Summary

• Multilateralism may, in theory, put countries on an equal economic footing. But in practice the concept has often relied on an anchor government to create and preserve global norms. Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the US has accelerated its move away from leadership in global economic governance. This shift threatens the monetary and trading systems that have long underpinned globalization. Does the global economy need – and can it find – another leader to take America’s place?
• In the monetary sphere, the US role in providing an internationalized currency has endured relatively well, even though the US’s formal anchoring of the global exchange rate system collapsed nearly half a century ago. Governance of the US dollar and of the dollar-based financial system has largely been left to competent technocrats.
• Recent US political uncertainty has encouraged other governments, particularly in the eurozone and China, in their long-standing quest to supplant the dollar. But these economies’ internal weaknesses have prevented their respective currencies from playing a wider role. Arguments for a multipolar system exist, yet network effects plus the dollar’s superior institutions mean it has retained its dominance.
• In trade, the US role as anchor of the global legal order was already looking unreliable before Trump’s election. Washington has faced growing resistance at home to its global responsibilities. This, together with the idiosyncratic rise of countries such as China, has made the US an increasingly unreliable and narrowly transactional leader.
• More recently, hard-to-regulate issues such as foreign direct investment, technology transfer and data flows, often with national security implications, are increasingly undermining the ideal of multilateral global governance. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization, focused on cross-border trade in goods and services, are becoming less relevant.
• Recent US actions against the Chinese technology firm Huawei show the Trump administration’s willingness to decouple the US market from China and try to drag other economies with it. As far as possible, other governments should resist taking sides. A complete separation of the global economy into rival spheres is probably unfeasible, and certainly highly undesirable.
• Although future US administrations may be less wantonly destructive, it is not realistic to expect them to resume America’s former role. Nor can the US simply be replaced with another power. Instead, coalitions of governments with interests in international rules-based orders will need to form. These coalitions will need to show due deference to issues like investment and national security, especially where attempts to bind governments by multilateral rules are likely to provoke a severe backlash from domestic constituencies.

As new cases of COVID-19 continue to surge, countries around the world struggle to mitigate the public health and economic effects of the virus. It is becoming increasingly clear that an effective pandemic response requires a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach. In the Arab world, where health systems are already strained by armed conflicts and displaced populations, a whole-of-society response to the pandemic is particularly critical as countries have become increasingly dependent on non-state actors, notably the private sector, for healthcare provision and any response that includes the state alone may not be sufficient to address the pandemic.

In a recent article, Fadi El-Jardali, argued that while the pandemic will have grave health and economic consequences for years to come, it brings with it a valuable opportunity to re-envision the role of state and non-state actors in strengthening health systems. The article addressed the need for increased collaboration between state and non-state actors, and the rethinking of existing cooperation models to provide quality healthcare services for all.  

In this webinar, part of the Chatham House project on the future of the state in the Middle East and North Africa, Dr El-Jardali will discuss how state and non-state actors can collaborate more effectively to address the shortcomings of national health care systems amidst the pandemic and beyond. The article’s author will share insights on the different capacities available in Arab societies that governments can draw upon to ensure that Universal Health Coverage, equity considerations and social justice are at the core of health systems.

You can express your interest in attending by following this link. You will receive a Zoom confirmation email should your registration be successful. Alternatively, you can watch the event live on the MENA Programme Facebook page.

 

The Russian annexation of Crimea was one of the great strategic shocks of the past twenty-five years. For many in the West, Moscow’s actions in early 2014 marked the end of illusions about cooperation, and the return to geopolitical and ideological confrontation. Russia, for so long a peripheral presence, had become the central actor in a new global drama. In this groundbreaking book, renowned scholar Bobo Lo analyses the broader context of the crisis by examining the interplay between Russian foreign policy and an increasingly anarchic international environment. He argues that Moscow’s approach to regional and global affairs reflects the tension between two very different worlds—the perceptual and the actual.

The Kremlin highlights the decline of the West, a resurgent Russia, and the emergence of a new multipolar order. But this idealized view is contradicted by a world disorder that challenges core assumptions about the dominance of great powers and the utility of military might. Its lesson is that only those states that embrace change will prosper in the twenty-first century.

A Russia able to redefine itself as a modern power would exert a critical influence in many areas of international politics. But a Russia that rests on an outdated sense of entitlement may end up instead as one of the principal casualties of global transformation.

Praise for Russia and the New World Disorder

'Once again, Bobo Lo has written an illuminating book on Russia's foreign policy. He has achieved a real 'tour de force' in both conceptual and descriptive terms. With elegance and precision, Lo has explained why Russia, as a declining power, is still so important for international stability, crisis management, and global issues. A must-read for now, and certainly a classic book for the next decade.'
—Dr Thomas Gomart, Director of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), Paris

'Bobo Lo offers a trenchant analysis of the challenges and choices that confront Russia in today's rapidly changing global environment. In his compelling discussion of the Kremlin's Hobbesian view of the international system, he asks whether Russia is capable of jettisoning its imperial mindset and becoming a modern nation-state capable of interacting more effectively both with its neighbors and the wider world. His answer is sobering--and sometimes surprising.'
—Angela Stent, Director, Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES), Georgetown University, and author of The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.

'Bobo Lo's new book is elegantly written and has a masterful grasp of the pressures and temptations that have acted on Putin in foreign and security policy. He puts us all in his debt.'
—Robert Service, Fellow of the British Academy, and Emeritus Fellow, St Antony's College, University of Oxford

In September, the UK will host a summit on the future of NATO. The Wales Summit will chart the course of the alliance as it deals with the long-term implications of Russia’s policy towards Ukraine and prepares to complete its longest combat mission in Afghanistan. The secretary-general will outline the decisions that need to be taken to ensure that the alliance remains fit to face the future. He will set out NATO’s readiness action plan, address the debate on declining defence budgets, and explain how NATO intends to turn a new page in Afghanistan. 

Islamic State videos have often been associated with savage violence and beheadings. An in-depth scrutiny however reveals another striking feature: that female bodies are absent, blurred or mute. Examining a few Islamic State videos in depth, the article suggests that the invisibility of women in tandem with the ostentatious visibility of male bodies enable gendered and embodied spectators to indulge in homoerotic as well as heterosexual imaginaries. In contrast to studies on visual security and online radicalization which assert that images affect an audience, this article focuses on the interaction between video and audience and argues that spectators are not only rational and emotional but embodied and gendered as well. Islamic State videos do not only attract western foreign fighters through religious–ideological rhetoric or emotional impact but also through gendered forms of pleasure and desire that enable carnal imagination and identification. The article probes the analytical purchase of carnal aesthetics and spectatorship.

World politics generates a long list of anxiety-inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. Yet International Relations scholars and practitioners are often criticized for being disconnected from the human realities of international calamity. The challenge for both is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds the human consequences of extreme violence and depravation. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by engaging the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place where human suffering is explicitly accentuated. We argue that the horror genre is at once an access point for ethical engagement with the human consequences of extreme violence and a complex terrain where dark imaginings can be politically loaded, culturally specific and ethically ambiguous.

The liberal international order (LIO) is in crisis. Numerous publications, debates and events have time and again made it clear that we are in the midst of a grand transformation of world order. While most contributions focus on either what is slowly dying (the LIO) or what might come next (China, multipolarity, chaos?), there is less analytical engagement with what lies in between those two phases of world order. Under the assumption that this period could last years or even decades, a set of analytical tools to understand this interregnum is urgently needed. This article proposes an analytical framework that builds on Gramscian concepts of crisis that will help us understand the current crisis of the LIO in a more systematic way. It addresses a gap in the literature on changing world order by elaborating three Gramsci-inspired crisis characteristics—processuality, organicity and morbidity—that sketch the current crisis landscape in a systematic way. Building on this framework, the article suggests different empirical entry points to the study of the crisis of the LIO and calls for a research agenda that takes this crisis seriously as a distinct period of changing world orders.

This special section brings together diverse spaces and modes of visuality through specific, sustained attention to the various types of violence depicted. In doing so, these articles draw out a concern for the visual constitution of violence in global politics, and its emotional and political consequences. Individually and collectively, the contributions highlight the ways in which policy-makers and researchers are daily confronted by violent images that influence how complex political problems are seen and consequently understood. Paying attention to the power of the visuality of violence is necessary to understand how certain kinds of policy responses to direct and indirect violence unfold.

As new cases of COVID-19 continue to surge, countries around the world struggle to mitigate the public health and economic effects of the virus. It is becoming increasingly clear that an effective pandemic response requires a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach. In the Arab world, where health systems are already strained by armed conflicts and displaced populations, a whole-of-society response to the pandemic is particularly critical as countries have become increasingly dependent on non-state actors, notably the private sector, for healthcare provision and any response that includes the state alone may not be sufficient to address the pandemic.

In a recent article, Fadi El-Jardali, argued that while the pandemic will have grave health and economic consequences for years to come, it brings with it a valuable opportunity to re-envision the role of state and non-state actors in strengthening health systems. The article addressed the need for increased collaboration between state and non-state actors, and the rethinking of existing cooperation models to provide quality healthcare services for all.  

In this webinar, part of the Chatham House project on the future of the state in the Middle East and North Africa, Dr El-Jardali will discuss how state and non-state actors can collaborate more effectively to address the shortcomings of national health care systems amidst the pandemic and beyond. The article’s author will share insights on the different capacities available in Arab societies that governments can draw upon to ensure that Universal Health Coverage, equity considerations and social justice are at the core of health systems.

You can express your interest in attending by following this link. You will receive a Zoom confirmation email should your registration be successful. Alternatively, you can watch the event live on the MENA Programme Facebook page.

 

This event is  part of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum and will take place virtually only.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank founding partner AIG and supporting partners Clifford Chance LLP, Diageo plc, and EY for their generous support of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum.

Please note this event is taking place between 2pm to 3pm BST. 

This event is part of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum and will take place virtually only.

International trade has a crucial role to play in tackling climate change. The production and transport of goods is a major contributor to green-house gas emissions, as is the delivery of certain cross-border services. At the same time, it looks inevitable that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to a radical re-think of global supply chains as companies and governments seek to build in greater resilience while at the same time preserving as far as possible the efficiency gains and lower costs that global supply chains generate when operating normally.

Future international trade rules will have a crucial role to play in addressing both challenges; they represent both an opportunity and a risk. If designed well, they could play a very important role in re-enforcing moves towards a more sustainable use of resources, greater overall alignment of economies with the Paris Agreement, and greater economic resilience. But they could also, if poorly designed and implemented, or overly influenced by strategic political considerations, have significant unintended and negative implications. These include: reduced economic efficiency, increased poverty, unnecessary economic decoupling and reduced consensus on the broader mitigation and adaptation measures required to meet the challenge of climate change.

Against this background, a number of key questions arise: In what areas, if any, do we need to modify or adapt key principles underlying the system of global trade rules in order to respond to the twin challenges of responding to climate change and building greater economic resilience?  Which are the most promising/practical areas on which trade policy experts should focus now to re-launch/re-energize discussions on WTO reform, including, for example, dispute settlement? What national economic policies will be needed to complement the development of new/reformed trade disciplines in these areas? How might future political changes, such as a change in the US administration, affect the prospects for and political momentum behind such deliberations? What in any eventuality is the best way to build the required political momentum?
 
This roundtable is convened by the Global Economy and Finance Programme and the US and the Americas Programme and it is part of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum. The event will take place virtually only.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank founding partner AIG and supporting partners Clifford Chance LLP, Diageo plc, and EY for their generous support of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum.

Please note this event is taking place between 2pm to 3pm BST.

This event is part of the US and Americas Programme Inaugural Virtual Roundtable Series on the US and the State of the World and will take place virtually only.

This event will take place from 14:00 – 15:00 BST.