement to offer clear strategic value, the impact of less easily quantifiable forms of influence should not be overlooked, especially as international observer missions effectively went missing in the discredited 2019 election. Preliminary statements back then from the Commonwealth, European Union, African Union and Southern African Development Community (SADC) struck a mostly congratulatory tone and were non-committal on the issues that would prove decisive in the court ruling. None went on to release their final reports.

Malawi must now start to move beyond election mode. Though COVID-19 cases remain low by global standards, a budget already heavily dependent on foreign aid and hampered by 18 months of political uncertainty will be slashed further by the pandemic’s impact. The IMF has predicted GDP growth of just 1% in 2020, down from a pre-coronavirus projection of 5%.

As it inherits a major balance of payments crisis, mounting debt and with no tourism revenue to fall back on, the new government will need to use its political capital to push for immediate reform. But it must not forget the core tenet of its campaign. The coalition that defeated Mutharika united the MCP’s rural support base with the middle-class urban following of the UTM. This spirit of unity and inclusion must be expanded and focus on long-term recovery. On this undertaking – unlike the polls – there will be no opportunity for a re-run.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that the world is undergoing a transition away from fossil fuels and carbon-intensive sectors, towards renewable energy and clean growth. The collapse of oil demand and prices have simply compounded the challenges that oil and gas producers already faced.

What happens next will have significant implications for Norway, as one of the world’s largest exporters of both energy and capital, and for the UK, as it plans its recovery and looks ahead to its hosting of the next major climate change summit in 2021 - COP26.

While the speed and scale of the transition has always been uncertain and contested, an accelerated transition with deep implications for future oil and gas demand looks plausible.

There has long been a debate over when global demand will peak, but what happens after demand has peaked is perhaps the more critical question. Now there is the additional uncertainty of how this post-peak demand might be affected by an oncoming global recession and potentially by the greening of recovery measures implemented in response to it. Will there be an extended plateau, a gentle decline or a sudden collapse?

The post-peak trend will impact oil producers and exporters to varying degrees, in terms of their vulnerability to reduced volumes and lower prices, and their ability to compete in a shrinking market. There is also growing scepticism over whether natural gas can act as a bridge between coal-fired power and renewables, as increasingly, renewables directly replace coal.  There is also significant uncertainty over extent to which hydrogen, either produced from fossil fuels or renewable energy, will play a significant role in a decarbonizing energy sector.

Even before the pandemic, there was growing public and political pressure in most EU member states for more ambitious action on climate change. More challenging climate targets now look certain as a growing number of governments and companies commit to becoming carbon-neutral by ever-earlier dates.

While market developments, such as the rate of change and the costs of technologies such as renewable energy and electric vehicles will heavily influence their deployment rates, policy interventions and large-scale investment in core infrastructure are still crucial to their scaling up. We are now seeing the EU refocus its Green Deal in support of post-COVID recovery, and scale its support for transition in coal-dependent and carbon-intensive regions with its €100bn Just Transition Mechanism.  

These developments have significant implications for fossil fuel producers and energy consumers both inside and outside the EU. It will particularly affect Norway, not only as a significant supplier of energy to the EU, but as a member of the European Economic Area, with likely pressure to adopt similarly binding domestic carbon reduction legislation. Similarly, as the UK forges new post-Brexit trading and regulatory relationships, it will need to align with European policies for efficiency.

As the host of the critical COP26 UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow next year, the UK will also need to at least match the EU in terms of its ambition on national emissions reductions, and in placing decarbonization and sustainability at the heart of COVID-19 recovery measures. However, unfortunately, the early indications are that 'Project Speed' will focus on traditional infrastructure projects are less than promising.    

The UK and Norway face similar challenges, as oil and gas producers that recognize the importance of climate change, and will rightly face scrutiny where they reinvest in their oil and gas sectors. They are both outside, yet highly dependent on developments within the EU. However, they are also both, somewhat surprisingly, world leaders in different aspects of decarbonization, such as off-shore wind or electric vehicle deployment, in part due their offshore capabilities and advanced manufacturing capabilities. This presents an opportunity for both countries and their industries to place an accelerated energy transition at the heart of their economic recovery and their relationship with the EU.

There will of course be different opinions on how to do this. A new Chatham House paper – Expert Perspectives on Norway’s Energy Future – explores these issues in the Norwegian context, and draws upon the views of 15 international experts on energy transition and climate change, each interviewed in depth. While unsurprisingly there is little consensus, these views provide valuable background from which to consider the future of future of energy for Norway, and for its partners including the UK and the EU.

Trade policy is a blunt instrument for realizing human rights. Although many trade agreements now include commitments on human rights-related issues - particularly labour rights - not everyone agrees that linking trade to compliance with human rights norms is appropriate, let alone effective.

Sceptics point out that such provisions may become an excuse for interference or ‘disguised protectionism’ and admittedly anyone would be hard-pressed to identify many concrete improvements which can be directly attributed to social and human rights clauses in trade agreements.

This lack of discernible impact has a lot to do with weak monitoring and enforcement. A more fundamental problem is the tendency of trading partners to gloss over – both in the way that commitments are framed and in subsequent monitoring efforts – significant implementation gaps between the standards states sign up to, and the reality.

Working from ‘baseline’ international standards and treating each state’s human rights treaty ratification record as an indicator of compliance does offer objective verifiability. But it also means underlying economic, structural, cultural, social, and other problems, often go unidentified and unaddressed in the trading relationship.

Regulatory failings of trading partners

Those with sufficient leverage can use dispute resolution or enforcement proceedings to signal displeasure at the regulatory failings of their trading partners, as recently shown by the European Commission (EC) in relation to labour violations by trading partners – against South Korea under the 2011 EU-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and Cambodia under the EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) scheme.

These actions do show a more proactive and rigorous EU approach to monitoring and enforcement and have been largely welcomed – especially by trade unions – as a necessary political response to persistent failings by the states to address violations of fundamental labour rights. However, claiming any major victories on behalf of the workers who produce the goods being traded seems premature.

The ‘implementation gaps’ - between human rights commitments made in a state-to-state context and the reality of the human rights situation on the ground - mean there may be cases where enforcement action under a trading arrangement, such as the removal of trade preferences, may actually make things worse. Some local unions have expressed concern that the EU action against Cambodia may be detrimental to vulnerable migrant women factory workers, especially in the context of a worsening economic situation due to the pandemic.

Making stakeholder voices heard

There are routes through which people with first-hand knowledge of human rights-related problems arising from trading relationships – such as labour rights abuses in global supply chains – can make their voices heard. Unions have used consultative bodies set up under trade agreements to highlight labour abuses in trading partner countries - this helped to shift the Commission’s strategy towards South Korea.

But the rather vague and open-ended mandates of these consultative bodies, and their reliance on cash-strapped civil society organisations to do much of the heavy lifting, means they are not a solid basis for systematic follow-up of human rights problems.

And yet, every country is likely to have a number of agencies with interests and expertise in these issues. Beyond labour inspectorates, this could include environmental regulators, licensing bodies, ombudsmen, national healthcare bodies, special-purpose commissions, ‘responsible business’ oversight and certification bodies, local government authorities and national human rights institutions.

At present these groups are barely mentioned in trade agreements with monitoring frameworks for human rights. And if they do feature, there tends to be little in the agreement terms to guarantee their participation.

To seriously address implementation gaps, there needs to be much greater and more systematic use of these domestic regulatory bodies in human rights monitoring and enforcement activities. These bodies are potentially vital sources of information and analysis about the many different social, economic, environmental and human rights consequences of trade, and can also contribute to designing and delivering ‘flanking measures’ needed to assist with the mitigation of human rights-related risks or adverse impacts which have been detected.

Looking further ahead, monitoring practitioners may find - as those involved in the EU GSP+ scheme have already noticed - that close and visible engagement with domestic regulatory bodies helps strengthen a regulator in getting clearer political support and better resources. It can also help with greater ‘buy-in’ to human rights reform agendas, creating conditions for a positive legacy in the form of more confident, committed, and capable domestic regulatory bodies.

Paying more attention to synergies that exist between the work of domestic regulatory bodies and the principles and objectives which cause states to seek human rights commitments from their trading partners is a vital contribution to the concept of ‘building back better’ from the present crisis.

The goal should be to move from the present system – which veers between largely ineffective consultative arrangements and adversarial, often high stakes, dispute resolution – to more cooperative and collaborative systems which draw more proactively from the knowledge and expertise of domestic regulatory bodies, not only in the identification and monitoring of risks, but also in the delivery of jointly agreed strategies to address them.

This article is part of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum, promoting research and policy recommendations on the future of global trade.

Many people are aware that the scourge of malnutrition affects a vast number of individuals and communities around the world. However, most tend to view it as a problem to be addressed by governments, charities or donors, rather than the corporate sector.

Certainly, when considered at a societal scale, malnutrition makes the complexities of delivering inclusive growth all the harder. It ratchets up the public health burden while restricting the potential for at-risk populations to take part in productive employment.  Economies are hindered, lives are blighted and the potential for people to reach their full potential can be severely limited.

A number of upcoming summits represent a window of opportunity to address nutrition in the context of resilience, particularly in the wake of COVID-19 and the much-referenced ambition for governments to ‘build back better’. The opportunity is there to foster a true partnership between governments, third sector organizations and businesses of all sizes, sectors and geographies to work for the betterment of society and deliver benefits to all participants in such a partnership. 

So what is the role of business in relation to nutrition - where does it sit on their list of priorities and why should it matter to them? A new Chatham House report represents an important contribution to the discussion about the role of business in addressing malnutrition. Through thorough research and direct engagement with businesses, it seeks to find out if malnutrition is on the corporate radar and the extent to which it is considered a material issue.

Surprisingly, whilst many large corporates recognize malnutrition as a matter for concern, this is typically defined only in the context of CSR programmes or related ambitions. These types of commitments have their limitations though; most notably the fact that the communities more severely affected by malnutrition typically sit outside of the sphere of influence of the multi-national companies with the greatest ability to mobilize resources and make an impact. Where populations are marginalized, operating within the informal economy and living in settings that are too fragile for large-scale business investment, corporate CSR programmes are unlikely to have a meaningful impact.

The report also asked businesses whether they considered malnutrition to have a material impact on their ability to create value, protect value and manage risk. In the majority of instances the answer was no. This may be surprising, particularly given the evidence provided by new modelling – done for this report using a purpose-built model by Vivid Economics – that illustrates the costs posed to business by malnutrition within a population. On an immediate and direct level, the impacts can be considerable due to lost or reduced productivity from the employee base. However, if even that immediate impact is addressed, the externalities associated with malnutrition can come back and have a negative effect on businesses and investors alike.

When reflecting on externalities and the landscape of risk within which business operates, it is worth considering climate change by way of comparison. Climate change is well embedded in the risk profiling of most progressive and well-managed corporates – although in some instances meaningful action may be well overdue. That said, it is recognized that the direct and indirect impacts have the potential to conspire and permanently reduce shareholder, stakeholder and societal value. 

Similarly, if left unchecked, the externalities associated with malnutrition will undoubtedly contribute to an increased level of risk in terms of both operating and investment environments. This is both an issue of social equity and enlightened self-interest given that good nutrition is key to the success of many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and is essential to driving sustainable economic growth. One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is the manner in which widespread malnutrition can significantly reduce the resilience of populations to external risks, including the outbreaks of infectious disease. We need only to look at the impact of climate stress and related events to understand how closely linked malnutrition is – or may become – to the incidence of social unrest and armed conflict in low-income countries.

Progressive companies and investors have already identified the ability to drive inclusive and sustainable growth as a compelling imperative for investment. In this context, the potential for improved nutrition – both in the workforce and amongst the communities upon which the firms depend – should be a true priority. As fund managers seek increasingly meaningful insight into the way that companies within their portfolio(s) create value, protect value and manage risk, the scope of environmental and social governance is expanding. Many recognize the link between delivering on the SDG agenda and protecting or enhancing shareholder value into the longer term. This is a powerful lever for change, particularly when considering that good nutrition is integral to the success of the ambitions laid out by the various SDGs. Successfully delivering against nutrition-focused targets could unlock growth in developing markets and create an enabling environment for achieving the broader SDG agenda. This may in turn help companies to deliver enduring shareholder value in a way that does not undermine their corporate sustainability commitments.

So, given the insights provided by this report, what can businesses do that have the potential to make a practical and effective impact? There are three main action points around which the private sector can galvanize its efforts and work in partnership to deliver a meaningful impact. 

The first action point is a basic requirement to be proactive and make supportive interventions with existing and future workforces, ensuring that staff are well fed and have appropriate facilities for breastfeeding and childcare. Beyond that foundational commitment, the second action point is to work to build impactful and well-governed partnerships to work within local communities and deliver outcomes at an appropriate scale. The third and final action point sets out the importance of reporting. Businesses should thoroughly assess the impacts of their operations, investments and influence. They should be transparent about those impacts and report both on the current situation and the commitments made to deliver on measurable targets.

Malnutrition is a scourge; it negatively impacts individuals, families, societies and economies. Now is the time to align corporate, government and third sector efforts to consign it to the past. We just need leaders to be bold enough to seize the opportunity.

As with any history, Chatham House has a long and complex one. Progress has come in fits and starts, sometimes driven by wider social change, but often led by individuals within the institute. When examining the institute's work on Africa, five seminal moments from the history really stood out.

The Founders

Lionel Curtis is credited as the founder of the institute, having proposed the idea at a meeting at the Hotel Majestic while attending the Treaty of Versailles talks.

Curtis served in South Africa during the Second Boer war and subsequent period of unification. He was one of the cohort of officials that served under Lord Milner, later dubbed ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’. Several of this group were involved in the foundation of the institute.

His experiences in South Africa undoubtedly informed his political philosophy - a strong belief in liberal imperialism. This is captured in the emblems of empire inlaid into the roundtable which is still in the Chatham House library, given to Curtis as a wedding gift.

But more importantly than his political philosophy, Curtis was an astute social networker and fundraiser who unlocked the finance required to establish the institute. Curtis’s papers in the Chatham House archives depict his almost obsessive following of the career of the South African diamond tycoon Sir Abe Bailey that eventually led to the first significant endowment to the institute - after the building. South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, a friend of Curtis and early champion of the institute, spoke at a dinner in honour of Bailey’s contribution.

Curtis’s connections meant much of the early finance came from South Africa, including from Otto Beit and Percy Molteno, who was also an early financer of the African National Congress (ANC).

Hailey’s Africa Survey

In 1938, Chatham House published Lord Hailey’s monumental Africa Survey. Its detailed 1,837 pages of study came to represent a seismic shift in attitudes towards the continent. Lord Lothian’s foreword emphasises that it grew from an idea of Smuts from 1929, although these origins remain disputed.

What is known is that Oxford University had submitted a proposal for a study of the continent to an American foundation which rejected it on the grounds that they didn’t want American money to be used to expand Smut’s doctrine of dominion. The group then merged their own plan into an emerging study by progressive missionary Joseph Oldham.

Curtis brought in his friend Lord Hailey to lead the initiative. Hailey was a distinguished civil servant who served in India but never in Africa. The project moved to Chatham House and received a substantial grant from the Carnegie Foundation. Having been originally conceived as a study to reinforce segregationist ideas, the final survey was groundbreaking. Its underlying assumption of basic racial equality debunked the premises of segregation and re-set British attitudes towards Africa.

This shift in mindset was hugely significant at the time, but the work would later be criticized for not including any African voices. And, despite carrying his name, Lord Lothian wrote very little of the text. He fell ill, in part due to the pressure of the four-year project, and the work was largely written by notable Africanists Lucy Mair, Charlotte Leubuscher, and Margery Perham. The Africa Survey was updated and reprinted in 1956, including a pull-out map depicting newly-independent Sudan. A sign of real change.

Independence and National Liberation

The 1960s was a decade of transformation both on the continent and at Chatham House. The institute became an important conduit for newly-independent African states to engage in international affairs, hosting several independence presidents, including Prime Minister Modibo Keita of Mali, President Léopold Senghor of Senegal, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Many of these speeches were republished in the Institute’s journal, International Affairs.

In January 1962, the Nigerian government invited Chatham House to host a conference in Lagos on the external international relations of the newly-independent African states. But it wasn’t just presidents that were offered a platform. Liberation leaders were also invited to speak as well as conduct research.

Dr Bernard Chidzero, a later finance minister in independent Zimbabwe, wrote on African nationalism in International Affairs in 1960, and conducted a multi-year study at the institute resulting in the publication of a book. In 1968, Eduardo Mondlane, founding president of FRELIMO, made an important speech on the nationalist fight for independence in Mozambique.

In 1961, Kenneth Younger, a new director of the institute, increased its research capacity on Africa through significant new hires. Catherine Hoskyns’s 1965 book on the Congo crisis became the seminal study on the topic. Dennis Austin, who had experience in West Africa, wrote the definitive work on Ghana’s transition to independence in 1964.

African Institutes

Chatham House has also been involved in the establishment of think-tanks across the world, including three in Africa.

The South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) was founded in 1934, in response to proposals made by Chatham House the previous year at the inaugural British Commonwealth Relations Conference. An East African Institute of International Affairs was also established in Nairobi but did not survive. The Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) was formed in 1961 in Lagos. Its founding director general Dr L A Fabunmi, said ‘the main task of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs will be to create, develop, and sustain an African perspective in world affairs’.

Chatham House has maintained a good working relationship with its sister institutes. In 2005 a special edition of International Affairs was launched at NIIA, the first time in the journal’s history it was launched outside the UK. And SAIIA staff and leaders are regular contributors to Chatham House events and research, including a partnership on the study of Central and Eastern European relations with Africa.

The Africa Programme

Created in 2002. this was the first time Chatham House had a dedicated research team working on Africa, producing a sustained and balanced assessment of events on the continent. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, work on Africa had been conducted by regionally-focused study groups, and the personal interests of the director for studies, Dr Jack Spence – a leading authority on South African foreign policy. An earlier attempt to create a more formal programme in the late 1990s fell victim to staff turnover.

In 1998, the British Angola Forum (BAF) was formed and found a home at Chatham House. It marked a departure from the institute’s focus on post-colonial 'Anglophone Africa'. At the end of Angola's civil war in 2002, under the leadership of Dr Alex Vines, the BAF morphed into a continent-wide programme.

Since then, the Africa Programme has produced more than 160 original research publications, and organizes between 120-140 events on Africa every year. The Africa Programme is marking the centenary of the institute with a major research theme on Foreign Relations and African Agency in International Relations.

Chatham House’s work on Africa has its roots in the liberal imperialism of the post war leaders. But throughout the last 100 years, it has been a platform for progress, playing a vital role in informing policymakers and facilitating debate on African affairs, as well as highlighting African perspectives on global issues.

The exhibition on the History of Africa at Chatham House was first displayed at the world-renowned fine art auctioneers and valuers Bonham’s in London for a reception in February 2020 marking the centenary of the Institute. It was curated by Christopher Vandome with the assistance of the Chatham House Library, and digitized with the help of the Institute’s communications department. Please contact the Library team for further information regarding the archive.

Chatham House Centenary:
Throughout our centenary year in 2020, Chatham House marks a century of influence, independent analysis and trusted dialogue with a number of exciting initiatives. Throughout the year, we explore key political moments from the institute's history and reflect on how Chatham House and other think-tanks should approach the future.

Flaring is a significant source of economic and environmental waste. Except when safety-related, flared gas can often be captured and monetised using low-cost proven solutions.

In doing so, governments can improve health and safety, reduce emissions (of carbon dioxide, methane, and particulates) and add value by driving up revenue, increasing reserves and production, creating jobs and improving the industry’s ‘social license to operate’.

Flare capture also helps countries to deliver on the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #13 while, for example, providing affordable alternatives for heating and cooking.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region accounts for 40% of the world’s flaring. In the region, flaring has increased year-on-year - apart from 2018 - to almost six billion cubic feet of gas per day, generating up to 300-500 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year.

These emissions result not only from the combustion of gas, but also from the venting, from inefficient flares, of un-combusted methane, a more potent greenhouse gas. Yet much of this is avoidable.

There are many commercially attractive options to reduce flaring in MENA. The key is to use the right proven technology and to be agile in commercial structuring. And the prize could be a boost to MENA’s annual revenues by up to $200 per second (up to $6.4 billion per year) by delivering wasted gas to market by pipeline, as power or in liquid form.

The chart highlights the abundance of flaring across the MENA region, and in many cases, their proximity to population centres. While Iran, Iraq, and Algeria generate 75% of MENA’s flaring, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and Qatar are notable for their relatively low ‘flaring intensity’ i.e. flaring normalized to oil production.

In today’s world of lower energy prices, it makes sense to monetise every molecule. Even more so for national oil companies, which are responsible for most of the flaring, since they are not only the custodians of their countries’ natural resources, but they also generate a dominant source of government revenue.

Most oil producers in MENA have already made commitments to the World Bank’s flaring-reduction initiatives (e.g. ‘Zero Routine Flaring by 2030’), but to date, delivery is mostly lacking. Three main issues have hindered progress.

Firstly, operators, regulators, and governments highlight that flaring is often not ‘sufficiently on the radar’. Flaring is often underreported if not ignored or denied - although satellite detection gives unavoidable transparency. In MENA alone, more than 1,700 flare clusters are visible every day from space.

Secondly, flare capture is sometimes not perceived to be economically viable due to costs, taxes, or inappropriate technology. Thirdly, there are often issues around resources, especially concerning management bandwidth, delivery capabilities or financing.

Yet these issues can be solved if the right proven technologies are combined with the right commercial structures. To accelerate flare capture projects, stakeholders in the MENA hydrocarbons sector must consider several complementary, action-oriented initiatives.

In particular, they should:

• Promote transparency and disclosure to drive greater awareness of flaring. Governments, regulators and operators must understand the real scale of their gas flaring opportunity and be capable of acting, as a recent report for the EBRD on Egypt highlighted. Compliance with clear standards for measuring, monitoring and verification is critical.
• Advance policies and incentives which encourage action. Better commercial terms will incentivise and accelerate flare investments. Stronger penalties will help, but independent and capable regulators must actually enforce these penalties. Through the use of such clear anti-flaring policies, Norway’s flaring intensity is almost 20 times lower than the MENA region.
• Improve the investment climate, beyond economics and open access to a broader range of players. Local market failures can be avoided by reducing the complexity and cost of in-country operations and by removing excessive, rigid, or redundant regulations. By enabling greater ‘third-party’ access to gas and power projects and infrastructure, new players can accelerate change by deploying new technologies and new operating models. Better third-party access will also unlock ideas, capital, skills and project-specific financing options. Algeria is making steps towards such liberalisation through its new 2019 Hydrocarbon Law.
• Reduce subsidies and improve energy efficiency and reduce demand, increase gas exports and boost national revenues. Countries with large subsidies on transport fuels and power, such as Algeria and Iraq, stand to gain the most.
• Encourage collaboration between stakeholders in industry and government by creating working groups to radiate best practices, build capacity, deploy technology and local content, such as the flare minimization programme in Saudi Arabia or Iraq’s major flare-to-power project operated by the Basrah Gas Company.

The industry needs to prepare for a greener world after COVID-19 and investors and consumers are demanding cleaner fuels. Since gas is widely viewed as a transition fuel, MENA governments and stakeholders must work to eliminate its wastage and seize the revenue, production and environmental opportunities that flare capture projects offer.

There is much new leadership in the region in government and critical institutions with new mandates for change. The time to act is now.

For a leader who had not travelled abroad since his inauguration – skipping G20 and APEC summits and the UN General Assembly – and who is probably one of the most intellectually incurious and disinterested Mexican presidents of the modern era when it comes to global issues, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador could have certainly waited until after the US elections in November to travel to Washington and personally engage with President Donald Trump .

Instead, Lopez Obrador – who has sought at all cost to avoid conflict with his US counterpart, having decided that bending the knee was a better option than standing his ground with Trump – waded straight into electoral politics in the US, despite his repeated assurances to the contrary.

The decision to travel now to Washington was fraught with political and diplomatic challenges, not least the fact that President Trump will use President Lopez Obrador as an electoral prop.

To American audiences, at a time when the US is riven by social and political convulsion unseen in 50 years since the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, meeting with Trump in Washington just before the general campaign starts was seen by many as a pat on the back for a polarizing and unpopular president.

In Mexico, most discussion has been about the merits and timing of the visit, with one El Financiero newspaper poll conducted a week before showing public support (59%) for the trip, while a post-visit Reforma newspaper survey showed that a substantial majority of those polled (69%) believe a Biden victory in November is a better outcome for Mexico.

While it’s true that Lopez Obrador returned to Mexico unscathed, his visit – and his baffling Rose Garden remarks stating that Trump (the most anti-Mexican US president in modern history) has shown respect to Mexico and Mexicans – is certainly a slap in the face to migrants in the US, 11 million of whom are Mexicans, to American NGOs and activists that defend the rights of migrants and enlightened immigration and asylum policies, and a boon to Trump’s dog-whistle xenophobia and chauvinism.

Lopez Obrador’s words added insult to injury by asserting the US president has never imposed anything on Mexico, blithely ignoring Trump’s March 2019 threat to impose punitive tariffs on Mexico unless the country deterred and stopped Central American transmigration flows through Mexico on their way to the US.

Certainly if the purpose of the visit was to celebrate the July 1 entry into force of the USMCA – a spin made even more hollow by the fact that Canadian Prime minister Justin Trudeau decided to skip the event – then Lopez Obrador should have been reaching out to the Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership to meet and thank them too, given the important role they played in supporting the revamping of NAFTA and the ratification of the USMCA.

The best-case scenario is that the meeting between the presidents will be leveraged by both governments to address looming hurdles with the entry into force of the USMCA.

But Trump still seems intent on wielding punitive tariffs and mercantilist measures to extract concessions from either Canada or Mexico. And across the border, the Lopez Obrador government – and his party in Congress – continue enacting abrupt policy shifts and changes to the rules across different sectors of the economy that bode ill for the level playing field required under the USMCA.

What could have easily been achieved via a virtual event has now morphed into a second successive Mexican government jumping on the Trump electoral bandwagon, after Enrique Peña Nieto’s ill-advised invitation to then-candidate Trump to travel to Mexico, and a new opportunity for the US president to ‘pimp’ Mexico for his campaign purposes. Perceptions have certainly deepened among Democrats that Lopez Obrador prefers to see Trump re-elected.

Although Lopez Obrador’s aim was to buy Mexico time between now and January of next year by hoping this visit will contain Trump’s anti-Mexican tirades on the campaign trail, whether or not Trump stops using Mexico as a political-electoral piñata is yet to be seen. I would not hold my breath.

Moreover, for a leader whose default position is ‘the best foreign policy is domestic policy’, the trip lays bare a paradox in Lopez Obrador’s mantra. It is precisely Mexico’s domestic weaknesses and failings that create foreign policy vulnerabilities, particularly vis-à-vis the Trump administration. And it is likely these will be used in the coming weeks and months to once again to pressure Mexico in what has become Trump’s ‘Sinatra Policy’ towards his southern neighbour: 'My Way'.

Perception is indeed reality, and Lopez Obrador – and more importantly Mexico – can ill-afford to be perceived as Trump’s patsies at this juncture of American history. As many expected, it only took four hours after President Lopez Obrador’s White House remarks for Trump-supporting Hispanic-outreach social media accounts to start piggybacking on them. Campaign officials have also specifically said they will likely use his quotes in TV ads aimed at Hispanic voters later this year.

In addition, there is a potentially bumpy road ahead for Mexico’s relationship with the Democratic Party. The statements and tweets issued by former vice-president Joe Biden, Biden campaign surrogates and officials, prominent Hispanic Democrats in Congress, and the Democratic National Chair signal as such, as does a letter sent the same day of the visit by Democratic representatives regarding outstanding labour issues in Mexico related to USMCA compliance and enforcement.

This trip could have a long-standing impact for Mexico’s relationship with the US – and US society – and the voters that will determine the future of this country in the decades to come. Lopez Obrador’s meeting with Trump could well become a ‘travel now, pay later’ moment in Mexico-US relations.

Although the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is focused on the Line of Contact around Nagorny Karabakh, a new - and significant - outbreak of violence has happened some 300 kilometres away on high ground along the de jure Armenia-Azerbaijan border.

Although not a first, violence in this area has generally been contained by the proximity of major transport and infrastructure arteries, and of civilian populations on both sides of the border. Plus, unlike in Nagorny Karabakh, the extended deterrents conferred by Armenia’s membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and bilateral agreements with Russia are also – theoretically at least – in force.

Despite this, battlespaces opened rapidly, with bombardment of civilian homes, drone strikes and cyberattacks on government and other sites being widely reported by both sides. At the time of writing, combined reported casualties were already at least 16, the highest for a single incident since April 2016’s ‘four-day war’.

Most are known to be Azerbaijani combatants, including the highest-ranking Azerbaijani serviceman to be killed in action since the 1990s – the respected Major General Polad Hashimov. And, although rumoured to be removed soon anyway following a campaign of negative briefing, Azerbaijani foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov was publicly blamed in the immediate aftermath for ‘meaningless’ diplomacy and dismissed. He was replaced by education minister Jeyhun Bayramov.

Origins of the clashes

How the fighting began remains unclear. The escalation did not appear to result from a coordinated offensive operation of the kind that led to the four-day war, nor are there obvious strategic goals for either side in terms of the international border. There does appear to have been an element of surprise as an Azerbaijani vehicle unexpectedly encountered a new Armenian post, triggering deadly artillery exchanges.

Unclear boundaries in highland terrain may have played a role. Although referred to as the international border, the de jure boundary between Armenia and Azerbaijan - previously an inconsequential internal administrative boundary in the Soviet Union - is not clearly demarcated in many areas and does not coincide with lines of actual control.

Here, as in Nakhichevan - Azerbaijan’s exclave bordering Armenia and Iran - Armenian and Azerbaijani forces have been engaged in long-term, incremental competition for tactical advantage by claiming higher ground in ‘no man’s lands’. But in remote and cartographically ambiguous areas, the precise location of borders - and even place-names - are unclear, and rival forces can unexpectedly meet their adversaries.

Although clear strategic objectives appear absent, what might then have been a lesser incident escalated purposefully into a crisis – suggesting a political rationale.

A missed opportunity for a negotiations reset

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan began 2020 with unfinished consolidations of domestic power - whether bottom-up in the case of Armenia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’, or top-down in the case of Azerbaijan elite renewal. COVID-19 then added further challenges, with the government of Armenia facing significant domestic criticism for its handling of the pandemic, while numerous opposition activists in Azerbaijan were arrested, and the country’s economic vulnerability to external shocks was highlighted.

But throughout this, the frontlines did remain calm - as they generally have since the three-year period from 2014-2017 which witnessed regular skirmishes, use of heavy weaponry and four days of intensive combat in April 2016. In January 2019, the OSCE Minsk Group made the often-cited announcement that the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan had agreed on the necessity of ‘preparing their populations for peace’.

Although the quietest year on the frontline since the 1990s then followed, neither side invested seriously in a peace strategy. After a reasonable start and moves towards humanitarian cooperation, relations between President Ilham Aliyev and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan eventually visibly soured.

Several moves, such as the go-ahead for new infrastructure in the occupied territories and Pashinyan’s attendance at de facto leader Arayik Harutyunyan’s inauguration in Nagorny Karabakh, were received in Azerbaijan as evidence of Armenian insincerity towards the peace process.

More inflammatory rhetoric then resumed, leading the OSCE Minsk Group to call for calm at the end of June. As recently as July 7, President Aliyev expressed public criticism of the peace process and emphasised the validity of Azerbaijan’s right to use force.

Each new round of Armenian-Azerbaijani fighting serves as an audit of the various restraining factors preventing a larger war. A Russian-Euro-Atlantic-Iranian consensus on proactively containing any new Armenian-Azerbaijani war appears to still hold, although senior-level attention from US secretary of state Mike Pompeo trailed that of his counterparts.

Russia acted quickly to offer mediation, reflecting the reality that any large-scale Armenia-Azerbaijan war would test Russia’s extended deterrence guarantees to Armenia. As in April 2016, Turkey has been vigorous in its support of Azerbaijan, raising concerns in Armenia and drawing oblique warnings from Russia. On the other hand, the CSTO - much to Armenian chagrin - dithered, initially calling then postponing a meeting citing the need for more time to study the situation.

Unprecedented spontaneous demonstrations in Baku called for war with Armenia, broke into the Azerbaijani parliament and, in some cases, articulated anti-government slogans. In the absence of reliable polling, such protests cannot be taken as evidence of a popular consensus in favour of war.

But they do underline the importance of the conflict as the one issue in Azerbaijan where open protest is accepted as legitimate and cannot easily be dispersed. As losses over the past week are counted, the dismissal of the foreign minister may not be sufficient to quell public anger.

Prospects are now real of a return to the dynamics in 2014-15: recursive low-level violence aimed at influencing the diplomatic calendar and public opinion while remaining below the deterrence threshold for triggering active external involvement.

Russia is one of the few countries in the region to have no legal definition of domestic violence and, as a result, there are no protective measures specific to domestic violence such as restraining orders or compulsory anger management training for abusers. In fact, the government has taken steps in recent years to remove any legal distinction between assault happening in one’s home, and elsewhere, with battery among family or household members for first-time offences decriminalized in 2017.

The Russian Ministry of Justice explicitly defended this position in its response to an enquiry into Russian domestic violence cases by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in November 2019. The ministry claimed existing legislation adequately protects citizens from domestic violence, ‘even though it has never been considered a separate offence’, reiterating that there is ‘no need’ for adopting specific legislation.

However, the four cases that led to the ECtHR’s enquiry demonstrate that current legislation is not sufficient. The most prominent case is that of Margarita Gracheva whose ex-husband severed her hands in 2017 despite her having made multiple complaints to the police ahead of the act being committed. If Russian legislation had mechanisms in place to isolate victims from their abusers, then Gracheva could have been protected by the law.

Instead, systemic impunity for abusers is supported by statements from people in power excusing domestic violence. The most recent of such statements came from the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, in June 2020. When meeting with the family of a young woman allegedly murdered by her husband, Chechnya’s leader said, husbands beating their wives ‘happens’ and that the young woman should have tried harder to hold on to her marriage. These statements send clear signals to abusers that their actions are justified, and to the victims, that they won’t be protected if they were to come forward.

Similarly, to other parts of the world, civil society organizations in Russia have reported an increase in the number of cases of domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. On a personal level, the pandemic has often exacerbated many of the factors that can lead to domestic violence such as stress, economic anxiety or social isolation.

On a systemic level, many of the provisions intended to protect victims of violence, which were already ineffective in Russia, have been worsened during the lockdown. Where police may not have rapidly responded to reports of domestic violence previously, under lockdown, they have become focused on  other priorities and, where shelters and support networks for the victims may have been scarce in the past, they have been further constrained.

Unsurprisingly, the strategy of the Russian state so far has been to deny that there is a problem of domestic violence, with the Ministry of Interior reporting that, according to their statistics, the number of domestic violence cases have gone down during the lockdown. Indeed, Chairwoman of the Federation Council, Valentina Matvienko, has said she does not believe lockdown has increased domestic violence because, on the contrary, families have been  ‘brought together’, reflecting wishful thinking at best and negligence at worst.

The pandemic has also been used as an excuse to postpone discussion of a federal law on domestic violence, drafted by civil society, that was submitted for review by the Duma last year. This bill would have introduced different types of domestic violence such as psychological and economic violence and transferred domestic violence offences from private to public prosecutions to make it easier for victims to seek justice.

The government’s disregard for domestic violence reflects, in part, the patriarchal mindsets of those in power but perhaps, more significantly, the Kremlin’s belief that conservative social groups constitute its main support base. This has been made evident by the politicization of Russia’s ‘traditional’ values in recent years which was vigorously deployed throughout the constitutional amendments campaign. While it is clear that the true purpose of amending the constitution has always been to allow Vladimir Putin to stay in power beyond 2024, amendments relating to this were absent from the government’s campaign. Instead, Russians were encouraged to vote by populist socially-conservative messages, hence why respect for traditional values has been added to the constitution.

Despite this, attitudes in Russian society are changing. A February 2020 survey by the Levada Centre showed that 61 per cent of Russians – and 74 per cent of Russian women – think domestic violence is a serious problem.

Moreover, the survey shows that women are much more aware of domestic violence than men – with every third woman in Russia admits being aware of domestic violence in their social circles while only every fifth man admits the same. This could be a sign that Russian men and women, on average, have a different understanding of what constitutes domestic violence. If so, adopting a law that defines domestic violence and holding a public awareness campaign is of paramount importance to eliminate any misunderstanding.

The difference could also be a sign that victims of domestic violence are more likely to confide in women hence making domestic violence less visible to men. This awareness gap perhaps explains the difference between men’s and women’s assessments of how serious the issue in Russia is.

The pandemic has provoked a new wave of discussions of domestic violence among Russia’s population with stories and statistics widely shared in the media and on the internet. As domestic violence becomes more visible, public perceptions are likely to shift further towards recognizing, and hopefully condemning, it. But, while legislation is crucial, the experience of other countries in the region, such as Armenia or Kazakhstan, shows that adopting laws on domestic violence is not enough. Measures are needed to ensure implementation of the law including training police officers and state officials and instituting disciplinary action for negligence of victims’ complaints.

Nevertheless, admitting there is a problem with domestic violence in Russia, and introducing laws, are an essential first step. The Russian government seems to have placed its bet on the support of conservative social groups but changing public opinion may prove this strategy unsustainable.

The virus of violence

During quarantine, the greater economic vulnerability of Ukrainian women has locked many of them with abusive partners. The uncertainty of personal finances, health and security in confinement has exacerbated domestic violence against women, in certain cases aggravated by the perpetrator’s war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In pre- pandemic times, only one third of domestic violence victims, 78% of whom are women, reported the abuse. During the pandemic, the calls to domestic violence helplines increased by 50% in the Donbas war zone and by 35% in other regions of Ukraine.

However, more precise estimates are hard to make. This is largely because some fractions of Ukrainian society still see domestic violence as a private family matter, which will get little assistance from the police. Also, reporting from a small confinement place permanently shared with a perpetrator during the lockdown can trigger more abuse.

The COVID-19-tested legal framework

The spike in domestic violence during lockdown has intensified the debate about the inadequacy of Ukraine’s approach.

Ukraine adopted the law on domestic violence in 2017 and made such behaviour punishable under administrative and criminal law. Importantly, the law does not limit domestic violence to physical abuse, but recognizes its sexual, psychological and economic variations. Domestic violence is further not limited to a married couple or close family members, but can be perpetrated against a distant relative or a cohabiting partner.

The extended definition of rape now includes rape of a spouse or a family member as an aggravating circumstance. A special police unit has been designated to deal with domestic abuse cases. Police can now issue protection orders in prompt reaction to an offence and immediately distance a perpetrator from a victim.

The victim can also spend time in a shelter - a system which the Ukrainian government has promised to create. A special registry of domestic violence cases has been set up for the exclusive use by the designated law enforcement and social security authorities to help them be more holistically informed in building a response.

However important, the introduced legal and institutional infrastructure was slow in proving its efficiency pre-COVID-19. It is struggling even more to stand the test of the coronavirus.

Changing the established mindset takes time. 38% of Ukraine’s judges and 39% of prosecutors still struggle to see domestic violence not as a household issue. Even though the police are becoming more reactive to home abuse complaints, getting emergency protection orders is still difficult. The court restraining orders are more effective, however they require the unnecessarily protracted and humiliating procedures of proving one’s own victimhood to different state authorities.

In response to the challenges of coronavirus for women, the police spread information posters and created a special chat-bot about the available help. However, while the domestic violence helplines of La Strada and other human rights NGOs are busier than ever, the police statistics suggest that the lockdown has not catalyzed home abuse.

This could indicate a higher trust to non-state institutions and the inability of a considerable group of women to use more sophisticated communication means such as chat-bots when they cannot call the police in the presence of an abuser. This problem is exacerbated by a current  lack of shelters in rural areas, as most are located in urban settings. Overcrowded in ordinary times, the shelters’ capacity to accept survivors during the lockdown is further limited by the social distancing rules.

Istanbul Convention – The bigger picture

Ukraine failed to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women, better known as the Istanbul Convention, largely due to the opposition of religious organizations. Concerned that the treaty’s terms ‘gender’ and ‘sexual orientation’ would contribute to the promotion of same-sex relationships in Ukraine, they argued that Ukraine’s current legislation provides adequate protection against domestic violence. However, this is not the case.

The Istanbul Convention does not ‘promote’ same-sex relationships, it only mentions sexual orientation among the non-exhaustive list of prohibited discrimination grounds. Remarkably, Ukraine’s domestic violence law itself is against such discrimination.

The Convention defines ‘gender’ as the socially constructed roles a society attributes to women and men. Ukraine’s overcautiousness about the term is ironic at least in two dimensions.

First, the 2017 domestic violence law restates its aim to eliminate discriminating beliefs about the social roles of each ‘sex’. In doing so, the law supports the rationale of what the Istanbul Convention denotes as ‘gender’ without using the term itself.

Second,  it is exactly the constraints of the rigidly defined niches for both sexes in Ukraine that have substantially contributed to the intensified domestic violence, whether it be  war or  coronavirus-related. The lack of sustainable psychological support for traumatized veterans and the stigma of mental health struggles, especially among men, mars their reintegration to peaceful life. This often results in alcohol abuse or even suicide.

As the economic uncertainty of the war and the virus prevents some men from fully living up to their traditional socially - and self-imposed - breadwinner role, this increases the risk of problematic behaviour and domestic violence.

By diverting the focus of the debate  to the term ‘gender’ used in the Istanbul Convention, conservative groups have ignored the fact that it describes the priority already enshrined in Ukraine’s 2017 law - to eliminate discriminatory beliefs about the socially constructed roles of men and women. This has drawn away time and resources needed to protect those vulnerable to domestic abuse.

Ukraine has not addressed the pigeonholing of women and men into gendered stereotypes. This has harmed men while further victimizing women and children, especially during the lockdown. Ironically, this is leading to the undermining of the very traditional family values certain opponents of the Istanbul Convention appealed to.

Fortunately, Ukraine’s ever-vigilant civil society,  dismayed at the wave of the lockdown domestic violence, petitioned President Zelenskyy to ratify the Convention. With a new draft law on ratification, the ball is now in the parliament’s court. It remains to be seen whether Ukraine’s policymakers will be up to the task.            

The UK has been redeploying diplomatic, defence and development capabilities towards the Sahel since 2018 – a strategic pivot intended to deliver development impact, address long term security threats to UK interests and support alliances with international partners.

The Sahel is one of Africa’s poorest and most fragile regions and has witnessed an escalation in jihadist activity, illegal migration and trafficking since a security crisis erupted in Mali in 2012.

The crisis spread to Niger and Burkina Faso and may now spill over into Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Senegal. With Nigeria also facing insurgency in the Lake Chad basin, all major regional security and economic anchors in the region are under threat including key UK partners. 

Reviewing the Sahel pivot

This pivot has already resulted in the expanding of UK embassies in Senegal, Mauritania and Mali and public commitments to opening new ones in Chad and Niger.

Back in London, there has also been a large uplift of staff including the setting up of a cross-Whitehall Joint Sahel Department in late 2018 and plans for more UK civil servants to have placements with the French government on the Sahel.

Yet in light of looming economic shocks from Brexit and Covid-19, there has been a lively debate in Whitehall on whether this is stretching UK resources too thin in an area of Africa that does not have close ties with the UK.

UK ministers are this week reviewing the Sahel pivot and will decide if it continues or grinds to a standstill including whether full embassies are opened in Niger and Chad.

This debate is not new. The UK has opened and closed its diplomatic missions in the Sahel in fits and starts since the early 1960s. More recently, MI6 pushed the re-opening of the embassy in Bamako in 2010 foreseeing Mali’s fragility before the current crisis started.

Partnering with the French

But though the Sahel is likely to dominate the Africa peace and security agenda for decades to come, the UK’s serious engagement in the region is not just about strategic foresight.

It also fulfils two other objectives: of partnership with two key bilateral allies, particularly France, and authority and leverage in multilateral fora such as the United Nations, African Union and the EU.

Partnering with the French in the Sahel has become even more important due to Brexit and the need to reinforce relationships with key European partners.

In 2012, David Cameron concluded that the rapid French response to stop a jihadist advance on the Malian capital Bamako was 'in our interests' and authorized the deployment of 330 UK military personnel, two cargo aircraft and a surveillance plane.

In July 2018, the UK announced further support to French led Opération Barkhane sending three Royal Air Force Chinook helicopters – supported by almost 100 personnel – which remain in theatre to this day.

UN commitment

Demonstrating the UK’s commitment to UN peacekeeping has also resulted in the deployment of 250 troops to join a UN peacekeeping mission to Mali later this year.

Based in Gao, these troops will form a long-range reconnaissance capability providing threat awareness, contributing to the protection of civilians and helping to prevent conflict from spilling over to neighbouring states.

This represents one of the biggest British peacekeeping deployments since Bosnia and it will be the most dangerous mission for British forces since Afghanistan.

The UK is also one of the largest humanitarian donors to the region and has contributed over £500 million in bilateral development and humanitarian assistance since 2015.

With COVID-19 now an additional challenge in the Sahel, a significant part of the UK’s £764 million contribution to the global COVID-19 effort will be channelled to the region.

New embassies are 'global Britain' strategy pillars

Keeping an eye on the impact of these initiatives requires a meaningful UK diplomatic network on the ground.

New embassies in the Sahel cost a fraction of maintaining three Chinook helicopters in the region providing the government real time insight in the post-Brexit absence of a regular supply of country analysis from the European External Action Service and support for the UK’s international relationships.

It also underlines the UK’s commitment to UN peacekeeping and standing as a permanent member of the UN Security Council in light of regular discussions of the Sahel.

The tripartite ministerial review of the Sahel pivot by the secretaries of state for foreign affairs, international development and defence that is underway should not penny pinch by reversing the opening of small embassies in Niger and Chad nor threaten the overall strategic focus on the Sahel – most recently welcomed by the House of Lord’s Select Committee on International Relations and Defence in its July report on UK Africa policy.

Instead, UK ministers should focus on better defining what the UK’s specific objectives are in the Sahel and particularly what the UK plans to do about Burkina Faso whose rapidly deteriorating security threatens to over-spill into key UK partner Ghana.

This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph.

Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka deserves sanctions. This election campaign in Belarus, which culminated in a vote on Sunday is the most brutal and dirty in its history. But, so far, the EU, the UK and the US have only issued familiar-sounding and futile appeals to the Belarusian authorities condemning their actions. Not imposing sanctions is a de facto licence to continue with repression.

Despite all this, the West is unlikely to impose significant sanctions afterwards. There are several questionable reasons for this. First, Western policymakers fear sanctions against Lukashenko will make him more likely to genuflect to Russia. However, relations with Russia have already deteriorated as Belarus accuses Russia of trying to interfere with its domestic affairs.

Sanctions serve as a wake-up call. The Belarusian authorities then might seek - once again - to repair relations with the West and reduce repression for greater assistance in any direct confrontation with Russia.

Second, the West is reluctant to implement sanctions because it has already invested somewhat in warming relations with Belarusian authorities. Punishing Lukashenko could mean burying the - admittedly modest - achievements of a Belarus-West dialogue that started in 2014 after the conflict in Ukraine began.

Even US secretary of state Mike Pompeo met with Lukashenko in Minsk this year, after which Belarus replaced a small but symbolic amount of Russian oil for American. All the same, the West has its conscience to answer to if dialogue is won but repressions continue.

The third reason why the West may not resort to targeted economic sanctions and visa restrictions is a latent concern whether such measures have any effect on democratization processes at all. They may be appropriate punishment, but there is little evidence they ever change the nature of a regime.

According to this logic, if the West imposes sanctions, the Belarusian authorities will continue to crack down with repression because they will have nothing to lose. That said, in previous years, the Belarusian authorities have released political prisoners in response to sticks and carrots brandished by the West. If Belarusian political prisoners did not have a price tag, the authorities would most likely keep everyone in jail.

To be fair, there are reasonable arguments in favour of and against sanctions. But if the West fails to impose them - be it through lack of political will or out of genuine concern about their effectiveness - at least it should focus on helping ordinary Belarusians withstand Lukashenko’s repressions. After the vote, arrested and jailed Belarusian citizens might lack money for lawyers and arbitrarily imposed fines.

If repression spreads further, independent media and human rights organizations will need funds to keep their structures running in the heat of the crackdown. Many entrepreneurs might lose their companies for openly supporting free elections. Thus, if the West will not sanction Lukashenko, it should at least show solidarity with these Belarusians in peril.

This article was originally published in The Telegraph.

Despite being such a historic selection, in certain aspects, Kamala Harris does not actually signal change. She is a moderate in the Democratic Party, an insider more than an outsider, and a highly experienced leader with national, state level and city level credentials. She worked as a district attorney in San Francisco for several years before being elected attorney general for the state of California, and then to the US Senate in 2016. Harris also stood as a candidate against Biden in the contest to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.

Like Joe Biden, she is a highly experienced leader with strong credentials. But California is solidly blue, so she cannot deliver a new state for him. In many ways she is a safe choice and — at a time when Biden is far ahead of Donald Trump in the polls and America faces a lot of uncertainty — many leading political analysts say safe is exactly what the Democratic candidate needs.

But certainly as a signal to the American people, and the rest of the world, of what America is and what it stands for, the choice of Kamala Harris is truly historic. The senator from California is the first African-American woman, and the first Asian-American woman, on the presidential ticket. If Biden wins in November, Harris becomes the first female vice-president.

The historic aspects do not end there. Harris also represents a rapidly growing segment of the US population, but one that gets far less mention — multi-racial Americans. The exact size of America’s multi-racial population has been notoriously hard to measure, especially as it has only been 15 years since the US Census Bureau allowed Americans to choose more than one race when completing their census form. But America has long seen itself as a melting pot, so Harris’s place on the ballot underscores a national narrative with a deep resonance across the country, not least among America’s schoolchildren.

In recent weeks, it came to feel inevitable Biden would choose an African-American running mate. His selection comes at a time when more Americans than ever before have taken to the streets to protest the brutal killing of George Floyd and racial injustice. And the demand for racial equality has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic which has disproportionately affected African-Americans who are dying from the virus at around double the rate of their white American counterparts, while twice the number of black businesses are closing relative to their white counterparts.

The choice of Harris also speaks to another fundamental aspect of the ‘American dream’. She is the daughter of two immigrant parents, her father being from Jamaica and her mother from India. Immigration has become one of the toughest issues in US politics, and immigrants have suffered repeated rhetorical attacks from Trump. One of Harris’s first stands in the US Senate was against President Trump’s entry ban to the US on several countries with majority Muslim populations.

When it comes to questions of identity, the choices that the US electorate now face in November could not be more stark. President Trump used the opportunity of the July 4 weekend to deliver a speech at Mount Rushmore which appeared to actively seek division and to ignite America’s cultural wars.

By choosing Kamala Harris, Biden also continues to signal that he will lead from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

Harris may be left of Biden, but she is far to the right of other well-known progressive candidates, especially Elizabeth Warren. She has not, for example, supported more far-reaching measures to redistribute wealth, especially the proposal for a wealth tax. And she has a track record of being tough on crime during her years as a prosecutor. Although she played an active role in recent protests and signalled her commitment to police reform and anti-lynching laws, not all young or progressive protesters will be easily persuaded by her credentials.

However, for voters who hoped for a more progressive candidate, two factors play to the advantage of the Biden-Harris ticket. This election still looks set to be a referendum on President Trump and — especially now — his ability to manage the public health and economic crises at home. And Biden has continued to include the progressive side of the Democratic Party in his plans, giving Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez key roles in developing climate proposals, and establishing a series of Unity task forces to bring the party together.

There are also other more conventional factors at play. Biden has relied on the support of African-American and also female voters. While Harris may not broaden this support, it should help ensure these voters turn out — if primarily via their postal box — to vote for Biden. His choice of Kamala Harris answers the one big outstanding question facing his candidacy and signals the true beginning of the race to the White House.

For decades, the mantra of ‘economic diversification’ characterized attempts to reverse Nigeria’s dependence on oil with little real progress. Despite numerous reforms, international loans and restructuring programmes, 85 million Nigerians live in deteriorating conditions of poverty. The current coronavirus pandemic combined with mounting debt obligations and declining GDP gives new urgency to this issue.

The fall in international oil prices, which led government to slash its oil benchmark price from $57 to $30 a barrel and cut 20% of the capital budget, worsens these problems, but it is far from the only factor. Biomass, which drives household pollution and contributed to the death of 114,000 people in Nigeria in 2017, is the most dominant source of energy in Nigeria, amounting to more than 80% of the total energy mix, followed by fossil fuels (18%), and a negligible amount of renewable energy.

Although a diversified energy sector with a strong emphasis on renewables is known to reduce health and economic risks of combustion, there has been little emphasis on the role a diversified energy mix could play in ensuring sustainable development – even though the estimated potential of 427,000MW of solar power and photovoltaic generation means Nigeria has enormous renewable energy opportunities.

The global economy is also undergoing tectonic structural changes that will affect demand for Nigeria’s oil, leaving a fossil fuel-dependent economy more vulnerable. Improvements in global fuel efficiency, the ascent of electricity as a substitute for oil in the transport sector, and the falling prices of renewables and storage technologies all lead to a reduction in demand for fossil fuel products.

Creating structures for transition

This is not a ‘get out of oil’ prescription, and energy transition is complex. But it is inevitable. There are no universal strategies applicable to all countries; local contexts and political realities inform what is possible. Nigeria can take advantage of its abundant natural gas deposit as a ‘transition fuel’ to buy it time for putting the appropriate transition structures in place. The country has made progress in reducing the amount of gas flared, but much remains to be done for Nigeria to meet the 2030 global deadline to end flaring, after failing to meet its 2020 national target.

The first step to proper transition is to align Nigeria’s international obligations with its domestic policies and legislations - the distance between words and action must be bridged and the institutional capacity to implement raised. And, while they contain symbolic green gestures, the economic recovery and growth plan developed in response to the 2016 recession, and the post-COVID-19 economic sustainability plan, do not espouse green growth as a fundamental objective.

Nigeria must start looking inwards, investing its resources in designing and funding a green transition strategy. Its leadership role in floating Africa’s first Sovereign Green Bonds should be followed with non-debt funding options. Faced with a pandemic that has shattered the boundaries of what is politically possible, the Buhari government has overcome initial inertia to announce a halt in oil subsidy payments, although whether it will see through that policy is yet to be seen.

If it does, how it uses the savings will be significant. The money could provide support for Nigeria’s renewable sector to counteract the price disparity with fossil fuels and encourage rapid research and development. The Nigerian Ecological Fund — which is 3% of the Federation Account — should be reformed and expanded beyond its current scope of addressing ‘serious ecological problems’ to cover climate change with a strong emphasis on mitigation and resilience. That would increase Nigeria’s climate finance and minimize reliance on multilateral climate funds.

Beyond public investments in green infrastructure, the government can also incentivize the private sector to drive a green economy. As the largest purchaser of goods and services in the country, it can leverage purchasing power to green the procurement process. With the release of about $421 million to the Ministry of Works, the 2020 budgetary allocation for road projects has been fully disbursed to the Ministry, making procurement in the construction sector ripe for green reforms. The application of sustainable building techniques and materials could reduce Nigeria’s 17 million housing deficit and create more jobs.

But the task of greening the Nigerian economy is too important to be left to the federal government alone. It also requires mainstreaming climate change and sustainable development into the operations, governance, and budgets of government ministries, departments, and private entities at the sub-national and national levels.

There has been much focus on reviving agriculture, which is laudable, but agrarian practices have radically changed from the 1970s when the sector accounted for 57% of Nigeria’s GDP and generated 64.5% of export earnings. Beset by a loss of biodiversity, drought, and desertification, extreme weather events, rise in sea levels and variable rainfall, it is no longer smart for Nigeria to invest in this area without due regard for the significant climate risks. Any effort to revive agriculture and its export potential must be green-centred and integrate regenerative and climate-smart practices.

The right policy mix combined with aggressive funding can position the country as a renewable energy leader, both on the African continent and globally. And it will reap the benefits in technology development, foreign investment, decreased emissions, poverty reduction, and energy for the 80 million people currently without access to the national grid – all of which could ripple into millions of clean energy jobs in manufacturing and installation across the country.

The road to a green future must be paved with deliberate and consistent policies. Reforms hatched because oil prices have plunged should not be ditched when there is a boom. On the brink of a second recession in four years, Nigeria has learnt that the economic turmoil caused by COVID-19 is only the latest warning that pinning economic growth on a boom-bust market and the generosity of foreign donors and creditors is a failing strategy. There is another way and there is an opportunity for Nigeria to lead.

The virus of violence

According to the UN (para. 7) and the International Criminal Court (ICC, para. 279), conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is quite prevalent in hostilities-affected eastern Ukraine. Both sexes are subjected to sexualized torture, rape, forced nudity, prolonged detention in unsanitary conditions with members of the other sex and threats of sexual violence towards detainees or their relatives to force confessions. Men are castrated. Women additionally suffer from sexual slavery, enforced and survival prostitution, and other forms of sexual abuse. Women are more exposed to CRSV: in the hostilities-affected area, every third woman has experienced or witnessed CRSV as opposed to every fourth man.

COVID-19 has redirected funding priorities, affecting the availability of medical and psychological help for CRSV survivors worldwide. In Ukraine, the very reporting of such violence, stigmatized even before the pandemic, has been further undermined by the country-wide quarantine-induced restrictions on movement and the closure of checkpoints between the government-controlled and temporarily uncontrolled areas.

Addressing CRSV in Ukraine

The stigma of CRSV, the patchy domestic legislation, and the unpreparedness of the criminal justice system to deal with such cases prevent the authorities from properly helping those harmed in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine armed conflict.

CRSV is equally traumatizing yet different in nuance for men and women. Female victims often choose not to report the violence. Women avoid protracted proceedings likely to cause re-traumatization and the disclosure of their experience, which could be particularly excruciating in small communities where everybody knows everyone.

Men also struggle to provide their accounts of CRSV. Their suppressed pain and shame of genital mutilation and other CRSV result in sexual and other health disfunctions. Combined with the post-conflict mental health struggles, this has been shown to lead to increased domestic violence and even suicide.

The very investigation of CRSV in Ukraine is challenging. Certain tests and examinations need to be done straight after an assault, which in the context of detention and grey zones of hostilities is often impossible. Specialized medical and psychological support is lacking. Investigators and prosecutors are hardly trained to deal with CRSV to the point that they do not ask questions about it during the interviews. Burdened by trauma and stigma, survivors are inclined to report torture or inhuman treatment, but not the sexualized aspects thereof.

Seven years into the conflict, the state still has not criminalized the full spectrum of CRSV in its domestic law. Ukraine’s Criminal Code contains a brief list of the violations of the rules and customs of warfare in article 438. It prohibits the inhuman treatment of civilians and POWs but does not list any types of CRSV.

The article has an open-ended reference to Ukraine’s ratified international treaties, from which the responsibility for other armed conflict violations may be derived. For the more detailed norms on CRSV, Ukraine should refer at least to Geneva Convention IV protecting civilians and two additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions, to which it is a party.

However, the novelty of the war context for Ukrainian investigators, prosecutors and judges and their overcautiousness about the direct application of international conventions mean that in practice, observing the treaty or jurisprudential instruction on CRSV has been slow.

Use of the Criminal Code’s articles on sexual violence not related to an armed conflict is not viable. Such provisions fail to reflect the horrible variety and complexity of CRSV committed in hostilities. They also envisage lesser punishment than a war crime of sexual violence would entail. Cumulatively, this fails to account for the intention of a perpetrator, the gravity of the crime and the trauma of its victims.

The lack of public debate and state action on CRSV understates its magnitude. Ukraine should break its silence about CRSV in Donbas and make addressing this violence part of its actionable agenda - in law and in implementation.

Ukraine should incorporate all war crimes and crimes against humanity of CRSV in its domestic legislation; ensure a more gendered psychological and medical support for both sexes; establish rehabilitation and compensation programmes for CRSV survivors; create special victims and witness protection schemes; consider the different stigmatizing effects of CRSV on men and women in criminal proceedings and engage the professionals of the same sex as the victim; map CRSV in the bigger picture of other crimes in Donbas to better understand the motives of the perpetrators; submit more information about CRSV to the ICC and educate the public to destigmatize the CRSV survivors.

The drafters of Ukraine’s transitional justice roadmap should ensure that it highlights CRSV, adopts a gendered approach to it and endorses female participation as a crucial component of reconciliation and broader policymaking.

Embracive policymaking

Although ‘the discriminatory line almost inevitably hurts women,’ 'every gender discrimination is a two-edged sword’, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously argued before the US Supreme Court. This could not be more relevant for Ukraine. The conflict - and lockdown-related violence has reverberated deeper within Ukrainian society, raising fundamental questions about the roles of both sexes and gender equality.

The failure to address CRSV and its different stigmas for both sexes mirrors the general lack of sustainable gender lenses in Ukraine's policymaking. It is no coincidence that a June 2020 proposal for gender parity in political parties coincided with another spike of sexist remarks by top officials. While women get access to more positions in the army, sexual harassment in the military is investigated slowly. Despite all the impressive female professionals, no woman made it to the first four-member consultative civic group in the Minsk process. Such lack of diversity sends an unfortunate message that women are not important for Ukraine’s peace process.

Ginsburg said, ‘women belong in all places where decisions are being made.’ CRSV against either sex won’t be addressed properly until both sexes contribute with their talents and their grievances to all pillars of Ukraine’s state governance and strategy. Ukraine should look to engage professional women - and there are plenty - to join its public service not just in numbers, but as the indispensable equal voices of a powerful choir.

Healthy forests have always been a vital resource for the communities living in, and around, them. Offering food, clothing, fuel and medicine, forests also stabilize the water table and guard against soil erosion. Timber from forests also serves local, national and international markets, generates jobs and is an important revenue stream for many governments around the world.

Forests have also increasingly been tasked with combatting the double threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the role of forests in preventing diseases which has further added to the need to preserve the world’s forest area.

However, at the same time, pressure on forest lands is increasing, particularly for agriculture and also for mining, infrastructure and urbanization. But, with myriad demands placed on forests, and impacts that transcend political boundaries, achieving a balance requires a reckoning of local and global priorities.

International forest initiatives until now have, quite rationally, prioritized a globalized conceptualization of forests – privileging their place in global supply chains and global crises. International regulations around timber, for instance, are primarily aimed at securing a long-term source of timber by reducing illegality in the system while national plans under the Paris Agreement focus on forests primarily as a global carbon sink.

Within these initiatives, local impacts are often dealt with as flanking measures. Community benefit-sharing agreements, compensation schemes and incentive programmes are aimed at mitigating impacts and modifying behaviour at the local level so that these align with international goals.

Meanwhile, and despite intense international attention, it has been found that globally natural forest cover declined in the six years since the New York Declaration of Forests set a goal to halve deforestation. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise and, although there have been successes, illegal timber continues to be traded internationally.

To halt these trends, it is important to reflect on the demands being placed on forests and to achieve a better balance between them. But this will require radical change. That’s why, in July, Chatham House convened an online Global Forum on Forest Governance at which these issues were explored.

One issue that was discussed is why it remains vital to listen to, and learn from, a wide range of voices. Single perspectives fail to acknowledge or respond to the full range of pressures exerted on forests therefore it is important to have a range of perspectives including those from the global north and south, economists and agronomists, social scientists and climate scientists.

But beyond the research community, all those who have a stake in forests must be included in the discussion too: women and men, young and old people, those living in urban and rural areas as well as people from the government and private sectors.

This lesson has often been repeated but rarely enacted perhaps because it is not easy to do and takes time. Nevertheless, broadening participation can help deliver the deep-rooted changes that are needed to the way forests are governed and managed.

Considerable evidence exists to show that improvements to governance can facilitate a more equitable approach to forests that better balances the needs and priorities of these different groups. Legal and institutional reforms, for example, that are sensitive to the needs of local populations have precipitated change. Successes in improving transparency have also been a key factor in holding both the private sector and governments to account.

Thus, creating radical change may not mean brand new ideas. Lessons can be learnt from the successes and failures of the past. It will be important that, as new and increasing demands are placed on already overburdened forests, these lessons are not forgotten and previous mistakes are not repeated.

What will matter over the next few years will be which ideas are acted upon and who gets to decide. As more than 100 countries announce plans to increase the ambition of their nationally determined contributions on emission reductions, and as the EU and the US move forward with plans to legislate deforestation out of commodity supply chains, a clear message that has emerged is that local actors need to be in the driving seat. This needs to go beyond listening and consultation to meaningful engagement that gives due weight to local priorities, perspectives and experience.

Having failed to swiftly translate popular support into tangible political achievements, there are signs the protests against the fraudulent presidential election in Belarus may be losing momentum in the face of the state’s resilience and still-confident security and enforcement apparatus.

Attempts to blame the unrest on the West have focused on groups Lukashenka and Russia can both call enemies. And now Aliaksandr Lukashenka is not only inventing anti-Russian policies supposedly held by the opposition, such as suppressing the Russian language and closing the border with Russia, but also a supposed military threat from NATO.

Border movements

Increased military activity inside Belarus does give Lukashenka a wider range of options. Unscheduled activation of military units includes airspace defence practice with missiles and aircraft, electronic warfare (EW) units put on round-the-clock alert, and a number of infantry brigades preparing for live firing exercises.

Lukashenka is drawing attention to the north-west corner of Belarus, singling out the city of Grodno near the border with Poland and Lithuania as a supposed target for Western efforts at destabilization. Grodno is also the destination for an airborne brigade moving from the east to the west of the country and the focus of military exercises under way on the country’s western borders.

All this feeds Lukashenka’s narrative that Belarus is in danger from NATO and the West who are supposedly both stirring up the protests and seeking to exploit disorder - and that this danger extends to possible military clashes.

The Belarusian exercises are over the border from where NATO troops - including elements of the Light Dragoons, a British reconnaissance unit - have been in place in Poland as part of NATO's enhanced forward presence (eFP) since 2017. Pointing to NATO activity in Poland and Lithuania, Lukashenka said on Wednesday ‘we have to follow their movements and plans’ and that ‘they will answer for it if something happens’.

The danger is that having invented a tense situation in Grodno, Lukashenka may now need to be proved right. There may be staged incidents or ‘provocations’ against Belarus military forces, either supposedly instigated by protesters or even by NATO forces on the border - all aimed at bolstering the narrative that NATO, the EU, and the West in general are hostile to Belarus and that more drastic measures are necessary for protection.

Russia’s options still open

Although initial fears of a Russian move into Belarus have receded, Lukashenka’s complaints about NATO also bolster the case for Moscow to intervene. The military exercises fit the narrative that Belarus is under threat from the West - which is exactly the pretext Russia would need.

If this is believed in Moscow, where foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has already described events in Belarus as part of a ‘struggle for the post-Soviet space’, this makes a Russian intervention more likely. Moving forces away from their base near the border with Russia to the other end of the country near Poland and Lithuania also means any Russian entry into Belarus could go more smoothly, with fewer wild cards of possible Belarusian opposition to consider.

There are plenty of sensible, rational, logical reasons why a Russian military intervention in Belarus would be disastrous and counter-productive. But what seems sensible and rational in Europe and North America does not always carry weight in Moscow, which may see the situation completely differently and measure options by completely different standards.

One key area of doubt is the sympathies of the Belarus armed forces. Although some elements of the Belarusian army - particularly airborne and special forces - work closely with their Russian counterparts, more general suggestions that the Belarusian military is merely an extension of Russia’s and is not capable of taking decisions for itself are an over-simplification.

The Belarus armed forces do know that hosting Russian ground troops, airbases or air defence systems would fatally undermine the country’s hopes of avoiding being caught up in any confrontation between Russia and NATO.

And although the great majority of Belarusian officers are Russian-speaking and many have been trained and educated in Russia, there may be sufficient pride in national identity and resentment at heavy-handed treatment by Russia to lead to substantial obstruction of Russian initiatives.

The Belarus General Staff has already refused permission for a Russian aircraft carrying 155 personnel from the Rosgvardiya militarized security force and three tonnes of cargo ‘for the Belarusian interior ministry’ to land in Belarus. This could indicate not only tension between Russia and Belarus, but even between ministries within Belarus itself.

Like Russia, Lukashenka has plenty of options in reserve if his situation deteriorates further. Announcing a state of emergency would allow the Belarusian army to support the security forces in dealing with protests. If the army is on the move with their equipment they are better prepared to be brought into action if needed, but testing the loyalty of the armed forces could prove dangerous if the sympathies of army units turn out to lie more with civilians than with their oppressors from the interior ministry.

The military preparations against fictitious threats and a patiently-waiting Russia is a toxic mix and Belarus’s friends abroad must tread carefully. A key task for the European Union (EU) is to help the Belarusian people without providing a pretext for further violence and Russian intervention.

The right level of engagement needs to be carefully calibrated, avoiding disasters of strategic communication such as European Commissioner Thierry Breton being translated into English as saying Belarus is not part of Europe – with the lack of EU interest that that implies. Although the EU statement promising sanctions and offering funds received a mixed reception, at least it cannot be used by Lukashenka and Vladimir Putin as evidence that their warnings of a Western military threat are genuine.

Among the many unusual features of the pandemic-induced downturn is the disconnect between depressed real economies and buoyant financial markets. This is particularly evident in the US, where output fell 9.5% in the second quarter while the S&P 500 index rose by one-fifth.

This may suggest a huge financial bubble is in the making, or at least a highly optimistic view of a COVID-19 vaccine and treatments. Another possibility is that markets have a better grasp of the economic dynamics of a post-pandemic world than most nervous consumers and governments.

Certainly, markets have been helped by central bank largesse. In March, major central banks reacted forcefully to the possibility of a serious credit crunch with lending guarantees and bond purchases. Such liquidity interventions soothe troubled markets, but they also raise asset prices — potentially into bubble territory. This partly explains the markets’ strength. But it may not be the whole story.

A closer look at market performance suggests they may be on to something more interesting. Compare the US’s broad-based S&P 500 equity index with the tech-focused Nasdaq 100. Since the start of the year, the Nasdaq has risen 24% while the S&P is up just 5%. In the S&P itself, it has been the dramatic rise of the so-called Faang companies — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google/Alphabet — that offset lesser performances by the other 495 companies. This sharp difference reflects two forces.

First, the COVID-19 crisis has had vastly different effects on different sectors. Lockdown brought a sudden increase in demand for the technology services that enable home learning (with school closures), homeworking (especially by office workers), home entertainment (instead of cinemas and theatres), home shopping (instead of physical shops), and home deliveries of almost everything else, including food. The Faang companies benefited disproportionally from this surge in demand as their production is scalable. Much of it could also be delivered by employees who themselves worked from home. The rise in their share prices reflects this.

Meanwhile, other sectors suffered massively. In the UK, the overall drop in gross domestic product of 20% in the second quarter was led by a fall of 87% in the accommodation and food services sector, which was severely affected by government restrictions. About one-quarter of the UK workforce, according to official figures, was also furloughed or temporarily off work without pay during lockdown. The fall in the share prices of hotels, restaurant franchises and airlines reflects such factors. 

The second driver of rising markets is that they are forward-looking while economic statistics reflect the past. For example, that UK GDP shrank during the second quarter is less interesting to a financial investor than the fact that during two months (May and June) GDP expanded by 2.4% and 8.7% respectively. In other words, output troughed in April but recovery began in May and accelerated in June as lockdown restrictions were eased. 

It is likely that rapid adaptations by companies and consumers to the pandemic-supercharged trends are already under way. In Britain, the share of retail sales (excluding fuel) made by ecommerce rose from around 7% in 2010 to 20% at the beginning of 2020 — it has since jumped to more than 30%. 

One-third of those officially working from home meanwhile say that they would like to do that permanently, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, and many large companies have offered their staff this choice.

Even in labour-intensive sectors such as healthcare and government services there has been a replacement of face-to-face delivery with digital booking and screen-based consultations.

Still, while this may help some companies in certain sectors, it does not imply a smooth recovery for the whole economy. Rather, it augurs a period of disruption as new companies, new business models and new job openings emerge. If the pandemic has ignited a Schumpeterian process of creative destruction, that is likely to continue whether or not effective vaccines and treatments ever come. 

Governments should ease the pain of this disruption with supportive fiscal and monetary policies, but they should not try to slow it down. The hopeful market message is that one lasting consequence of COVID-19 may be the rejuvenation of productivity growth that eventually spreads far beyond tech. 

This article was originally published in the Financial Times.

If sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, the EU, or states unilaterally, are not sufficiently targeted, and do not include adequate safeguards for humanitarian action, they can adversely affect the very populations for whose well-being they were imposed in the first place.  This is not a new concern, but one brought starkly to the fore by their impact on responses to COVID-19.

The detrimental impact of sanctions, which can prevent the supply of medical or personal protective equipment (PPE), or the provision of technical support or training to local health authorities is evident. Sanctions can also affect remote learning if support cannot be provided to local education authorities, export licences cannot be obtained for the necessary equipment and software, or if the companies providing reliable internet coverage are designated under the sanctions.

A comparison of US and EU sanctions on Syria reveals key challenges, but also opportunities for improving current arrangements for the imposition and implementation of sanctions so as to minimize adverse consequences in Syria and more generally.

The US has imposed broad sanctions, such as restrictions on the provision of funds, goods or services – even charitable contributions – to the Syrian government, including the health and education ministries, now playing a central role in the COVID-19 response.

UN agencies are exempted from these restrictions. A general license authorizes NGOs to conduct activities to meet basic needs, but it excludes those involving the government. So NGOs wishing to provide medical devices, PPE, training or other support to ministry of health staff have to apply for a specific licence.

But procedures for applying for licences are complicated, and the approval process notoriously slow.  No accommodation has been made to facilitate the COVID-19 response: no interpretative guidance – that would be valuable for all NGOs – has been issued, and no procedures established for reviewing applications more quickly.  There is no statement of policy indicating the circumstances under which specific licences might be granted.

Transactions with designated entities other than the government, such as internet providers whose services are necessary for remote learning, remain prohibited, and regulations expressly preclude applying for specific licences.

US sanctions frequently have a broad scope, both in direct and indirect application.  NGOs registered in the US, and staff who are US nationals, are directly bound by them, and grant agreements between the US government and non-US NGOs require the latter to comply with US sanctions.

This leaves the non-US NGOs in a Catch-22 situation – as they are not ‘US persons’ they cannot apply for specific licenses, but if they operate without such licences they may be violating grant requirements. This lack of clarity contributes to banks’ unwillingness to provide services, and may lead NGOs to curtail their activities.  This situation is regrettable in Syria, where the US is the first donor to humanitarian action, and also arises in other contexts where the US has imposed similar sanctions.

The EU’s sanctions for Syria are far more targeted. Of relevance to the COVID-19 response, they do not include prohibitions on the provision of support to the government that could impede assistance in the medical field.  There are, however, restrictions on the provision of certain types of PPE or substances used for disinfection, and also on transactions with designated telecommunications providers that affect continuity of education during lockdowns.  Although not prohibited, these activities must be authorized by member states’ competent authorities. Similar concerns arise about the complexity and delays of the processes.

The EU sanctions framework is complex, so the recent European Commission Guidance Note on Syria providing official clarification of how it applies to humanitarian action is welcome.  Although the note only explains the existing rules rather than amending them to facilitate the COVID-19 response, it does include a number of important elements relevant not just to Syria, but to the interplay between sanctions and humanitarian action more broadly.

First, it notes that ‘in accordance with International Humanitarian Law where no other option is available, the provision of humanitarian aid should not be prevented by EU restrictive measures’.  This recognizes that humanitarian assistance takes priority over any inconsistent restrictions in sanctions, and it also applies both to UN sanctions and unilateral measures. It is a starting premise that is frequently overlooked in discussions of whether sanctions should include exceptions for humanitarian action.  Its reaffirmation is timely, and it must guide states in drawing up future sanctions.

Second, the note states that sanctions do not require the screening of final beneficiaries of humanitarian programmes.  This means that once someone has been identified as an individual in need on the basis of humanitarian principles, no further screening is required.  This is extremely important to COVID-19 responses as it reflects a foundational principle of IHL that, to the fullest extent practicable, everyone is entitled to the medical care required by their condition without distinction.

Third, while responsibility for the implementation of sanctions, including the granting of authorizations, lies with member states, the note nudges them to adopt a number of measures to expedite and streamline such processes.  These include the suggestion that states could issue a single authorization for the provision of humanitarian aid in response to the pandemic.

The European Commission is to be commended for this initiative, which should be replicated for other contexts where the COVID-19 response may be undermined by sanctions.  These include Gaza, where it would be important to highlight that the designation of Hamas under EU counterterrorism sanctions must not prevent the provision of assistance to relevant ministries.

Failing to draw a distinction between the designated political party and the structures of civil administration risks turning targeted financial sanctions into measures akin to comprehensive sanctions.

The pandemic should serve as a catalyst for improving the system for the adoption and implementation of sanctions by the UN, the EU and individual states, including the UK as it elaborates its sanctions policy post-Brexit. The principles are clear: without prejudicing the aims for which sanctions have been imposed, humanitarian needs must always be prioritized, and met.

AI holds the potential to replace humans for tactical tasks in military operations beyond current applications such as navigation assistance. For example, in the US, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently held the final round of its AlphaDogfight Trials where an algorithm controlling a simulated F-16 fighter was pitted against an Air Force pilot in virtual aerial combat. The algorithm won by 5-0. So what does this mean for the future of military operations?

The agency’s deputy director remarked that these tools are now ‘ready for weapons systems designers to be in the toolbox’. At first glance, the dogfight shows that an AI-enabled air combat would provide tremendous military advantage including the lack of survival instincts inherent to humans, the ability to consistently operate with high acceleration stress beyond the limitations of the human body and high targeting precision.

The outcome of these trials, however, does not mean that this technology is ready for deployment in the battlefield. In fact, an array of considerations must be taken into account prior to their deployment and use – namely the ability to adapt in real-life combat situations, physical limitations and legal compliance.

Testing environment versus real-life applications

First, as with all technologies, the performance of an algorithm in its testing environment is bound to differ from real-life applications such as in the case of cluster munitions. For instance, Google Health developed an algorithm to help with diabetic retinopathy screening. While the algorithm’s accuracy rate in the lab was over 90 per cent, it did not perform well out of the lab because the algorithm was used to high-quality scans in its training, it rejected more than a fifth of the real-life scans which were deemed as being below the quality threshold required. As a result, the process ended up being as time-consuming and costly – if not more so – than traditional screening.

Similarly, virtual environments akin to the AlphaDogfight Trials do not reflect the extent of risks, hazards and unpredictability of real-life combat. In the dogfight exercise, for example, the algorithm had full situational awareness and was repeatedly trained to the rules, parameters and limitations of its operating environment. But, in a real-life dynamic and battlefield, the list of variables is long and will inevitably fluctuate: visibility may be poor, extreme weather could affect operations and the performance of aircraft and the behaviour and actions of adversaries will be unpredictable.

Every single eventuality would need to be programmed in line with the commander’s intent in an ever-changing situation or it would drastically affect the performance of algorithms including in target identification and firing precision.

Hardware limitations

Another consideration relates to the limitations of the hardware that AI systems depend on. Algorithms depend on hardware to operate equipment such as sensors and computer systems – each of which are constrained by physical limitations. These can be targeted by an adversary, for example, through electronic interference to disrupt the functioning of the computer systems which the algorithms are operating from.

Hardware may also be affected involuntarily. For instance, a ‘pilotless’ aircraft controlled by an algorithm can indeed undergo higher accelerations, and thus, higher g-force than the human body can endure. However, the aircraft in itself is also subject to physical limitations such as acceleration limits beyond which parts of the aircraft, such as its sensors, may be severely damaged which in turn affects the algorithm’s performance and, ultimately, mission success. It is critical that these physical limitations are factored into the equation when deploying these machines especially when they so heavily rely on sensors.

Legal compliance

Another major, and perhaps the greatest, consideration relates to the ability to rely on machines for legal compliance. The DARPA dogfight exclusively focused on the algorithm’s ability to successfully control the aircraft and counter the adversary, however, nothing indicates its ability to ensure that strikes remain within the boundaries of the law.

In an armed conflict, the deployment and use of such systems in the battlefield are not exempt from international humanitarian law (IHL) and most notably its customary principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack. It would need to be able to differentiate between civilians, combatants and military objectives, calculate whether its attacks will be proportionate against the set military objective and live collateral damage estimates and take the necessary precautions to ensure the attacks remain within the boundaries of the law – including the ability to abort if necessary. This would also require the machine to have the ability to stay within the rules of engagement for that particular operation.

It is therefore critical to incorporate IHL considerations from the conception and throughout the development and testing phases of algorithms to ensure the machines are sufficiently reliable for legal compliance purposes.

It is also important that developers address the 'black box' issue whereby the algorithm’s calculations are so complex that it is impossible for humans to understand how it came to its results. It is not only necessary to address the algorithm’s opacity to improve the algorithm’s performance over time, it is also key for accountability and investigation purposes in cases of incidents and suspected violations of applicable laws.

Reliability, testing and experimentation

Algorithms are becoming increasingly powerful and there is no doubt that they will confer tremendous advantages to the military. Over-hype, however, must be avoided at the expense of the machine’s reliability on the technical front as well as for legal compliance purposes.

The testing and experimentation phases are key during which developers will have the ability to fine-tune the algorithms. Developers must, therefore, be held accountable for ensuring the reliability of machines by incorporating considerations pertaining to performance and accuracy, hardware limitations as well as legal compliance. This could help prevent incidents in real life that result from overestimating of the capabilities of AI in military operations. 

Whoever occupies the White House after the election, it is evident the emphasis will be on ‘America First’, and that only characteristics and approaches will differ. If Donald Trump is re-elected, his electoral base will support a continuation of isolationist, protectionist policies. If Joe Biden becomes president, he will enjoy some limited popular backing for international re-engagement, but his voters still clearly want him to prioritize domestic issues.

Implications for the foreign policy of the next US administration are evident. America may have a long history of isolationism, but that should not be confused with ignorance of the growing interconnectedness of today’s world. However, Americans are struggling to find a new equilibrium for their country’s role in the world.

Around seven-in-ten hold the view that the United States should take a leading or major role in international affairs, and the same number acknowledge that international events affect their daily life. But Americans remain reticent about global engagement, and half of registered voters believe other countries take unfair advantage of the United States.

This clear contradiction is mirrored in what can be expected from the election victor, with a Joe Biden administration likely to speak for those who want America to lead, while a second Donald Trump administration is expected to continue complaining about US victimization by an ungrateful world.

A majority (57%) of Americans say foreign policy is 'very important' to them as they decide who to vote for in the 2020 election. This may seem like a high priority, but American polls often show many issues are 'very important' to voters. What matters is relative importance and foreign policy pales in comparison with the significance the public accords to the economy (79%) or healthcare (68%). Immigration (52%) and climate change (42%) are of even less relative importance to voters.

Notably, despite the deep partisanship in American politics today, there is no difference between Republican and Democrat voters on the low priority they accord foreign policy. And barely one-third (35%) of the public give top priority to working with allies and international institutions to confront global challenges such as climate change, poverty and disease — in fact only 31% say improving relations with allies should be a top foreign policy priority over the next five years.

However, despite this apparent lack of support for international relations, a rising majority of Americans believe international trade is good for the economy — running contrary to many international assumptions that Americans are inherently protectionist. But this increased interest may not amount to much in reality. Americans also believe trade destroys jobs and lowers wages. Trump is clearly wedded to a protectionist worldview and may continue to try dismantling the World Trade Organization (WTO). Biden is unlikely to initiate any new trade liberalizing negotiations given what would be, at best, a slim Democratic majority in the Senate and anti-trade views held by many unions and blue-collar voters among his constituency. Any political capital he commits to trade is likely to focus on reforming the WTO, but privately his advisers admit they are not optimistic.

In addition, both Biden and Trump face strong public support for ratcheting up pressure on China, although their lines of attack may differ, with Trump likely to double down on tariffs while Biden would work closely with Europe on both trade and human rights issues. More broadly, almost three-quarters (73%) of Americans now express an unfavourable view of China, up 18 points since the last presidential election. One-quarter of Americans classify Beijing as an ‘enemy’ with almost half saying the US should get tougher with China on economic issues, although attitudes do divide along partisan lines, with Republicans generally more critical of Beijing, but Democrats are tougher on human rights.

On immigration, Trump’s policies are out of step with the public. Six-in-ten Americans oppose expanding the border wall with Mexico, 74% support legal status for immigrants illegally brought to the United States as children — including a majority of Republicans (54%) — and as many Americans favour increasing immigration as support decreasing it. But Trump has already promised to double down on limiting immigration if he wins because it is what his Republican electoral base wants and, as with trade, this is one of his long-expressed personal beliefs. If he wins, expect more mass roundups of undocumented people, completion of his border wall and stricter limitations on legal immigration.

In contrast, Biden is likely to loosen constraints on immigration because he believes immigration has been good for the economy and the Democratic party is increasingly dependent on Hispanic and Asian voters, the two fastest growing portions of the population. However, open borders are not a Biden option. The US foreign-born population is at near-record levels and, every time in American history the portion of foreign born has come close to being 14% of the total population — in the 1880s, the 1920s and now — there has been a populist backlash. Democrats cannot risk that again.

On climate change, there is strong evidence the American public is increasingly worried, and likely to support rejoining the Paris Agreement if Biden is elected and increases US commitments to cut carbon emissions. But the public also appears unlikely to punish Trump if, as promised, he leaves that accord, and he is almost certain to continue denying climate science in the interest of the coal, oil, and gas industries.

The public’s concern about global warming does not necessarily translate into support for taking substantive action. There is a huge partisan divide between the number of Democrats (68%) and Republicans (11%) who say climate change is a very important issue in the 2020 election. When pressed on what action they want on climate change, and who they trust to do it, Americans are less likely than Europeans to accept paying higher prices. A carbon tax stands no chance of passing the Senate, thanks to moderate Democrats from fossil-fuel states, and America’s love affair with large, CO²-emitting vehicles shows no signs of ebbing.

The outcome of the 2020 US election will almost certainly not be determined by foreign concerns, although an international crisis — a terrorist incident, a military confrontation with China or North Korea — could impact voting in an unforeseen way. But given the mood of the American electorate, if Trump is re-elected, there will be scant public pressure for a more activist, collaborative US foreign policy, beyond support for a tough line on China, while a win for Biden will give more room for some international initiatives.

But public opinion data is clear. Voters want the next US president to focus first on domestic issues — overcoming the pandemic, digging the country out of a deep economic hole, calming racial tensions, and reversing inequality. The outcome of the election may end America’s recently antagonistic foreign policy and halt the deterioration of its international role. But dramatic American re-engagement appears unlikely as the public’s priorities lie elsewhere.

According to UN Youth, people aged 15-24 make up one-sixth of the world’s population but, in roughly one-third of countries, the eligibility for parliamentarians begins at 25 years old and only 1.6% of parliamentarians are in their twenties. Young people are largely being excluded and overlooked, both as political candidates and even as participants in political processes, giving them limited political control over their own futures. 

If politics continues to be regarded as a space for older, more politically experienced individuals from particular backgrounds, young people will continue to be left systematically marginalized, and overall disengagement with politics within societies will continue to grow. Global leaders may increasingly point out the importance of youth representation in national and international fora, but the reality is their real policymaking impact still comes mainly from self-organized and informal activities.

And yet, despite this continued exclusion, huge numbers of young people are interested in political and civic engagement, and they have been driven to create new spaces. Youth networks, movements, and constituencies have emerged which provide the opportunity for younger voices to express political stances, and thus enhance the diversity and inclusivity of political debate. 

From the global Extinction Rebellion protests, to the student-led Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa and the UK, there are numerous examples of the power of informal youth networks and movements pushing for change. In certain cases, such as Sudan’s political revolution in 2019, we can see how direct action by young people creates major impact, but unfortunately these successes are few as most informal initiatives remain overlooked and undervalued. 

Putting youth representation into government

Creating diverse representation requires the linking of vital informal networks to formal political processes. In response to a recent Common Futures Conversations challenge, one mechanism with the potential to achieve this aim that emerged is creating dedicated youth representatives within government departments, so that qualified young people with relevant expertise are formally appointed to act as the link between government and informal youth movements. 

These individuals should be hired as employees rather than volunteers and take up the responsibilities of a government employee, supported by a large network of youth-led movements and initiatives as well as a smaller, voluntary advisory board of young people. 

This network then acts as a sounding board for the representative, gathering the opinions in their local communities and bringing forward crucial concerns so the youth representatives can confidently feed into policymaking processes with a clear sense of the substance of youth opinion. Alongside the network, a voluntary board of young people could provide additional support to the representatives when required to consult a broader range of youth organizations.

Both in the youth network and the board, a key priority is to involve different movements and initiatives reflecting diversities such as geographic spread, people who are marginalized due to ethnicity, gender or sexuality, educational and professional backgrounds, and other factors. 

Implementing such a structure would ensure more diversity in youth representation, something which is missing in many existing youth participation and formal political structures. Representation needs to move away from only highly-educated youth living in cities to ensure more influence for those young people usually left on the sidelines. 

Youth involvement in politics leads to better civic engagement overall. It improves the influence and access of young people, and supports governments becoming more inclusive and responsive to the plurality of voices they are representing. It also has the potential of encouraging millions more people to become properly engaged with politics. 

In order to gain support from parliamentarians and policymakers, it is crucial to highlight these benefits and demonstrate how the support of young people helps shift the political landscape for the better. All the necessary parties already exist in most countries, so all that is required is to drive a collective initiative and for both governments and the youth to take responsibility for making it work.

As the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson said during a recent Chatham House Centenary event: ‘We need to make space for young people so we can hear their voices, their imagination, their commitment to question and speak truth to power. We need young people to feel that they are part of the solution.’ 

Building formal structures is a necessary step to achieving this vision, as it provides practical solutions to realize a more diverse, inclusive and meaningful participation of the youth in politics, and also creates more representative and responsive governments.

Does the UK have a foreign policy? The failures in Iraq and Afghanistan curbed our Blairite appetite for intervention. Then the Brexit referendum and the advent of Donald Trump as US president upended the European and Atlantic pillars of our strategy. The UK has been outflanked by Russian opportunism, and on China it is confused about the balance of security risk and economic opportunity. Meanwhile, the world is accelerating into a dangerous, bipolar era of geopolitics.

The claim that leaving the EU would open a highway to British global influence was always hollow. Since 2016, the UK’s influence has declined; our forces are barely present in international theatres of conflict and, as recent days have again shown, the Brexit soap opera undermines our diplomacy and soft power. So far, there are only glimmers of a new direction.

On issues such as Iran, climate change and excluding Russia from the G7, the UK has stayed close to EU positions. Elsewhere, it has taken a tougher stance on China and Hong Kong that is aligned more closely with the US and the Five Eyes intelligence community, which includes Australia, Canada and New Zealand. There is also a renewed focus on human rights.

However, this does not add up to a coherent strategy. Getting it to do so is the job of this autumn’s 'integrated review' of security, defence, development and foreign policy. The timing is driven by the government’s comprehensive spending review, which — bizarrely — means they will reach conclusions without knowing what sort of deal, if any, we will strike with the EU, or who will be the next US president.

The challenge is to define a credible and distinctive role for a freestanding medium power with strong traditions of diplomacy, defence, intelligence, trade and aid. Not everything has changed; although unmoored from the EU, the UK remains a significant player in Nato, the UN Security Council and other international organisations. 

The review needs to start by deciding what matters most. A sensible list would include avoiding conflict between the US and China, maintaining global prosperity, preventing nuclear proliferation, addressing environmental damage and climate change, and shoring up a multilateral system of international rules. There will always be urgent problems, and it matters how we respond to them. But a foreign policy should be geared to enduring aims.

On each priority, the review must examine how the UK, outside the EU, can make a difference. Sometimes it may find a specific national role, such as convening next year’s COP26 climate conference. Nine times out of 10, however, the route to our national goals will lie, as before, through leveraging relationships with others.

Three relationships matter most. We need a plan for the US, whoever wins the election. If Boris Johnson is the European leader closest to Donald Trump, how will the British prime minister turn that to his advantage if Trump wins? On the other hand, a Joe Biden victory would better serve our wider interest in a reinvigorated Euro-Atlantic community — although, under this government, that would also weaken our hand in Washington compared with Berlin and Paris. What is the plan to counter that?

Second, we need clear thinking on China. In the new bipolar geopolitics, the UK should stand firmly with the US — although not to the extent of allowing Washington to dictate our policy, or of cutting necessary and useful links with China. We need to decide on a strategic objective. Are we preparing for lasting great-power confrontation or even conflict; or are we working for a more sophisticated global equilibrium? In either case, who will be our best international partners?

Evidently, this requires a constructive relationship with Europe, with which the UK has the most obvious shared interests. Bilateral relationships will be valuable, as will the E3 group of the UK, France and Germany. But our reluctance to negotiate a foreign policy relationship with the EU collectively is an error.

When the brainy Whitehall strategists have put down their pens, the review will then, as always, descend into a hard-nosed haggle over money. There are already large holes in Ministry of Defence procurement budgets; the COVID-induced recession will make things worse. With new priorities to fund, such as cybersecurity, the argument will be less about spending more than gouging out savings to redistribute.

Finally, the review must look at delivery. As Downing Street has disempowered ministries, Whitehall’s foreign policy machinery has become over-centralized. Trade and economic considerations should have more weight. Delivery of the new strategy should also be led by a reformed and renamed Department for International Affairs that has leadership on foreign, development and trade policy, oversees external intelligence and works closely with the Ministry of Defence.

Only with such clarity on priorities, relationships and resources can we craft the coherent foreign policy post-Brexit Britain needs. The task will be easier if the UK and EU reach a deal in December.

This article was originally published in the Financial Times.

Although there is a long road ahead to achieve sustainable peace and formidable challenges remain, the hope is Sudan can turn the page on decades of war that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, particularly in Darfur and the Two Areas (South Kordofan and Blue Nile).

The peace agreement, between Sudan’s transitional government and the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), a broad alliance of armed and other movements, and Minni Minawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement, is not yet comprehensive as it did not include two other important armed movements.

Expected to be formally signed in early October, the deal has been hailed as a ’historic achievement’ by the UN secretary-general, and the international community also commended the government of South Sudan for its positive role as mediator and urged hold-out groups to join the peace process. Much does depend on delivering on the agreement, and the experience of implementing past peace accords in Sudan has been dismal, particularly when it comes to bringing tangible benefits to people on the ground.

What potentially makes the Juba agreement different is that Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government aspires to deliver peace, justice and democracy in line with the goals of the revolution; that the agreement was negotiated between the Sudanese themselves, with a light touch from the South Sudanese mediation and low-key logistical and technical support from the international community; and that much of the negotiations were conducted between former comrades, in marked contrast to the confrontational atmosphere that prevailed during the Bashir era.

As Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok put it: ’This is a Sudanese peace, made with our own hands and by our own efforts’ and: ’This is not a paper agreement, but is a living organism that needs care, attention and political will from all of us’.

Achievements of the agreement

The result of almost one year’s hard work in Juba, the agreement is comprehensive in scope and addresses the fundamental issues of Sudan’s crises in Darfur, the Two Areas and other marginalized regions, albeit in a mixture of regional and national protocols. It goes a long way to realizing the vision of a democratic ‘New Sudan’ based on respect for the diversity of the Sudanese people and equal citizenship without religious, ethnic, cultural or gender discrimination.

There is a focus on the concerns of historically marginalized populations in Sudan’s conflict zones and disadvantaged areas, and it addresses root causes of conflict, such as issues of identity, marginalization, the relationship between religion and state, governance, resource-sharing, land issues, social justice, and equality at the national level.

The deal also looks to resolve the consequences of conflict, such as humanitarian relief, the safe and voluntary return of IDPs and refugees to their original lands and compensation, eviction of illegal settlers and the development and reconstruction of the conflict-affected areas. It provides for significant devolution of power and resources to the regions, including autonomy for the Two Areas and restoration of a single Darfur region. On transitional justice, the government has committed to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ensure Bashir and others subject to arrest warrants will ‘appear before’ the ICC.

This deal will change the face of the transitional government by bringing marginalized forces to the centre of the political process. The transitional period will extend to 2023, with the armed movements having three seats in the (currently 11-member) Sovereign Council and 25% of seats in the Cabinet and soon-to-be-formed Legislative Assembly.

The power-sharing provisions have been criticized as disproportionate to the size of the movements’ political constituencies and military presence inside Sudan. But the movements argue significant representation in the government is necessary to support implementation and that their arrival in Khartoum will help to strengthen the transition to democracy.

Establishing a single, national professional army, reflective of the diversity of Sudan and with a new military doctrine opens the way for much-needed comprehensive security sector reform. During the transition, this will include the creation of a 12,000 strong joint force between government security forces and the armed movements to help protect civilians in Darfur. Importantly, mechanisms allowing for civilian input on security reforms are also established.

The deal also guarantees religious freedom and the separation of religion from politics. This ensures religion will not be exploited by state institutions as it was during the Bashir-era, provides for the constitution to be based on equal citizenship, and for the establishment of a National Commission for Religious Freedom to protect the rights of Christians and other minorities. In the Two Areas, the autonomous government will have special legislative powers to pass laws based on the secular 1973 Constitution.

Increasing inclusivity

Key to achieving inclusive and sustainable peace is ensuring popular ownership and finding ways to engage civil society stakeholders and marginalized communities such as nomads in dialogue, reconciliation and social peace initiatives. The negotiations were mainly a top-down elitist process. Although the UN brought IDPs, tribal leaders and women’s groups to Juba for short periods, there was limited participation by civil society. However, the agreement provides for a wider range of stakeholders to feed into a comprehensive peace through reconciliation and transitional justice mechanisms, follow-on conferences and an inclusive National Constitutional Conference.

Achieving a comprehensive peace will also mean bringing other armed movements on board, particularly those led by Abdel Aziz Al Hilu and Abdel Wahid Al Nur, both of whom hold significant territory, forces and support (in the Two Areas and Darfur respectively). Negotiations in Juba with Abdel Aziz had stalled over his demands for a secular state or, failing that, the right to self-determination, but he has now reached a preliminary agreement with Prime Minister Hamdok on a way forward.

Other challenges of implementing peace

Turning the peace agreement into reality on the ground will face many other challenges given the fragility of a civilian-military transitional government, distrust, and competition between the signatory movements and some political parties, as well as increasing insecurity in many parts of the country caused by armed militias, inter-tribal violence, the proliferation of weapons, and sabotage by elements of the former regime. There is also likely to be resistance from groups such as illegal settlers who see their interests being threatened.

With its economy in meltdown because of economic mismanagement by the Bashir regime, COVID-19, and unprecedented floods, finding resources to implement the peace deal is far beyond the means of Sudan’s cash-strapped government. Implementation therefore requires sustained and generous support from its regional and international partners, including the country’s urgent removal from the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list, which is preventing debt relief, access to concessionary loans and large-scale foreign investment. With donor budgets under heavy pressure, raising money will be hard, but by continuing to support a nascent democracy in a strategically important but unstable region, Sudan’s allies will be safeguarding their long-term interests.

If properly implemented, the Juba peace agreement is a major first step towards creating a ‘New Sudan’ based on peace, equal citizenship and social justice. Key tests of whether Sudan can finally turn the page are whether the signatory movements and other revolutionary forces can unite to deliver the dividends of peace for the victims of Sudan’s conflicts, and embrace inclusion rather than tribalism and narrow political affiliation; whether the remaining armed movements are ready to start serious negotiations for a comprehensive peace; and whether Sudan now receives the support and attention it deserves from the international community. Surely Sudan has already come too far for this historic opportunity to be lost.

Domestic violence has always been a complex issue in Kuwaiti culture, often tied to norms and beliefs relating to family structures and concepts of guardianship, honour and discipline. As with other forms of abuse within the family, it is also considered a private matter and therefore not addressed publicly.

Despite a lack of up to date figures, the problem is widespread, affecting 53.1% of women in Kuwait according to a 2018 study. But Kuwait’s last submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) showed only 447 domestic violence cases had been through the court system in 2016, and only 76 of those resulted in a conviction. Given the known difficulties of reporting abuse and getting a case to court, it is not a stretch to conclude the actual figures of abused women is much higher than this figure given by the Ministry of Justice.

In one recently reported case, a pregnant woman was shot in the head and killed by one of her brothers while she was recovering in the in the intensive care unit of Mubarak Hospital from being shot by her other brother the day before. The reason for such a horrific double attack was she had married without her sibling's consent, even though her father had accepted the match.

Worryingly, activists and experts claim domestic violence has been rising in Kuwait during COVID-19, in keeping with global trends during lockdowns, and aggravated by the lack of legal resources and shelters for survivors. Highlighting this unfortunate situation, along with worldwide interest in the issue of domestic violence within the current epidemic, did lead to renewed media interest in the issue in Kuwait, and brought the lack of resources available to abuse survivors into the public eye.

And it is this renewed attention – alongside the fact Kuwait is about to enter an election cycle in November – that may well have driven recent governmental and parliamentary moves on the long-awaited family protection law, which recently passed in Kuwait’s national assembly with 38 votes for, one MP abstaining, and another voting against.

But 17 MPs were conspicuously absent from the room, including the Women and Family Committee rapporteur Alhumaidi Alsubaei, known for his human rights activism. This signals how complex the social and political issues associated with domestic violence as, although the official version of the law is yet to be made public, the submitted bill contained 26 articles.

The articles call for the formation of a National Family Protection Committee to draw up plans countering the spread of domestic violence in Kuwait, as well as the review and amendment of existing national laws which may be perpetuating the violence. Other provisions cover mandatory training programs for all government sectors involved in family protection, awareness programmes on detection, reporting and survivor advocacy, and issuing an annual report about domestic violence statistics.

Article 5 specifically calls for activating a domestic violence shelter and offering rehabilitation and advisory services, while Article 13 tackles the punishment of those who try and coerce survivors not to report abuse. These two articles are especially important because, although the Fanar Advisory Service and Domestic Abuse Shelter was formally opened in 2017, it has never actually been functional due to the delay of legislation needed to make it operational. Described as a ’stillborn dream’, the unused building is surrounded by sewage water.

The new family protection law also gives important provision for cooperation with civil society organizations, such as Eithar, Abolish 153, and Soroptomists Kuwait working on this issue. Although Kuwait already has several official bodies meant to be dealing with ending violence against women, in reality it has been these groups effectively dealing with the plight of abuse survivors. With no functional shelters, dedicated hotlines or specialized resources to assist victims, Eithar and Soroptimists Kuwait provide resources and support, while Abolish 153 focuses on filling the hitherto legal vacuum.

The path to getting this law put to a vote has been a long and winding one. Back in 2017, Saleh Ashoor MP submitted the first version of the domestic violence bill when he was heading up the Women and Family Affairs Committee. At that time, the bill was signed by just four other MPs - Safa Al Hashem, Ahmad Al Fadhel, Khalil Al Saleh and Faisal Al Kanderi. But it was the starting point and, several iterations later, it is essentially a version of that proposal which has been voted into law.

Much of the delay over the past three years, both with the legislation and activation of the shelter, has been due to the fact there were many bodies involved, such as the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Social and Labor Affairs, and civil society representatives, all of whom at times had different agendas. But alongside the amendment to the press and publication law which also passed that same historic day in parliament, the family protection law is undoubtedly a major win for all those liberal civil society activists who have lobbied long and hard to change these dangerous and restrictive legislations in Kuwait.

The G20 summit in November was to be a moment when the world focused its attention on Saudi Arabia. As the leaders of the world's 20 largest economies came together for the first time in an Arab capital and presided over the world’s greatest challenges and opportunities, King Salman would have taken centre stage with his son and crown prince Mohammed bin Salman not far behind in the spotlight.

However this will now be a virtual summit, and that is probably a blessing in disguise for the kingdom and its leadership which has not enjoyed a good year. It shares responsibility for crashing the price of oil, which, in conjunction with COVID-19, has brought the global economy to its knees. And it continues to be mired in the Yemen conflict, whereas its ally the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has, by and large, managed to extract itself while also seeking to rescue its reputation by signing a ‘peace deal’ with Israel.

More recently, it has been forced to push back plans to host the next instalment of ‘Davos in Desert’ until 2021 and the crown prince’s flagship charity Misk is currently under review. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) made a wholly unsuccessful bid to secure a major stake in Newcastle United Football Club which brought an unfavourable ruling at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and a heap of damaging media attention.

Squandered opportunity

Nothing washes away the stain of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder or the continuing imprisonment of women and men charged with being traitors. But in many ways, leading the G20 offered the Saudi leadership, especially Mohammed bin Salman, a chance to press reset and atone for some of the excesses of his more controversial policies, such as the war in Yemen and blockade of Qatar. But he appears to have squandered the opportunity so far and there are no signs that is about to change.

Hosting the summit in Riyadh would have given Mohammed bin Salman an opportunity to try and recapture the heady days of 2018, when many of the world's leaders and even the media still viewed him as a force for good. He would have had a captive audience and, instead of staying away from Western capitals which he has chosen to do recently, he could have been feted by world leaders on his home turf. Moreover, the presidency agenda — empowering people, safeguarding the planet, and shaping new frontiers — would have lent itself to meaningful engagement on key policy issues.

Although many analysts and commentators quite rightly argue that Riyadh’s focus on empowerment and safeguarding the planet is widely hypocritical given the kingdom has lurched further towards quashing any signs of opposition and remains highly dependent upon hydrocarbons, at least the ambitious goals of Vision 2030 ought to align with the G20 agenda. The goals of Vision 2030 remain aspirational and are far from ever being met, but there is synchronicity between the two agendas. In fact, the overview of Saudi Arabia’s G20 Presidency documentation states ‘the G20 agenda has a strong echo in the daily lives of the people in the Kingdom’.

Saudi Arabia really needs to empower its people and capitalize upon its youth dividend but that requires, as so many have argued persuasively, long-term investment in education, training, and skills acquisition, and will not be achieved overnight. It needs strategic thinking, capacity-building, commitment, scope for course correction, and patience. There are no quick wins, no shortcuts.

Safeguarding the planet is common to one and all but breaking a dependency upon hydrocarbons, diversifying its economy, and mitigating against the growing impact of climate change are all pressing issues Saudi Arabia needs to address. A failure to achieve these goals in a time-sensitive fashion poses a threat to the well-being of the kingdom and, in order to do so, it must empower its people and use technology wisely to advance the process. Saudi Arabia should be at the front of the pack, but is being surpassed by its neighbours and is in danger of being left way behind.

With its wealth and youthful population, the kingdom can be at the cutting edge of shaping new frontiers. It can deploy its substantive funds to support its own innovators and — to borrow the jargon — create an ecosystem that not only offers Saudis an environment fostering creativity, but also one that draws talent into the kingdom.

This does not mean investing in ‘white elephant’ projects that fail to spark the imagination of Saudis, or following the crowd to buy football clubs without rhyme or reason. It means gearing up to address everyday issues that preoccupy minds of Saudis, such as employment, housing, healthcare, and the well-being of family members. It is notable how the excitement of ‘bread and circus’ issues has abated and the focus moved once again towards family, faith and finance.

The Saudi presidency of the G20 is in danger of passing by with a whimper and the November summit may now be unremarkable. This does not mean the hard work of the continuously active engagement groups will go unnoticed or to waste, but it does mean the photo-opportunity will be passed up and the joint statement garner less interest than usual.

While it may feel like a lost opportunity for the kingdom and, in particular, Mohammed bin Salman, they should both breathe a sigh of relief. In many ways, they will be let off the hook by avoiding the direct scrutiny of the world’s media and human rights organizations. However, the crown prince could still seize the initiative given the spotlight will be on him, albeit from afar, and take bold steps towards resolving the thorny issues that have come to mar his pathway to power.

The emergence of a multipolar global economy in which the US is no longer the main engine of growth has boosted the role of economic diplomacy, the setting of foreign economic policy. While the EU remains the world’s biggest economic bloc and the US is still an economic powerhouse, it is Asia – China in particular – which has created hundreds of millions of new middle-class consumers, helping to drive global economic growth.

This shift has ignited an era of competition between the US and China and, by implication, a debate about the merits of different political and legal systems. The difficulty for the rest of the world is how best to navigate this highly polarized climate – in recent history, only the Cold War comes close to having matched the adversarial dynamics of such a divided international community.

In conducting economic diplomacy, governments should consider their economic strengths, the importance of transparency, and how best to operate in a fragmented international system.

First, the setting of trade and investment policy should take into account developments in the global economy. One trend worth noting is the rising importance of services – in particular digital services – in international trade. The expanding cross-border trade in intangibles such as business services and data means the negotiation, definition and enforcement of standards to regulate these are of growing importance for the global economy, and for policymakers in many countries.

In contrast, negotiations around merchandise trade are likely to take a somewhat lower profile. Under the World Trade Organization (WTO), tariffs on manufactured goods have dropped significantly in any case – though there is still scope to lower them. Contemporary diplomacy, as well as disputes, around the lowering or raising of barriers to international trade will increasingly concern non-tariff measures applicable to services rather than those, such as tariffs, that traditionally apply to goods.

For service-based economies, it is vital free-trade agreements (FTAs) encompass regulations and standards for intangibles. But this is difficult in a multipolar global economy where the US, China and the EU all have different legal and regulatory systems, and raises the prospect of a fragmented global trading system divided into blocs of countries adhering to different standards.

A pluralistic or mini-multilateral approach to trade such as the stalled Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) could help resolve elements of this division. TiSA was launched in 2013 by a group of advanced economies, not the entirety of the WTO, to further opening up global services trade. However, talks have been on hold since 2016 and, in the current climate, it is near impossible to conclude negotiations when the major economies do not come to the table and instead promote their own standards with their closest trading partners.

Second, policymakers should consider that, in an era of heightened trade tensions, any framework for economic diplomacy needs to be transparent if it is to be trusted and credible. Such a framework could centre on commercial openness and consistency with a country’s foreign and intelligence policy aims. For example, clearly spelling out how a country reviews prospective foreign investment and applying this consistently would demonstrate that all projects are treated equally without singling out any individual country. This would be an improvement over an ad hoc and less transparent approach .

A major challenge in creating a ‘principle-based’ economic diplomacy framework of this kind is reconciling competing policy aims. To this end, several key questions need answering. Should trade agreements encompass non-economic elements, such as foreign policy aims? Do concerns over national security mean that trade and investment agreements should favour allies? Could such a framework assess a trading or investment partner in terms of national security as well as potential economic benefit?

A country should also re-think how to undertake a wider international role when embarking on economic diplomacy. The inability of the major powers to set new global rules has had a detrimental impact on an international system under significant strain. The stalling of multilateral trade talks and urgency of international coordinated action on global public goods, such as health and the environment, shows there is a pressing need for a new approach to international relations.

Economic diplomacy could, and should, bolster the rules-based multilateral system. The challenge is engaging the major powers without whom widespread adoption of global policies and standards is less likely. Yet the chances of wider adoption might actually be better if a proposal does not come from either the US or China. This opens up the opportunity for other countries to be ‘honest brokers’ and potentially improve their own international standing.

In an era of increasing tension between great powers, economic diplomacy requires re-tooling. It should consider not just economic considerations, but also broader foreign policy aims, greater transparency, and a pluralistic approach to global rules to strengthen the multilateral system.

What role do the presidential debates serve in encouraging voter turnout?

Leslie Vinjamuri: Going into the debates, 74% of Americans were set to tune in and watch according to a new Monmouth Poll. This is striking since more than 90% have already decided who their candidate will be, and many have already cast their ballots. 

During President Donald Trump’s time in office, Americans have been far more politically engaged than in previous periods. A record 49.3% of the voting eligible population turned out to vote in the 2018 midterm elections, according to the United States Election Project. This was the highest voter turnout since 1914, and it also reversed a downward trend. 

Debates don’t change voters’ minds and last night’s debate, the first between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is unlikely to be an exception. But debates can shape public sentiment and enthusiasm, not least for voting.

Polling confirms that Trump trails Biden by an average of around 7% nationally, but also that his base is highly enthusiastic. The same is not true for Biden: the older voters that support him are far more enthusiastic than younger voters that do the same.

How credible are Trump's claims that the US economy is experiencing a V-shaped recovery and Biden's claims that there is a K-shaped recovery? 

Megan Greene: Off the back of an unprecedented lockdown in the US and a resultant short and sharp contraction of the economy, the immediate recovery was swift and V-shaped. This is partly a reflection of significant support to Americans in the form of unemployment benefit enhancements and to businesses in the form of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. But as the economy reopened, growth was always going to rebound and a short-term V-shaped recovery was always going to materialize.  

Don’t be fooled by Donald Trump’s assertion that a V-shaped recovery will persist though. Most of the support for workers and small businesses expired in late July or early August and people and firms have stayed afloat by dipping into their savings. In the absence of another fiscal stimulus package—very unlikely before the end of the year—this is completely unsustainable.  

The K-shaped recovery that Joe Biden has suggested is far more likely going forward. The lockdown revealed extraordinary inequality in the US economy. The death toll of the virus on black and Asian Americans was higher than on white Americans. Huge disparities were laid bare in the labour market as well.

It was precisely those hourly service workers who saw few wage gains since the last recession who were first to lose their jobs in this crisis. The service workers who kept their jobs were real heroes—delivering our food, teaching our kids over Zoom, removing our trash—and yet have not been remunerated accordingly. Unemployment for high-income workers is nearly back to January 2020 levels, but is still down by over 15% for low-income workers.  

This trend will only get worse as small businesses go under and large, superstar companies step in to fill the void. This increase in market concentration reduces the number of potential employers from which workers can choose and reduces workers’ wage negotiating power.  

Rising inequality in the US is by no means a new trend, but as with many things it has been accelerated by the coronavirus crisis. Inequality will continue to drag on the economy if it is left unaddressed.

Did either candidate refer to America’s role in the world?

Leslie Vinjamuri: This debate could only have hurt America’s global image. This comes in the midst of a pandemic, when the gravest problems are at home, and when America’s global leadership depends on getting its house in order. Rather than restoring confidence, Donald Trump used the debates to undermine confidence in the elections and to stoke fear of violence in America’s cities.

By design, most of the debate was focused on domestic issues. But the candidates did discuss climate science, the one issue touched on that matters most beyond America’s borders. The difference between Trump's and Biden’s plans was stark and the debates made clear that America’s global leadership on climate change hinges on these elections.

Biden articulated a clear plan to reduce carbon emissions, create green jobs and invest in green infrastructure. When it comes to global leadership, this would bring the United States back into a debate that China has been leading. Last week, President Xi Jinping committed China to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060; Biden has committed the US to achieving this goal by 2050.

But Trump repeatedly deflected the moderator’s question about whether he accepted climate science. And when asked about the link between climate change and forest fires, he launched a series of attacks on forest managers.

In addition to Trump's comments on China and COVID-19, the only reference made to foreign policy was Biden's comments that he would be tougher on Russia. Did this debate reaffirm the notion that the majority of Americans prefer less engagement with the world? 

Chris Sabatini: According to the themes set by the moderator Chris Wallace and the debate committee, foreign policy was not scheduled to be among the topics covered in the 29 September debates. That will come up later. When it did appear in the first debates it was around largely domestic topics: COVID-19, allegations of corruption, concerns about trade and manufacturing and suspicions of Russian influence shaping the US elections and US foreign policy. 

That foreign policy surfaced in this debate and around those specific, partisan issues demonstrates not a lack of interest by US voters in the world but the ways in which extra-national influence is seen by some (and played by the candidates) as damaging US politics, society and the economy. The problem is that such fears don't make for coherent or constructive foreign policies, but rather reinforce a perception of the US as a victim. Let's hope the issue of foreign policy comes up and is discussed more thoughtfully and positively in future debates when it is on the docket.

How will this debate impact the rest of the race?

Leslie Vinjamuri: For voters at home, the most disturbing part of tonight’s debates should be Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the integrity of the electoral process.  This comes on the heels of the president’s failure last week to confirm that he would respect the outcome of the elections.

Trump used the debates as a platform to launch a series of attacks on mail-in ballots, casting them as fraudulent and saying that people should just turn up and vote. The recent debates confirmed that when it comes to the pandemic, the economy, and especially the environment, the alternatives are stark and there is a lot at stake. Whether this drives voters to the polls, or to switch off the television remains to be seen.