Lockdowns are being eased in many countries, but from different starting points in terms of prevalence of the virus, and with different near-term trade-offs between protecting life and easing constraints on economic activity.

The pressure to ease is understandable. The IMF estimates $10tn has been spent so far on official support measures worldwide, and forecasts global GDP will contract by an unprecedented 4.9% in 2020.

However, the WHO director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recently insisted that there is an ‘urgent responsibility to do everything we can with the tools we have now to suppress transmission and save lives’, even as research into vaccines and therapeutics continues.

Focusing on suppressing and eliminating the virus as quickly as possible is not just the best strategy for saving life, it also makes most sense in terms of minimising the long-term economic damage from the pandemic.

The alternatives remain uncertain

Neither a vaccine nor improved treatment are currently sufficiently certain to be the focal point for an economic recovery strategy. Despite optimism about vaccine development, there is no certainty of a decisive outcome by a given date. And, even if a vaccine proved effective, manufacturing and distributing it to 8bn people will present an unprecedented set of logistical and economic challenges and take many months, if not years.

In the meantime, although substantial progress has been made in reducing loss of life among those made seriously ill by the virus - and who have access to advanced medical facilities - it remains highly dangerous for a significant proportion of the population - around 20% in advanced economies.

An alternative containment strategy based on gradually reducing the prevalence of the virus in the population by maintaining an “R” number (replication coefficient) just below one will be both economically costly and highly risky when compared with a decisive push to eliminate the virus quickly.

With an R number just below one it is true the virus may eventually disappear, but only over a lengthy period, during which economically damaging social distancing measures will have to stay in place, dragging out the impact on both demand and supply.

Wage support measures to limit ‘economic scarring’ will have to be maintained, and kickstarting the economy with a conventional fiscal stimulus will be difficult, if not impossible, especially when the ability - or willingness - of consumers to spend is still heavily constrained either by social distancing measures or a lack of confidence.

There is also a major risk when the R number is close to one that the virus could suddenly take off again, leading to a complete failure of the strategy.

Benefits of suppress and eliminate

A successful policy focused on suppressing and eliminating the virus offers much better prospects. First, the government can then protect the vast bulk of the economy within its territory, even if it means continuing travel restrictions for some time vis-a-vis countries that are less committed to or less successful in eliminating the virus.

Some sectors - particularly long-haul air transport - will be hard hit, but other critical high value or employment intensive sectors - such as domestic hospitality, leisure and the arts - will be able to make a substantial recovery. To put it bluntly, the authorities may have to hold back some sectors to save others. Such a strategy would also ensure an economy can participate sustainably in free travel zones with other countries.

Second, a drive to suppress and eliminate the virus in the shortest possible timeframe, and then maintain that status, will help authorities communicate clearly to the public the overarching framework guiding the application of social distancing measures, and the nature of the ‘new normal’ economy that can be expected to emerge over the medium to long-term.

Achieving such clarity will enhance the public’s trust in the government’s strategy and hence responsiveness to government instructions. It will also minimise unnecessary and costly adaptations by business and increase its ability to target new opportunities arising from the genuine long-term changes brought about by the crisis.

In addition, a suppress and eliminate strategy is the only sure way to address the disproportionate impact of the virus on ethnic minorities and the poor, and to put an end to the isolation of the millions who currently have to shield themselves.

We know that suppressing the virus almost completely within a given territory is possible because some countries have already done it - notably New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. Some which started with a serious epidemic, such as China, Spain and Italy, have also managed to reach a point where almost complete elimination within their territory can be envisaged.

Renewed outbreaks are likely to happen, particularly while the virus remains in active circulation globally. But this does not invalidate the underlying suppress and eliminate strategy.

Key policies to suppress and eliminate the virus include: a rapid and decisive national lockdown to reduce the disease to levels low enough for test, trace and quarantine systems to identify and suppress local outbreaks; social distancing measures for a limited period or in a specific locality to limit spread while, as far as possible, minimising economic impact; and effective quarantine and track systems applied at borders to prevent the disease from being re-introduced by non-essential travellers and returning nationals.

The precise form of these policies is evolving rapidly as we learn more about the virus. For example, if there is a need today to stop a rapidly escalating epidemic in a given territory, it won’t necessarily mean adopting exactly the same package of lock down measures across the board as were applied three months ago. Several activities had to cease then simply because the virus was spreading so fast there was no time to put in place effective mitigation measures. This does not have to be repeated.

In addition, the benefits of the widespread use of face masks are now much better understood. As is the value of deploying a battery of measures, each one only partially effective on its own but, in combination, with a decisive impact. Financial support measures may need to be adjusted or extended to underpin local lockdowns and, at any given point, the authorities will need to work within an overall budget for relaxation measures and prioritise - getting pupils back in school may mean holding back easing of restrictions elsewhere.

Choosing an effective strategy inevitably means making tough choices. Delaying short-term recovery measures, even by a matter of weeks in whole economies or specific localities, can make a decisive difference to delivering a long-term sustainable economic outcome. The authorities may also be forced to hold back some economic sectors, possibly even leading to permanent damage, as the price of a general recovery. But if we are not ready to make these choices, the economy may become permanently stuck in a halfway house between lockdown and recovery.

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.

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.

The World Bank estimates that the magnitude of internal migration is about two‐and‐a‐half times that of international migration. Within India, an estimated 40 million internal migrant workers, largely in the informal economy, were severely impacted by the government’s COVID-19 lockdown.

With transportation systems initially shut down, many had no recourse to travel options back to homes and villages, resulting in harrowing journeys home. Those who were able to make it home found, in some instances, villages refusing entry because of fears of transmission.

The shocking images of migrants forced to walk in desperation showed the enormity of the crisis as well as some of the challenges posed by an extended lockdown in India where so many people live hand to mouth and cannot afford not to work.

Migrant workers and the informal economy

The complete failure of the government to anticipate the needs of this group, and the subsequent distress caused, has made visible a large workforce who experience precarity of work and often live hand to mouth.

One key challenge is the lack of robust data on the scale of internal migration. While estimates abound, there is no proper data collection system in place to accurately record temporary, seasonal and circular migration patterns. However, it is estimated that more than 90% of working people in India are engaged in the informal economy, with states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar accounting for more than 80% of workers in this sector.

A recent government labour force survey estimated that more than 71% of people with a regular salary working in non-agricultural industries had no written job contract. Nearly half of workers are not eligible for social security benefits.

Daily-wage workers are particularly vulnerable, with limited or no access to social security and most living in poverty. Living hand to mouth, their loss of livelihoods has led to a lack of money to pay rents or pay for food. Women are impacted whether because of their gender, responsibilities as caregivers, or as members of disadvantaged castes and communities.

COVID-19 has massively impacted this group of workers. Stranded Workers Action Network found that 50% of workers had rations left for less than one day; 74% had less than half their daily wages remaining to survive for the rest of the lockdown period; and 89% had not been paid by their employers at all during the lockdown.

According to Supreme Court proceedings, relief camps are housing some 660,000 workers; some 2.2 million people also rely on emergency food supplies. Job losses, and home and food insecurity have left this group highly vulnerable.

In March 2020, in response to COVID-19, the Indian government instituted the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package (PMGKB), a $22.6 billion relief package. The World Bank announced $1 billion funding to accelerate social protection support, in part through the PMGKB.

This support would work alongside pre-existing initiatives such as the Public Distribution System (PDS), which covers 800 million people, and Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT). This cash injection could help address one of the key challenges facing India’s piecemeal and uneven social protection programmes – inadequate funding. India’s spending on public social protection excluding health is just 1.3% of the GDP.

However, there are still other challenges to overcome. One is how to ensure coordination and coverage within, and across, differing states. The second is how to transition multiple schemes into one integrated system that can be accessed anywhere within the country, particularly important when many workers are on the move. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive system, which is adaptive and flexible to needs and provides adequate social and income support.

Another coverage issue relates to the use of direct cash transfers (DCTs) to support people impacted by the loss of livelihoods, where funds are deposited within bank accounts. Such measures fail to consider the significant numbers of people who do not have access to banks and will not be able to access this support.

Wider impact on livelihoods and remittances

​There is a risk, with extended lockdown and risks of further waves of infection, that labour shortages could negatively impact the economy. There is a wider need to support re-entry back into the workforce and support livelihoods. National Survey Sample data shows that between 2007 and 2008, internal remittances amounted to US$10 billion. These domestic transfers financed over 30% of all household consumption in remittance-receiving households.

But future migration for work is likely to be severely impacted. As restrictions begin to ease, employers and businesses cannot necessarily rely on cheap available labour. Having faced destitution and hardship, many may wish to stay closer to families and local support networks.

As Irudaya Rajan notes in The New Humanitarian, it is likely ‘there will be a reduction in long-distance migration in India after this’, as many migrants will be wary of being stranded again. This would be hugely detrimental to stimulating the economy as reverse migration could push down wages and subsequently demand.

Another issue may be returning migrant workers, who have been working overseas, over half of whom work in the Gulf. It is unclear if, or when, migrants will be able to return to work, with the World Bank estimating that remittances from this group could fall by about 23%.

However, what is striking has been India’s support for this group - the Vande Bharat Mission has deployed flights and naval ships to help return migrant workers, especially vulnerable groups - in marked contrast to the lack of preparation and care for internal migrants.

One factor for this may be the volume of remittances these migrant workers bring to the Indian economy, but it overlooks the contribution of internal remittances, on which there is far less robust data.

But the current challenges can also be an opportunity. The scale of the migrant crisis has made visible an often-overlooked population of workers. With political will, and investment at federal and state levels, this could be an opportunity to transform livelihoods.

As thoughts will turn to how to stimulate economies and get people back to work, it is imperative that those in authority turn their minds to how to create a more just society, that invests in healthcare, and has a social protection system that supports the most vulnerable in society.

Migrants are not just objects of charity that need support. Internal migrants are key income generators that play a vital role in Indian society and should never be overlooked again.

This article was originally published in Routed Magazine.

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.

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.            

Violent unrest in Addis Ababa and the surrounding Oromia region has led to the loss of over 177 lives, with the detention of thousands and widespread destruction to property. The rise of identity-based conflict and related political tension is the most severe test of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s leadership since he came to power two years ago.

Protests erupted after the assassination on the 29th of June of Hachalu Hundessa, a prominent Oromo singer and activist. They spiralled into widespread rioting, looting and arson which devastated some towns. Targeted attacks and killings, particularly against ethnic minorities in Oromia, have damaged communities’ social fabric and heightened regional tensions.

The motives behind Hachalu’s murder are not fully understood. Suspects linked to a militant faction of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) have been arrested, while the government has blamed the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and certain prominent activist-politicians for inciting ethnic violence and attempting to derail Ethiopia’s fragile political liberalization. With investigations not yet concluded, any exploitation of this tragedy for political gain and without adequate due process is likely to further erode trust in the government and public institutions. 

Ethiopia’s progress halting under Abiy Ahmed

The prime minister came to power with a vision of national unity – encapsulated in his ideology of Medemer – and implemented a raft of reforms aimed at strengthening institutions and increasing political space, inclusivity and freedoms. Abiy was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for Ethiopia’s rapprochement with Eritrea, alongside domestic progress. He was lauded for mediating within the region, including in Sudan following the ouster of Omar al-Bashir.

However, Ethiopia’s simmering ethnic and political divisions have deep roots, with structural problems that have been insufficiently addressed under Abiy’s helm. These include conflicting narratives about Ethiopia’s history, an unfinished federal project and tensions over the division of power between the centre and the regions.

There is also the desire for better representation from various ethnic groups, linked to the pursuit of greater autonomy in many places, notably in the ethnically diverse southern region. Reforms have increased expectations among competing constituencies, heightening tensions further.

There are signs that Ethiopia is sliding dangerously backwards, particularly on security and democracy. The country has seen worsening levels of militant ethno-nationalism and inter-communal violence, a dangerous standoff between the federal government and Tigray region, and an increase in politically motivated deaths.

This has been compounded by the government turning to familiar, heavy-handed and securitized responses to law and order challenges, including intimidation and mass arrests of civilians, opposition politicians and journalists, and shutting off the internet. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission called for security forces to refrain from punitive measures and pursue conciliatory approaches in implementing the state of emergency measures brought in to deal with COVID-19.

The country is also facing a triple economic shock caused by the pandemic, renewed instability and devastating desert locust swarms. The IMF recently reduced Ethiopia’s GDP growth projections for 2019/2020 to 3.2 percent down from 6.2 percent and the country has estimated that 1.4 million workers will be affected by the pandemic, particularly in the service and manufacturing sectors.

The impact on agriculture, which accounts for a third of GDP and on which most Ethiopian’s depend for their livelihoods, is expected to be severe. In addition to shaking investor confidence, the likely impact on livelihoods, food security and poverty levels makes it harder for the government to maintain public support and could add to instability.

Political turmoil caused by election delay

The situation has been exacerbated by the indefinite postponement of elections that were due in August 2020, as a result of COVID-19.

Efforts to avoid a crisis of legitimacy for the government caused by the end of parliament’s term in October 2020, led to a decision on the way forward being taken by the Council of Constitutional Inquiry (CCI). This group of legal experts led by the President of the Supreme Court, gave the ruling Prosperity Party (PP) an open-ended extension of their term, rubberstamped by the House of Federation, with no limits set on their powers during the interim period.

This decision sets a dangerous precedent and is a missed opportunity to achieve compromise and advance the democratic process. The lack of inclusion has angered opposition groups, with whom the government has had little genuine dialogue. Many in the opposition had advocated for a transitional or technocratic government during the interim, despite risks of further divisions and a vacuum of authority, and accuse the PP of manipulating institutions to stay in power.

Furthermore, the TPLF, the ruling party in the Tigray region and formerly the dominant national political force, is pushing forward with its intention to hold unilateral regional elections. It formed a new regional electoral commission, in spite of objections from the national electoral board and the government, which has implied it could use force to stop the elections. This rising enmity between the PP and the TPLF is extremely worrying and requires immediate de-escalation.

A pathway to genuine dialogue and reconciliation

Ethiopia’s problems can only be resolved through dialogue, compromise and reconciliation. Escalating tensions, particularly between the federal government, Tigray and Oromo opposition groups risk furthering instability and fragmentation. One way to establish confidence would be for a group of respected Ethiopian personalities (elders and religious leaders) to lead a political dialogue, with actors carefully chosen and vetted to ensure the buy-in of government, opposition parties and the public, and supported by Ethiopia’s regional and international partners.

Once established, an initial goal of such a platform would be to induce elites, populist leaders, activists and influential regional media to stop exploiting division and violence for narrow gain. Priority agenda issues include the election timetable and required institutional and legal reforms, the role of the opposition during the interim period, strengthening reconciliation efforts, and the need to carefully manage autonomous security forces within regional states.

The prime minister can still weather the storm and implement his vision of a unified multinational Ethiopia based on the values of democracy, rule of law and justice, but only if the government and other stakeholders do all they can to reduce tensions and preserve peace at this critical juncture. COVID-19 and the associated economic impacts have deepened the country’s multifaceted problems, which can only be resolved by political actors committing themselves towards inclusive dialogue and reconciliation, as they seek to forge a shared common future.

Gon Coulibaly, an economic technocrat and Ouattara loyalist since the 1990s, was earmarked in March as the candidate for the ruling Rassemblement des Houphouëtistes pour la Démocratie et la Paix (RHDP) party in the elections due in October, and represented a handpicked heir, trusted to sustain the strategy established during Ouattara’s nine years in power.

Many RDHP parliamentarians and local mayors are now pressing the 78-year-old Ouattara to run again. This was not what he had planned. He hoped to go out on a high – ‘par la grande porte’ – and set a statesmanlike example of retirement by choice, making way for the next generation. His leadership of reform of the regional currency that will see the end of the West African CFA franc would have been the crowning achievement of a presidency that had taken his country from post-war stagnation to sustained growth GDP growth rates around seven per cent before COVID-19 forced a slowdown, as it has worldwide.

A profound strategic dilemma

Gon Coulibaly had undergone a heart transplant in 2012, and when he hurried to Paris in early May and was fitted with a stent, some wondered whether he would have the energy required for an election campaign. Yet he returned home on 2 July, with his formal nomination by the RHDP pencilled in for early the next month. His sudden death on 8 July, at the age of just 61, was a terrible personal blow for Ouattara, who had regarded him almost as a son, and much more than a purely political protégé. But it also left the president facing a profound strategic dilemma.

Names of alternative potential RHDP candidates have been floated – notably the defence minister, and now interim premier, Hamed Bakayoko and the secretary general of the presidency Patrick Achi. Both have solid electoral track records and ample experience of government. But over recent days the impression has grown that they do not command the ultimate confidence of Alassane Ouattara to take on the leadership of the nation.

Speculation has grown that the president will conclude that he has no choice but to go back on his promise to retire and stand for yet another term. Although some respected legal experts disagree, he has always made a point of insisting that the constitutional reform of 2016 allows him to run again. And many influential voices within the RHDP are now pressing him to do so.

This is not ‘rentacrowd’ fawning. Many members of the governing party have always felt that Ouattara offers the strongest blend of political appeal, governing capability and international profile required to lead a country that likes to see itself as West Africa’s ‘elephant’.

A weak opposition, but third term challenges

In electoral terms, Ouattara’s greatest campaign asset might be the unconvincing state of the opposition figures who are actually free to stand, after the Ivorian authorities’ strong-armed the judicial system into blocking the hopes of the of the smooth-talking former parliamentary speaker Guillame Soro, who had great appeal for Cote D’Ivoire’s growing young population. Soro is now exiled in France after conviction in absentia for corruption. Ex-president Laurent Gbagbo remains in Brussels, while the International Criminal Court considers the prosecution appeal against his acquittal on charges of human rights crimes. He is now allowed to travel and has applied for a passport to come home, but it is unclear if this will be granted. That leaves another former head of state, the 86-year old Henri Konan Bédié, as the main opposition challenger.

However, even if the RHDP party machine delivers victory for Ouattara, a third term risks hard questions from those who dispute its legitimacy and it may generate other significant political challenges too. Some 60 per cent of Ivorians are under the age of 25, and many young people are impatient for leaders more in tune with their concerns and outlook. Some 51 per cent now live in towns and cities.

The sprawling Abidjan conurbation, in particular, weighs heavily in the political culture and national mood. Street protest and urban frustrations are a real factor, and something that fuels vocal grassroots support for both the Soro and Gbagbo camps.

Moreover, despite the government’s capable management, the COVID-19 crisis has struck a severe economic and social blow that is sure to impose painful legacy pressures. Even when real GDP was rising by seven per cent per annum, increasingly evident inequality was brewing popular resentment. Corruption appeared to be on the rise, and the obvious prosperity, construction and consumption in parts of Abidjan were not reflected nationwide nor in all sections of society.

In the latter years of his second term, Ouattara recognized this and launched an ambitious programme to broaden the reach of development and nudge growth towards a more ‘inclusive’ model. But selling this as the core of an election agenda would be harder for a political veteran who has been in power since 2011 and who now went back on his rhetoric about making way for a younger generation.

A third term Ouattara would also face challenges internationally, and particularly in West Africa. He has always presented himself as a statesmanlike figure with restraint and respect for institutional values, setting a tone that has helped in the management of numerous regional crises – exemplified by his participation in a five-president mission to Bamako last week, an effort to broker a solution to Mali’s political and protest deadlock. If a third term run sparks mass domestic protest or accusations of constitutional manipulation, the diplomatic standing and influence so associated with Ouattara will be jeopardized.

So Côte d’Ivoire’s president faces profoundly awkward questions as he ponders the third term bid that he had forsworn less than five months ago. And yet he may well conclude that, from his political perspective, there is no viable alternative.

While we must wait for the final reckoning of most successful national coronavirus responses, it does still appear those countries with memories of MERS and SARS - such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, and South Korea – led the way in being best prepared for COVID-19, with strong contract tracing and isolation measures.

Experience of previous outbreaks informed the containment strategies adopted by countries in East Asia in response to COVID-19. Vietnam reported its first case of COVID-19 in January but, over the following four months with rapid targeted testing, contact tracing and successful containment, only around 300 additional cases with no deaths were confirmed.

These countries learned to be flexible fast when new transmissions occurred, establishing quick lockdown measures targeted at key groups such as Singapore’s schools or South Korea’s night clubs and religious centres. In stark contrast, most European countries were overwhelmed by the pandemic despite enjoying world-class health systems, predictive models, scientific expertise, wealth, and resources.

Asia may have suffered first from coronavirus, but there is no ‘first mover advantage’ in dealing with a pandemic. The more resilient a society, the better placed it is to cope with a variety of risks and challenges. But to become resilient, a society needs to have faced setbacks and learned from them. And to remain resilient, it needs to stay aware of its own vulnerabilities and avoid complacency.

Prior experience of crises and disturbances, coupled with a ‘trial and error’ process of learning to deal with them, makes a society more resilient, whereas high levels of economic welfare and relative lack of recent crises leave some societies less prepared to face shocks. This is known as the ‘vulnerability paradox’.

Within Europe, it has actually been the Greek handling of COVID-19 that so far appears more successful than others. Greece is a country which has suffered a decade of austerity leading to a weakened healthcare system. And with one of Europe’s oldest populations, the Greek government was keenly aware of its own vulnerabilities. This prompted an early lockdown and a rapid increase in intensive care beds.

Although better state capacity and health system capability are clearly positives for mitigating disasters, citizens do tend to be less familiar with risk preparedness. This lack of experience can then breed complacency which threatens societies where risks are often complex, numerous, transboundary and inter-related.

Conversely, the absence of systemic resilience at a national level often puts the onus on family units or local communities – creating resilience as a necessary response to weak government capacity. There is little choice but to learn to look after yourself and your community.

However, although the vulnerability paradox helps explain why prior experience makes a system more resilient, societies need to stay aware of their own vulnerabilities and avoid complacency if they are to continually remain resilient.

Complacency coupled with a belief in the virtues of the free market has left some countries hit harder than others by the pandemic. In normal times, ‘just in time’ business models can be highly efficient compared to holding vast stocks. But it does not require hindsight to know that a global health crisis will see demand for protective equipment soar and these business models severely challenged.

Several societies have also witnessed a decline in trust towards institutions, especially politicians or the media. The deployment of science as justification for political decisions around coronavirus was presumably intended to help garner trust in those decisions. But when the science itself is inexact because of inadequate or emerging knowledge, this strategy is hardly fail-safe.

COVID-19 does provide an opportunity to rebuild trust by rethinking the relationship between the state and its citizens, to engage people more directly in a discussion about societal resilience with empowered citizens, and to rebuild a social contract between state and society in the context of recent significant changes and further potential threats.

It should also provide a salutary wake-up call to a range of ‘strongmen’ leaders prone to portraying issues rather simplistically. Although COVID-19 may be one of the few complex problems to which simplistic measures do apply - such as wearing a mask and using social distancing – these do not provide the whole solution.

Generally, declining trust in politicians reflects the ongoing inability of current politics to deal with a range of societal challenges. COVID-19 is certainly the most sudden and presents the biggest immediate economic shock of recent times, but it is just the latest in a long line of examples of political failure, such as conflict in the Middle East, climate change, terrorism, and cyber-attacks.

Along with the growth of automation and digitization which provide opportunities at the macro-level but threats at a more micro-level, what most of these issues have in common is that national responses are likely to fail. Restoring trust requires re-energized global governance, and this means compromise and humility – qualities which appear in short supply to many current politicians.

But, regardless of political will, building resilience to tackle ongoing or rapidly forthcoming challenges also rubs up against free market beliefs, because building resilience is a long-term investment and comes at a price. But by acknowledging vulnerabilities, avoiding complacency, implementing lessons from past experiences, and learning from others, policymakers will be better prepared for the next crisis.

Reconstructing societies through the prism of resilience creates fundamentally different outcomes to global challenges, and can build trust between elected representatives and the wider population. Accepting the vulnerability paradox and acknowledging that those generally less prone to disasters are actually less able to cope when change happens creates a powerful argument for this new approach.

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.

In the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion last week, it is not just the role of the Lebanese political class that has come under scrutiny, but that of their international peers too.

Sunday’s international donor conference led by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, raised €253m (£228m) in relief funds, but it also signalled an important change in rhetoric. For the first time, donors affirmed that relief funds would directly go to the Lebanese people, and that longer-term economic assistance would be dependent on Lebanon implementing structural reforms.

This affirmation came hot on the heels of growing international attention on rampant corruption among Lebanon’s ruling political class, which is widely blamed for the port explosion. It sends the message to Lebanon’s rulers that, while their country desperately needs foreign assistance to stand on its feet, no one can help Lebanon if it does not also help itself.

But the communique issued following the conference glossed over the international community’s own role in sustaining Lebanon’s corrupt political class over a period of decades. At the aid conference, Macron said that Lebanon’s future is at stake. What donors need to recognise is that this future is a shared responsibility for them and Lebanon’s leaders alike.

With Lebanon’s debt greater than 170% of its GDP, and with the port explosion costing an estimated $15bn of damage, Lebanon needs foreign assistance to prevent it becoming a failed state. But what it needs even more desperately are reforms that would counter the corruption and lack of accountability that led it to this sorry state of affairs in the first place.

It is Lebanon’s existing political system – a power-sharing pact between different sects rather than a system of governance on the basis of competence – that facilitates its leaders’ reckless behaviour.

The international community is partly responsible for sustaining this system through cascading patronage. For decades, Lebanese leaders grew accustomed to neglecting the national interest and eventually being bailed out by international assistance. Dollar deposits would land in the central bank from Gulf donors, loans would be offered by European countries and foreign aid packages would flow to Lebanese state institutions – only for the majority of this money to end up lining the pockets of the country’s rulers, who frequently overcame their political differences to share state resources between them. The Lebanese state came to exist as a shell in the eyes of its citizens.

Lebanon’s rulers benefited from citizens’ low expectations from the state and the lack of measures ensuring transparency and accountability in the country. They brokered a social contract that cast the leaders as patrons and the people as clients rather than citizens. Foreign powers were well aware of this dynamic but they often turned a blind eye to it, and even nurtured it, because they believed the Lebanese political system brought stability and predictability following the tumultuous civil war.

With time the leaders’ greed grew, and with that the economic situation worsened. Leaders who behaved as de facto local authorities, granting constituents civil service jobs or minor privileges, provided them less and less. There was some international recognition that this dynamic was becoming unsustainable – international donors pledged $11bn during the CEDRE conference of 2018 on condition that Lebanon implemented structural reforms.

And in the wake of Lebanon’s recent economic deterioration, the International Monetary Fund said in April that any discussion of a loan to Lebanon would be subject to more reforms. On both occasions, Lebanon’s rulers ignored the calls for reform, counting on foreign support eventually coming in unconditionally as it used to in the past. International donor follow-up was sluggish.

The port explosion needs to be a wake-up call for any international entity seeking a stable Lebanon. The blast is ultimately the result of the decades during which political classes in Lebanon and outside it fostered the country’s dysfunctional political system. No long-term assistance should flow into Lebanon without strong conditions on transparency and accountability in how this assistance would be employed.

Foreign support is not the problem per se, but rather when it is handed on a plate unconditionally, maintaining the patronage cascade, exacerbating the weakness of state institutions, and further impoverishing Lebanese citizens.

With Lebanon’s economy almost crumbling in the aftermath of the explosion, there is an opportunity for the international community to exert leverage over Lebanese leaders – whose personal wealth grew partially from legal and illegal transactions through the devastated port – so that necessary reforms are implemented. Such leverage would not remove Lebanon’s defective political system, but would pressure its leaders to accept at least some basic reforms.

But for Lebanon to really turn a new page, it needs a new social contract and a new political system based on fairness, transparency and accountability. This is a change that can only start from within Lebanon, but it also depends on the international community abandoning their tacit support of a disastrous political status quo.

This article was originally published in The Guardian.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

As the UK’s post-Brexit foreign policy takes shape, it is increasingly clear that joint cooperation with France and Germany will be of key importance. The current dispute with the US over imposing further sanctions on Iran shows that the UK values continuing strong cooperation with its European partners on key international issues, even at the cost of a major transatlantic dispute. Moreover, the recent first meeting of the German, French and British defence ministers in an E3 (European/EU 3) format signalled political commitment by all three partners to double down on joint diplomatic cooperation despite troubled UK-EU Brexit negotiations.

The UK working with France and Germany as part of the E3 has evolved in recent years from a shared approach to diplomacy on Iran’s nuclear programme to include a broader range of international security issues, such as the conflict in Syria and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. E3 cooperation has so far been largely low-key, marked by close relationships and daily contacts between officials rather than high-profile summits between the leaders of the three countries. In the absence of any EU-UK negotiations on a future foreign, security and defence policy relationship, the E3 represents a key arrangement for aligning and mobilizing Europe’s ‘big three’ states. In a recent Chatham House research paper, we argue that Germany, France and the UK could and should maintain the E3 as a platform for flexible diplomatic coordination and crisis response, and expand its focus to address a new set of thematic, regional or multilateral topics. These could range from further cooperation on arms control to a reform agenda for multilateral institutions or a joint approach to the broader European neighbourhood.

The E3 countries have complementary reasons for wanting to make the format work. France and Germany recognize that the high degree of shared foreign and security policy interests with the UK require a pragmatic format for close cooperation, to provide insurance against an underdeveloped EU-UK relationship, help efficiently combine European forces and bring added value to the EU and NATO – but also to see the UK aligned with Europe on major international issues. Close foreign and security policy relationships with France and Germany will remain of interest to the UK as well, in order for it to keep playing an effective role in European security and to work with like-minded partners on key international issues.

Brexit presents both a major challenge for the E3 relationship and a major rationale for developing the format further. Neither France nor Germany see E3 cooperation as a substitute for a deal on a future EU-UK relationship or for the development of the EU’s own foreign, security and defence policy. Failure to reach a Brexit deal and a collapse of the EU-UK relationship into hostility and antagonism could make E3 cooperation politically difficult in the short term. In the longer term, were the UK and the EU to adopt very different foreign and security policies, E3 cooperation would also make less sense.

Even if an agreement is reached on the future EU-UK relationship by the end of this year, for France and Germany the challenge will be to reconcile their work with the UK through the E3 with their commitment to the EU. France and Germany have different rationales for favouring E3 cooperation. While France is more relaxed about its intergovernmental approach and prioritizes deliverables, Germany is worried about the perceived competition between the E3 and the EU. However, they both share the view that E3 cooperation should complement rather than undermine EU foreign, security and defence policy cooperation, while acting to bridge or smooth cooperation between the EU and the UK. If E3 cooperation were to conflict with broader EU policy by generating hostility from excluded member states (such as Poland or Italy) and therefore distract from building consensus for broader EU initiatives, such as post-COVID economic recovery, E3 cooperation may falter.

Another key factor for the E3 will be the evolution of transatlantic relations, and whether the next US administration presents Europe with the dilemma of choosing between broad alignment with the US or open confrontation, as in the case of the Iran nuclear deal’s ‘snapback’ mechanism. As a non-EU state, the UK may have more autonomy to set its own policies but it will not be able to escape a choice between either a broad alliance with European states or a more ambivalent and ad-hoc relationship with the continent, while also creating new formats for cooperation with other democracies such as the Five Eyes states. This type of diplomatic ‘venue shopping’ could create tensions with European partners, especially Germany and France who hope to anchor London into a broad European approach. The UK’s ongoing Integrated Security, Defence and Foreign Policy Review should provide clarity as to the UK’s future European ambitions and what that means for the E3.

Given the growing instability surrounding Europe, reinforced by an eventful summer 2020– with the Iran nuclear deal in limbo, renewed tensions between Turkey and Greece in the Mediterranean, protests in Belarus, increasing US-China rivalry and further instability in the Sahel – the E3 has recently been developing a more visible profile. By convening the first meeting of E3 defence ministers in August, Germany showed leadership and a commitment to the format despite its fears of hostility from other EU member states towards increased E3 cooperation. Officially widening E3 cooperation to include defence, while mostly symbolic for now, satisfies Berlin by marking a step towards institutionalization, appeases Paris by putting on the joint agenda issues such as the recent coup in Mali and the crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean, and shows some political commitment by London at a time of tense UK-EU Brexit negotiations.

France, the UK and Germany all agree that the E3 is a necessary cooperation format that needs to be developed further. Recent events seem to show willingness on the part of the three countries to make it work, both in spite of and because of upcoming Brexit tensions. Longer-term challenges – relating to intra-EU tensions over the role of the E3, the future EU-UK relationship and transatlantic divergences – are still to be addressed and managed for the format to reach its full potential. Nevertheless, in today’s uncertain strategic context for Europe, the E3 is establishing itself as a go-to format for cooperation for Europe’s ‘big three’.

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.

1. Acknowledge the new reality

A huge number of Belarusians across all levels of society simply no longer recognize Lukashenka as their legitimate president. The unprecedented size and persistence of protests against his regime and the sheer scale of reports of repressive actions, torture, and even murder, mean Belarus will never be the same again.

However, current paralysis in EU policy and the absence of a comprehensive US policy are both serving as a de facto licence for Lukashenka to deepen the political crisis. The sooner policymakers realize this and act with more responsibility and confidence, the quicker the increasing repression can be reversed.

2. Do not recognize Lukashenka as president

If the international community stops recognizing Lukashenka as president, it makes him more toxic to others, including Russia and China, both of which will be reluctant to waste resources on someone who is seen as the main cause of Belarusian instability. Even if Russia still decides to save Lukashenka and financially support him, ignoring Lukashenka decreases the legitimacy of any agreements he signs with the Kremlin on collaboration or integration.

Demanding a re-run of the presidential election should also remain firmly on the agenda as functionaries within Lukashenka's system should know this international pressure is not going away until a truly transparent vote takes place.

3. Be present on the ground

In order to curb repression and establish ties with actors within Belarus, a monitoring group should be organized under the auspices of the UN, the OSCE or other international organizations to establish a presence on the ground, and to stay in the country as long as it is needed, and is possible. Governments and parliaments can send their own missions, while staff from international media and NGOs should be encouraged to report on what is actually happening inside the country.

The bigger the visible presence of the international community is in Belarus, the less brutal Lukashenka’s agencies can be in persecuting protestors, which in turn would then allow more substantial negotiations to take place between the democratic movement and Lukashenka.

4. Announce a package of economic support for a democratic Belarus

The Belarusian economy was already in bad shape before the election, but the situation is going to get much worse. The only way out is support from the international community with a ‘Marshall Plan for a democratic Belarus’. States and international financial institutions should declare they will provide significant financial assistance through grants or low-interest loans, but only if there is democratic change first.

It is essential to make this economic package conditional on democratic reform, but also that it will have no geopolitical strings attached. If a democratically-elected government decides it wants to improve relations with Russia, it should still be able to count on an assistance package.

This would send a strong signal to economic reformers who remain inside Lukashenka's system, giving them a genuine choice between a functioning Belarusian economy or sticking with Lukashenka, whose leadership is seen by many as to be responsible for ruining the country’s economy.

5. Introduce targeted political and economic sanctions

The Lukashenka regime deserves tough sanctions internationally, but so far only selective visa restrictions or account freezes have been imposed, which have little to no effect on what is actually happening on the ground. Visa sanction lists need to be expanded but, more importantly, there should be increased economic pressure on the regime. Companies which are the most important to Lukashenka's business interests should be identified and targeted with sanctions, all their trading activity halted, and all their accounts abroad frozen.

Governments should also persuade their own country’s large companies to reconsider working with Belarusian producers. It is shameful that international corporations continue to advertise in media controlled by Lukashenka and appear to be ignoring the reports of human rights violations at Belarusian companies they do business with.

Moreover, there should be a deadline set to halt all repression, or broader economic sanctions will be imposed. This would send a strong message to Lukashenka and also his entourage, many of whom would then become more convinced he has to go.

6. Support NGOs to investigate allegations of torture

There are few legal mechanisms to prosecute those thought to be involved in election fraud and acts of brutality. Nevertheless, all reports of torture and falsifications should be properly documented by human rights defenders, including identifying those alleged to have taken part. Gathering evidence now prepares the ground for investigations, targeted sanctions, and leverage on law enforcement officials in the future.

But, given that such an investigation is not possible in Belarus right now, international human rights activists should be enabled to start the process outside the country with support from Belarusian NGOs.

7. Support known victims of the regime

Even with an unprecedented campaign of solidarity among Belarusians, many people need support, especially those alleged to have suffered torture. Some media outlets claim to have lost a significant amount of revenue because advertisers were forced to pull out, and journalists arrested. Human rights defenders need funds to keep organizations running in the heat of this crackdown.

Supporting all these people and organizations will cost tens of millions of euros, but it would significantly ease the huge financial burden facing those who have opposed the regime.

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.

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.