Ed Samir Saran and Vinia Mukherjee

Editors’ Note

“later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt?

it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.”

~ Warsan Shire

That there can be no peace without development is a universal truism. The two, perhaps the loftiest and noblest of human aspirations, are perpetually interdependent: Conflict impedes progress; and the lack of economic opportunity can contribute to conflict. Today, as humanity’s excesses wage a war on the planet—causing extreme weather events, food insecurity, threats to health, and massive displacements—both peace and development will be the casualties unless we turn around.

The Reckoning: Regression or Renaissance? confronts the many obstacles that come in the way of our pursuit of peace, progress, and sustainable development, and offers insights into our choices. It is indeed a moment of reckoning, and this collection of essays engages with the debates that are crucial to the decisions that we will have to make.

As if climate change has not been enough to bring the world to its precarious state, there is more. There is still no end in sight to either the war in Ukraine or the conflict in Yemen, and tensions continue to simmer in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the biggest setback in poverty reduction in decades, economic inequities persist in many places, and demographic shifts and ageing populations are giving birth to even newer challenges. 

Genevieve Donnellon-May sets her sights on the Pacific, which is facing the dual challenge of navigating great-power competition and addressing pressing domestic concerns. Ensuring economic development, security cooperation, and environmental sustainability will be keys to peacebuilding in the region.

If peace is the aim, one region that has long been haunted by its absence is Africa. Davis Makori reminds us not just of this fact—that, following a brief period of optimism, armed conflict continues to be the scourge of the continent—but more importantly, that it is the civilians who bear the brunt of the constant state of war. The imperatives for Africa are early-warning systems, community-focused protection mechanisms, and UN reform to address the fundamental imbalance in the global peace and security architecture.

Europe is another theatre of conflict, and the domestic nostalgia for a glorious era of peace and prosperity, now lost, has become more intense. Velina Tchakarova lists a litany of challenges impeding Europe’s rediscovering of its old self: declining birth rates and an ageing population; dependency on other countries for energy supply; and growing security threats.

Agatha Kratz tackles the subject of Europe too, this time in the context of its relationship with China. Brussels and other member state capitals are showing a “newfound activism” against China, including launching trade defence cases and tightening investment rules. In the coming days, while EU-China relations could stabilise, there will still be no meaningful change in bilateral ties.

Kate O’Shaughnessy, in her piece, writes about the Indian Ocean region and how it looks much more unstable than it did only a decade ago. For the international community to engage meaningfully in the region and create an impact, it must include the voices of island states and address the issues that matter most to them—climate change, maritime domain awareness, regional economic integration, and human capacity building.

Listening to what small and developing states have to say will be critical, because in many ways, the Global South will be the fulcrum of change.

In global governance of healthcare, for example, the year opened with pivotal shifts as the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization, provoking uncertainty about global health security, disease control efforts, climate resilience programmes, and pandemic preparedness. Ayoade Alakija, however, in her essay, sees the opportunity: the disproportionate power the US is ceding may now be re-distributed, and emerging economies of the Global South should increase their agency and autonomy.

The Global South will also need to step up in the area of international trade, where South-South cooperation can help these countries compete on equal footing with the Global North. For Kekeli Ahiable, expanding access to markets will create growth that in turn can pull over 700 million people in developing economies out of extreme poverty.

Part of the trade imperative for the Global South is to gain access to low-carbon technologies to accelerate the energy transition—a task that is complex, as Lydia Powell writes. Efforts to nurture a low-carbon future must balance the emphasis on mitigation with the adaptation needs of the Global South, while considering their right to human well-being, often neglected in North-led prescriptions for climate change.

Mannat Jaspal also examines themes around energy transitions, and writes that, while the proportion of fossil fuels in the energy mix will decline, they will not disappear entirely even in net-zero scenarios. A key to decarbonising is technology—and there’s the rub: The gap between the required deployment of low-carbon technologies and current patterns is significant, and of the technologies that need to be deployed by 2050, the best results so far are primarily in less complex and more commercially viable applications.

Technology is also key in the domain of quantum research, the subject of a contribution by Linda Nhon and Andreas Kuehn, written in the context of the race between the United States and China. As the new Trump administration prepares to define policies that will shape the US science and technology leadership trajectory in the next four years and beyond, it needs a clear vision of how the country can reach quantum superiority.

Technological imperatives are similarly present in the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the subject of an exposition by Trisha Ray. She notes that building and deploying AI at scale requires capital, infrastructure, and manpower that right now, only highly centralised entities like tech giants and rich governments can marshal. She gives us four models for how states will likely nurture ‘sovereign AI’, or AI that uses a country’s own resources.

While the subjects of quantum computing and AI may be relatively new, what we have been tackling for some years now are the challenges posed by the proliferation of social media and its use for malicious activities. Anulekha Nandi and Anirban Sarma discuss the perpetual dilemma in the governance of social media—once not too long ago heralded as the ‘public sphere’ ideal: finding the sweet spot between free speech and security.

This same dilemma finds its place in the gargantuan task of counterterrorism. Naureen Chowdhury Fink, in her essay, explores the intersection of technology, gender, and counterterrorism. She uses the case of ISIS and how it used gendered narratives in its search for legitimacy during the years of building its ‘caliphate’, and underlines the importance of considering this nexus when crafting sustainable and effective prevention and response strategies.

Two other geographies that we cover in this volume are Latin America and the Arctic. Dawisson Belém Lopes writes that even as China’s economic footprint may be expanding across Latin America, US hegemony remains palpable. More importantly, however, countries in the region are navigating the US-China power struggle “with pragmatic ambivalence” while maintaining their diplomatic approach.

And what of the so-called “great game” in the Arctic—home to vast reserves of energy sources and rare-earth minerals as well as important trade routes? Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev surmise that the Arctic players, motivated by their common interests, will likely work to resolve their tensions not by force but through negotiations and arbitration.

We close the journal with the question of how we can have meaningful reforms in current international financial institutions. Karim El Aynaoui, Hinh T. Dinh, and Akram Zaoui argue that what is needed is a “paradigm shift” in the relationship between these institutions and developing countries. Rather than relying primarily on international assistance, developing nations should leverage technical expertise to mobilise private capital—both foreign and domestic—for development. In turn, IFIs must prioritise technical assistance, institution-building, and private capital mobilisation to help countries achieve sustainable and resilient growth.

Each of the 16 essays in this volume gives us enough to mull on where we want to head next. The reckoning will not just be about who gets to mine the Terbium in the Kvanefjeld plateau of Greenland, or whether or not China succeeds in claiming the Scarborough Shoal. It is about entire island states that will disappear; the millions in Africa who have been dependent on UN humanitarian assistance for 20 years. Our sound judgement is being called upon not just for the ‘great games’ but for the every single day: Do we keep hurting and wither, or do we create a new era?

Read the journal here.