The most vexing, complicated and elusive question in international relations is how to achieve an order, based on rules, that enjoys legitimacy, rewards investments in cooperation, reconciles clashing interests and deters conflict. It is not a problem over which a magic wand can be waved. But in our own time, immense and patient efforts have been made towards that general goal, however imperfect the result.

The concept of the ‘rules-based international order’ refers today in its most general sense to arrangements put into place to allow for cooperative efforts in addressing geopolitical, economic and other global challenges, and to arbitrate disputes. It is embodied in a variety of multilateral institutions, starting with the United Nations and running through various functional architectures such as the Bretton Woods system, the corpus of international law and other regimes and treaties, down to various regional instances where sovereignty is pooled or where powers have been delegated consensually by states on a particular issue.

Some aspects of the rules-based order are heavily informed by distinct values, such as those contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But, more often than not, they simply prescribe a set of basic principles for how the business of international political and economic relations is to be transacted. The parameters of legitimate and illegitimate behaviour are specified. Compliance is incentivized, and some scope to sanction transgressors is provided for.

For some, the rules-based international order is a politically highly charged concept. Indeed, the absence of a common standardized definition of it is perhaps a by-product of the controversy which the mere notion of a rules-based order often attracts – among those who had no or little part in its shaping; those who regard multilateralism as an infringement of sovereignty and a straitjacket on national ambitions; and those who sense in it a presumption of universal values and shared interests that jars with their own particular historical experience and political preferences. And in a world in which each country occupies its own place on the spectrum of attraction to, tolerance of and resistance to multilateralism, it is inevitable that the present system should be a patchy and incomplete one.

If that patchiness seems increasingly apparent today, then this reflects the proliferation of problems on a truly global scale that multilateral initiatives have as yet failed to keep up with. This is partly because of the sheer pace of change and the deep complexity of problems, and partly because any significant programme of coordinated action requires a focus and consensus that today is in shrinking supply.

More than that, some of the sharpest challenges – climate change; the lack or weakness of rules in the sea, space and cyber domains; the dilemmas thrown up by technological change – are problematic precisely because they are areas in and through which geopolitical competitions are being contested. The policy challenges may be new, but the pattern of behaviour currently surrounding them presents some dangerous echoes from the past.

Throughout history, most attempts to form international orders have been conceived in a coercive way. From classical antiquity to the 20th century, the dominant form of order has been that imposed or attempted by successive territorial empires, or by predominant powers who made the rules by fiat and were deferred to by their neighbours and satellites.

Significant attempts at more collaborative conceptions of order, aimed at coexistence and minimizing risk through rules and accepted conventions, have been far rarer. And the key point about them is that they have been attempted only after competition has spilled over in an uncontrolled, exhausting and ruinous conflict that has called for mechanisms and understandings to prevent a recurrence of disaster. That, in any case, has been the European experience, and subsequently the result of the engulfing crises that radiated out globally from Europe in the 20th century.

Early efforts at order-building focused on mutual recognition and the management of what were felt to be inevitable rivalries. The Westphalian Peace of 1648 emerged from a 30-year period of religious war in Europe. It emphasized the sanctity of sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states as a precondition for order, but relied on a jostling balance-of-power approach to the preservation of a basic stability.

A tolerance of conflicts to correct imbalances was implicit to the scheme. But its acute sensitivity to shifts in alignments of power contributed to the later conflicts – from the wars of the Spanish Succession and Austrian Succession to the Seven Years’ War – that ravaged Europe in the 18th century and occurred in an increasingly global theatre of military operations, tracing the development of European imperial projects.

Despite these shortcomings, the balance-of-power model was produced again as a remedy to uncontrolled conflict, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, following more than 20 years of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. A Concert of Europe, accommodating a rehabilitated France, was instituted to regulate the system and periodically decide major geopolitical issues. But it fell into disuse. And although Europe did not suffer a general war for the rest of the 19th century, the salient geopolitical facts were ones not of power balances but of the sharp relative decline of France and the vertiginous rise of Prussia, which defeated Austria and France on the path to German unification.

These dynamics produced convoluted and ever-widening balancing manoeuvres that by the eve of the First World War in 1914 had congealed and hardened into the opposing Triple Alliance and Triple Entente systems, which trapped their respective members into tangled commitments to fight at the trigger of a crisis.

The peacemaking efforts, in Paris in 1919, that followed the war entailed conscious efforts to overturn the balance-of-power model. The tone was set by US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, with their emphasis on transparency and openness, while the concepts of egalitarianism among states, the drive towards disarmament and the practice of collective security were central to the revolutionary creation of a League of Nations in 1920.

But the peacemaking also included a punitive dimension – the designation of German culpability, the demand of economic reparations and territorial adjustments – imposed by victor on vanquished. To its critics, the international order being evolved, and the rules drafted to underpin it, had the attributes of an involuntary settlement more than those of a construct built by equals.

Lacking a comprehensive membership – crucially, the US had demurred, while other major powers progressively withdrew or were thrown out – and the military means to impose itself, a divided and often circumspect League faltered in meeting a succession of international crises. It then collided fatally with the revanchism of Germany, Italy and Japan that produced the Second World War.

The ambitiousness and eventual institutional intricacy of the UN system founded in 1945 marked a response to the scale of the ordeal through which the world had passed, and sought to correct the deficits of the League. The UN’s membership and the activity of its main organs and specialized agencies all grew prodigiously in succeeding decades, as did its efforts to advance the spirit and culture of multilateralism.

But by giving special privileges to the victors, principally through veto rights held among a small group of permanent Security Council members, the UN reflected and perpetuated a certain historical circumstance: there was no formal institutional adaptation in its highest structures to account for a progressive redistribution of international power, the rehabilitation of defeated countries, the rise of the decolonized world or the desire of emerging powers to assume international responsibilities commensurate with their heft. Rather than a mechanism for international governance, it remained an intergovernmental body through which states pursued their specific or collective priorities.

Indeed, the dominant questions around order in the first five decades of the UN’s existence were those posed by the Cold War conducted by the US and the Soviet Union and their respective allies and satellites, while the UN in effect was a prominent arena in which this global antagonism was carried out.

The world order was bipolar in concentrating power in two camps, with a swath of neutrals, non-aligned and swing players in between; and bi-systemic in the complete contrast in the ideological affinities and economic models that were promoted. Nuclear weapons raised the stakes associated with direct conflict to an existential level, and so pushed armed contests to peripheral theatres or on to skirmishing proxies.

The collapse of communism in the early 1990s ushered in a new dispensation. Those who divined the arrival of a ‘unipolar moment’ for the US were perhaps more accurate in their choice of epithet than they knew. At least on the surface, the US became by far the preponderant power. The decline and 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, in consequence of its economic decrepitude and strategic overstretch, not only removed the US’s peer competitor, but also opened up avenues for promoting economic liberalization and democratic government.

This shift was manifest in particular in changing dynamics in Europe. The US had sponsored the reunification of Germany and was a patron of its subsequent embedding in an integrating, democratic and liberal region. Over time, this drew the former Warsaw Pact members into EU and NATO structures (albeit at a pace and with a completeness that Russia’s strategic calculations could not be accommodated to).

And yet, despite these advances, in retrospect the chief development of the 20 years after the Cold War was a different one: globalization had at a gathering pace prompted a redistribution of political power, while its interlocking economic structures created a dense web of interests and dependencies that moved in all directions. It was likely in these circumstances that the appearance of any major emergency would produce insistent voices demanding what they saw as a more inclusive, legitimate and effective form of international order.

Crises duly arrived, first in the shape of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which strained alliances and stirred controversial debates about the justice and permissibility of military interventions and the need for constraints on US power; and then in the form of the financial meltdown of 2008, seen by many as a principally Western debacle calling for new global economic governance structures as instanced in the improvised G20. Neither set of debates was conclusively resolved, but each persisted against the backdrop of quickening systemic change.

The dilemmas about the shape and maintenance of a rules-based order with multilateralism at its core have since only deepened. The world is pulling in different directions. The ‘America First’ posture of the Trump administration has upturned the central feature of the system. It entails a distaste for multilateral agreements, a disavowal of traditional notions of US leadership, and an insistence on the unimpeded exercise of American power in pursuit of defined national interests.

China asserts the centrality of multilateralism, and practises it selectively, but on the whole favours binary diplomatic transactions where it holds asymmetric advantages; it has used this approach in the construction of its Belt and Road Initiative, as well as on other fronts.

Europe has created in its continent a rules-based order par excellence in the shape of the EU, but its energy has been sapped and its introversion fed by a succession of crises, of which the amputation of the Brexit-bound UK is simply one. The EU has yet to chart its future course or define a global strategy to uphold and advance the multilateralism which has been at its core.

Russia unabashedly is subverting the rules-based order as part of a programme of aggrieved self-aggrandizement. Japan champions the principle of a rules-based system, but the country has been disoriented by its abrupt detachment on this issue from its traditional US partner; while Japan has sought to engage like-minded countries in the West, they have not forged a concerted practical plan of action together.

Among other regional powers, Brazil has a populist government that echoes many of the Trump administration’s instincts, and India, whatever its preferences, has yet to acquire a foreign policy or presence on the global stage equal to its demographic weight and economic potential.

Prominent points of risk in this fragmenting picture are the multilateral trade system, efforts to address climate change, and collective measures to deal with entrenched conflicts.

One obvious consequence of the attrition of the rules-based system through the indifference or ambitions of the great powers is that it will leave smaller states much more exposed and hostage to the vagaries of geopolitical competition. A key question therefore is whether such states will choose and be able to defend a system which gives them a measure of protection.

Over recent decades, a variety of regional groupings – ASEAN, the African Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Organization of American States – have evolved as species of rules-based mechanisms and in order to gather their collective weight. They make a ready constituency for those who would build a coalition for multilateralism. But it is also clear that the support of smaller regional players for such an approach depends on a revision of the rule-making system towards greater inclusivity and a broader say as to the issues it should address.

It is in the context of these trends and structural shifts that Chatham House Expert Perspectives 2019 offers ideas for how to modernize and adapt elements of the rules-based international order. As the title of this opening essay indicates, the imperative to ‘adapt’ reflects the gravity of contemporary challenges, and the inability of many existing structures to underpin ever-more-essential cooperation. Chatham House experts do not offer a master plan, but they attack the problem from a variety of indicative angles.

Suggestions are offered as to where gaps in international rules – regarding economic governance, the global health architecture and in respect of under-regulated domains such as space, for example – need to be filled to address immediate problems and advertise the relevance of multilateralism.

Other ideas demonstrate how logjams affecting some aspects of the system can be worked around; how key powers with scope to shape the system should be engaged; how a broader variety of actors beyond national governments need to be drawn into the effort; how rule-breakers might be tackled; and how imposing order on some chaotic situations requires the fundamental premises of existing policies to be rethought.

Chatham House, which celebrates its centenary in 2020, is a child of efforts after the Great War to reconceive the conduct of international relations and fulfil a mission that is today defined as the creation of a ‘sustainably secure, prosperous and just world’. The historical record shows that international orders not built on these attributes will fail.

This essay was produced for the 2019 edition of Chatham House Expert Perspectives – our annual survey of risks and opportunities in global affairs – in which our researchers identify areas where the current sets of rules, institutions and mechanisms for peaceful international cooperation are falling short, and present ideas for reform and modernization.

The United Nations (UN) Security Council is stuck in a peacekeeping trilemma. This is a situation where the Council's three strategic goals for peacekeeping operations—implementing broad mandates, minimizing peacekeeper casualties and maximizing cost-effectiveness—cannot be achieved simultaneously. This trilemma stems from longstanding competing pressures on how the Council designs UN peacekeeping operations as well as political divisions between peacekeeping's three key groups of stakeholders: the states that authorize peacekeeping mandates, those that provide most of the personnel and field capabilities, and those that pay the majority of the bill. Fortunately, the most negative consequences of the trilemma can be mitigated and perhaps even transcended altogether. Mitigation would require the Council to champion and implement four main reforms: improving peacekeeper performance, holding peacekeepers accountable for misdeeds, adopting prioritized and sequenced mandates, and strengthening the financial basis for UN peacekeeping. Transcending the trilemma would require a more fundamental reconfiguration of the key stakeholder groups in order to create much greater unity of effort behind a re-envisaged peacekeeping enterprise. This is highly unlikely in the current international political context.

The vote to impeach Donald Trump holds almost no surprises - on both the abuse of power and obstruction of congress articles, the votes were split entirely on party lines with nearly all the majority-led House Democrats but not a single Republican voting to impeach Trump.

However, this ‘pre-ordained’ outcome of the House impeachment inquiry does serve to highlight that the US is in the midst of a hyper-partisan political moment. Policy gridlock has led to two government shutdowns during Donald Trump’s presidency, with one further budgetary fight narrowly avoided.

With a few notable exceptions (such as USMCA), policy areas that lend themselves to bipartisanship - including infrastructure and drug pricing - have seen very little progress under divided congressional chambers. Party identification can now be overlaid with the cable news channel one watches or the newspaper one reads.

Impeachment now moves to the Senate for a trial, requiring a two-thirds majority of the Republican-led senate (or 67 senators) for a conviction. Given the congressional partisanship we are seeing, the baseline scenario continues to be that the senate will not vote to convict Trump and remove him from office - despite much being made of how many senators are likely to vote for a Senate conviction.

Why public opinion could be crucial

There is another story to keep a close eye on. The number to track is 47.2 – the current polling average of public support for Trump’s impeachment. Polling averages from the end of September 2019 (before the hearings began, but after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal inquiry) had 49.4% supporting impeachment versus 47.2% this week.

Here’s why this number matters. If those pushing for impeachment and removal are unable to drive popular support across a critical threshold level, then those against impeachment and removal are not going to abandon the president and vote for a senate conviction. With Trump consistently polling in the low 40s on job approval, but in the high 80s/low 90s within the Republican party, this means Republican congress members concerned about re-election are extremely hesitant to distance themselves from him without a clear mandate from the domestic public. 

A tale of the two most recent presidents to face impeachment underscores this point. Gallup polling claimed 58% of adults supported impeaching and removing President Richard Nixon from office in August 1974, whereas only 35% of the public supported impeaching President Bill Clinton in December 1998, the month he was impeached.

Given the respective outcomes of those two impeachments, it suggests public support for impeachment and removal needs to increase well beyond the current 47.2%, to avoid the foregone conclusion of acquittal in the Senate (even if there are signs of the tide moving in the opposite direction with those against impeachment overtaking support for the first time in December).   

What does this mean for Democrats?

In the short term, if the Democrats want to make inroads into the hearts and minds of those across the partisan gulf, it will be critical to secure senate testimony from those in Trump’s inner circle at the time of the Ukrainian affair.

After Trump ordered individuals with first-hand knowledge of the administration’s efforts vis-à-vis Ukraine not to testify, House investigators were unable to call many witnesses with direct evidence (which in fact left the House testimony exposed to Republican claims of hearsay). With Trump impeached, more of the public is likely to tune in to the senate proceedings, and direct evidence by inner circle administration officials required to testify presents an opportunity to move public opinion.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi recognizes how crucial the procedures and participants for the senate trial will be, and has said she could delay sending the articles of impeachment to the senate as leverage for a 'fair trial'.

Democrats also have to consider how an impeachment inquiry that - at least from this vantage point - does not end in a conviction of the president plays out for the 2020 election campaign, especially if this also likely means that public opinion - and certainly Republican-party views - of Trump have not shifted.

The US and China have entered into an increasingly confrontational relationship over trade and technology. This may force Europe to make difficult choices between the two economic superpowers – or perform a balancing act. Although the recent US-China phase-1 trade deal has eased the relationship for now, the trade and technology tensions are a structural issue and are likely to persist.

The debate over Huawei’s participation in 5G networks is an example of how the UK and other countries may face competing priorities in economic, security and foreign policy. Can Europe avoid a binary choice between the US and China? Is it possible for the EU to position itself as a third global power in trade, technology and standard-setting? What strategies should Europeans adopt to keep the US and China engaged in the rules-based international order and what does the future hold for trade multilateralism?

Sir Simon Fraser will join us for a discussion on Europe’s future role between the US and China. Sir Simon is Managing Partner of Flint Global and Deputy Chairman of Chatham House. He previously served as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Head of the UK Diplomatic Service from 2010 to 2015. Prior to that he was Permanent Secretary at the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He has also served as Director General for Europe in the FCO and Chief of Staff to European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson.

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.

Belarus’s parliamentary elections, held on 17 November, were predictably non-transparent, with numerous violations. The regime of Alexander Lukasheka allowed no opposition candidates as members of parliament – in contrast to the previous parliament, in which there were two opposition MPs. While this might seem to be a return to ‘business as usual’, three key takeaways from the elections highlight a shifting political and social landscape.

1. Lukashenka is appeasing his ruling cadre by promising to increase their role in the political system.

With several influential officials becoming new MPs, it is more likely that parliament will be more involved in any forthcoming discussion of a new constitution. Lukashenka has been promising constitutional reform for several years; he has said publicly that it will lead to an increased significance of government agencies as well as parliament. The aim of this is to keep them more engaged and on Lukashenka’s side.

In terms of the composition of the new parliament itself, there are some key differences with previous years. It is no longer a comfortable place for officials to while away their pre-retirement: many MPs are now in their fifties or younger, and have plans for careers beyond parliament.

It also looks as if small steps are being taken towards the emergence of a party system in Belarus. The leader of Belaya Rus, a pro-government association of Belarusian officials, got a seat in parliament for the first time, increasing the likelihood of it becoming a political party. The number of MPs from different parties has increased to 21 (out of 110 in total). Although these still all broadly support Lukashenka, they can differ from the president in policy positions. For example, the Labour and Justice Party, with 6 seats in parliament, supported the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Change, of course, may not necessarily be in a pro-Western direction.

Moreover, the newly elected members of parliament look more like real politicians. They go to debates, speak to independent journalists and have their own social media channels. Some have even felt able to criticize the actions of the authorities.

Similar changes have been taking place in other institutions in Belarus. The government is now more competent than it has ever been. The National Bank has managed to carry out macroeconomic stabilization on one of the most unstable currencies in Europe, while the ministries responsible for the economic development have implemented certain small-scale reforms. The Minister of the Interior has even acknowledged mistakes made by his department (under his predecessor), and undertaken to make improvements.

This has resulted in a near-comical situation, whereby the Belarusian non-state media outlets have an increasingly positive view of some state officials, such as Prime Minister Siarhei Rumas, while the state media has been scaling back its coverage of him to ensure he does not become too popular.

2. Belarus has less need for the West and is reluctant to make even small concessions.

Since the slight warming of Belarusian relations with the West in 2014, Lukashenka has been having more meetings with prominent Western officials. Western institutions began trying to cooperate more closely with Belarus, but soon saw that it was not very interested. In 2018, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development allocated €360 million to Belarus. However, it is now considering a reduction, as reforms in Belarus have not, in its view, gone far enough. The European Union has also committed considerable time and money to regional authorities, but this has not brought any significant changes to Belarusian local government.

The absence of opposition candidates also demonstrates that the Belarusian authorities are prepared for a new deterioration of relations with the West. The authorities could certainly have afforded some opposition in parliament, especially since they themselves choose whom to appoint. Given that they did not, they either do not consider worsened relations a problem or are confident that the West will continue to cooperate with Belarus in order to limit Russian power, regardless of its violations of the rule of law.

3. There is growing popular dissatisfaction with the current regime, but the state has no good plan for how to deal with it.

Parliamentary election campaigns in Belarus are traditionally low-key, but this year they were particularly muted. The authorities tried to ensure that people knew as little about the election as possible. Campaign posters appeared on the streets just two weeks before polling day. It seems the authorities were reluctant to politicize society, as further resentment at autocratic rule is brewing.

Many Belarusians who previously supported Lukashenka now have a very critical opinion of him. Take political blogging: the most popular political blogger in Belarus is a 22-year-old man who goes by the name of NEXTA. He produces low-quality videos which are highly critical of the authorities. A film by him about Lukashenka, released a month ago, has already received 1.8 million views, even though there are only 9.5 million people in Belarus.

The authorities are not in a concessionary mood. The presidential elections in 2020 will also likely be a sham. If the authorities’ grip over the country is weakened, they will fear an outbreak of anger, resulting in widespread protests which the regime might once again have to meet with violence.

What does Britain’s departure from the EU mean for the country’s policy towards the South Caucasus, a small region on the periphery of Europe, fractured by conflict? Although Britain is not directly involved in any of the region’s peace processes (except in the case of the Geneva International Discussions on conflicts involving Georgia, as an EU member state), it has been a significant stakeholder in South Caucasian stability since the mid-1990s.

Most obviously, Britain has been the single largest foreign investor in Caspian oil and gas. Yet beyond pipelines, Britain also has been a significant investor in long-term civil society-led strategies to build peace in the South Caucasus.

Through what was then the Global Conflict Prevention Pool, in the early 2000s the Department for International Development (DfID) pioneered large-scale peacebuilding interventions, such as the Consortium Initiative, addressing Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, in 2003-09. These built civic networks in the South Caucasus and partnerships with British-based NGOs.

This experience left a strong intellectual legacy. British expertise on the South Caucasus, including specific expertise on its conflicts, is highly regarded in the region and across the world.

There is also a strong tradition of British scholarship on the Caucasus, and several British universities offer Caucasus-related courses. Through schemes such as the John Smith Fellowship Trust, the Robert Bosch Stiftung Academy Fellowship at Chatham House and Chevening Scholarships, significant numbers of young leaders from the South Caucasus have spent time in British institutions and built effective relationships within them.

Three challenges

This niche as a champion of long-term, strategic peacebuilding and repository of area-specific knowledge should not be lost as Britain’s relationship with the EU and regional actors evolves. This can be ensured through awareness of three challenges confronting a post-Brexit Caucasus policy.

The first challenge for London is to avoid framing a regional policy in the South Caucasus as an extension of a wider ‘Russia policy’. Deteriorating Russian-British relations in recent years strengthen a tendency to view policies in the European neighbourhood through the traditional prisms of Cold War and Russian-Western rivalries.

Yet an overwhelming focus on Russia fails to capture other important aspects of political developments in South Caucasus conflicts. Although often referred to as ‘breakaway’ or ‘occupied’ territories, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorny Karabakh are not ungoverned spaces. They have evolved into examples of what scholars call ‘de facto states’ that, to differing degrees, control territory, provide governance and exercise internal sovereignty.

Few disagree that these entities would not survive without external patronage. But neither does that patronage explain their sustainability on its own. Russia-centricity diminishes Britain’s latitude to engage on the full range of local drivers sustaining these entities, contributing instead to less effective policies predicated on competition and containment.

A second and related challenge is to maintain and develop Britain’s position on the issue of engaging populations in these entities. De facto states appear to stand outside of the international rules-based system. Yet in many cases, their civil societies are peopled by skilled and motivated activists who want their leaders to be held accountable according to international rules.

Strategies of isolation ignore these voices and contribute instead to fearful and demoralized communities less likely to engage in a transformation of adversarial relationships. Making this case with the wider international community, and facilitating the funding of local civil societies in contested territories, would be important steps in sustaining an effective British policy on the resolution of conflicts.    

The third challenge for Britain is to maintain a long-term approach to the conflicts of the South Caucasus alongside potential short-term imperatives in other policy fields, as relationships shift post-Brexit.

In this fluid international environment, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a role to play both as an internal champion of a long-term peacebuilding strategy and a coordinator of British efforts with those of multilateral actors engaged in the South Caucasus. These include the United Nations, the EU’s Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the Crisis in Georgia and OSCE’s Special Representative for the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office for the South Caucasus, all of which have built relationships with relevant actors on the ground.

Recommendations

Britain’s niche as a champion and advocate of a strategic approach to peaceful change can be secured post-Brexit in the following ways.  

First, in-house expertise is crucial to effective peacebuilding programming. The Foreign Office’s research analysts play a vital role in generating independent internal advice and liaising with academic and NGO communities. Their role could be supplemented by the reinstatement of a regional conflict adviser post, based in Tbilisi, tasked with strengthening Britain’s regional presence on conflict issues and coordinating policy at a regional level.

This post, with a remit to cover conflicts and build up area knowledge and relationships can contribute significantly to working closely with local civil societies, where so much expertise and knowledge resides, as well as other stakeholders.

Second, programming should build in conflict sensitivity by dissociating eligibility from contested political status. This can encourage local populations to take advantage of opportunities for funding, study, comparative learning and professional development irrespective of the status of the entity where they reside.

The Chevening Scholarships are an excellent example, whereby applicants can select ‘South Caucasus’ as their affiliated identity from a drop-down menu. This enables citizens from across the region to apply irrespective of the status of the territory in which they live.   

Finally, a holistic understanding of peace is crucial. Programming in unrecognized or partially-recognized entities should acknowledge that effective peacebuilding needs to embrace political dynamics and processes beyond cross-conflict contact and confidence building. Local actors in such entities may find peacebuilding funding streams defined exclusively in terms of cross-conflict contact more politically risky and ineffective in addressing domestic blockages to peace.

While cross-conflict dynamics remain critical, ‘single-community’ programming framed in terms of civic participation, inclusion, civil society capacity-building, minority and human rights in contested territories, and building the confidence from within to engage in constructive dialogue, are no less important.

The ’global Britain’ promised by Brexit remains a fanciful idea. Quiet, painstaking work to build on the legacies of a long-term British investment in a peace strategy for the South Caucasus, on the other hand, is a realistic and attainable goal.

Once an autonomous region populated mainly by Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan, Nagorny Karabakh, is a contested territory in the Caucasus. Since the late 1980s, its contested status has driven popular mobilization among Armenians and Azerbaijanis and an all-out war between 1992-94. After a quarter-century of enmity and military build-up, in 2019, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders agreed to ‘prepare their populations for peace’ but how would this work in practice?

Parts of a Circle: History of the Karabakh Conflict (2019) chronicles the disputed history of the decades-old conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Supported by the European Union and based on a series of three documentary films jointly produced over four years by Armenian and Azerbaijani production teams, the film showcases journalistic cooperation in bridging societies in conflict.

The screening was followed by a panel discussion that will explore the state of the conflict and the efforts to end it. Why have efforts to resolve the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia not been successful? How can both sides build grassroot support for peace after years of fomenting hatred? And what can the international community do in support?

A short film about the making of the documentary can be seen here.

As the international community looks to the period beyond the UN Copenhagen agreements on climate change, attention is focusing on the finance for implementing global emissions reductions on the ground. The requirement for significantly scaled-up investment into the solutions to climate change is a central issue, often characterized as investment flows into 'low carbon technologies'.

This paper draws on five years of insights from mainstream financiers leading the exponential growth in renewable energy investment, and key issues for policy-makers seeking to foster conditions for even greater investment are identified.

Following the conclusion of the Paris climate negotiations, this expert roundtable will examine the critical elements of the final agreement and what this means for the future of energy and climate policy in key countries.

The discussion will examine what the agreement means for keeping global average temperatures below two degrees Celsius and assess whether ambition will be ratcheted over time. It will also look at the primary implications of the outcome for key regions and countries such as the EU, United States, China and India. Finally, the session will also consider the next steps in terms of implementing the agreement. 

Attendance at this event is by invitation only.