Mariam Daher preparing for her Tawjihi examinations in the temporary learning spaces in Gaza. Credit: Education Above All Foundation

By Hani Shehada
DOHA, Qatar, Oct 2 2026 (IPS)

In the 21st century, getting a pencil into Gaza became international news. In January, after more than two years of restrictions, UNICEF finally brought in learning kits with pencils and exercise books. Textbooks stayed out. By then, the UN had recorded damage to 97.5 per cent of Gaza’s schools.

If a pencil makes headlines, consider what a national examination demands: question papers printed for thousands of students, answer sheets scanned, halls furnished and staffed. In Gaza, education officials started by pulling damaged photocopiers from beneath the rubble, stripping their usable parts and rebuilding enough machines to keep the exam alive. It worked. More than 95,000 students have sat the Tawjihi, the national secondary school examination that decides who can compete for a university place.

This week, world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly under the banner of “a United Nations that delivers for all“. The effort behind Gaza’s examination poses an uncomfortable question to that promise: when does celebrating a solution make it easier to tolerate the problem? Scholars writing from Gaza have warned that praising Palestinian resilience reassures outside observers and releases them from the duty to act.

At a school damaged by the war near Mashrou’ Amer in southwestern Gaza City, Education Above All Foundation and UNDP have established 10 temporary learning spaces. Credit: Education Above All Foundation

Israel classifies thousands of items as “dual-use“, spare parts among them, and bars or limits their entry. Technicians harvested parts from other machines. Repairing the printers and scanners took more than 90 days. The printers ran on old ink stocks, because new ink faced restrictions too. Until recently, paper itself could not enter Gaza.” and drop the fallback plan after it.

Exam halls also needed seats and desks. Little wood reaches Gaza. Carpenters build tables from scrap and shipping pallets, and families burn whatever they find to cook and keep warm. Staff repaired chairs and desks with timber from the pallets that carry aid. Every liter of fuel for an examination center required coordination. All of it happened under strikes that never fully stopped, which have killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect.

An examination also needs people. Every center needed invigilators while many education staff receive only a fraction of their salary. Before assigning anyone, the ministry first had to establish who was still alive. The war has killed more than 21,000 students and educational staff since October 2023.

A school teacher leads a lesson inside one of Gaza’s temporary learning spaces established by Education Above All Foundation and UNDP.
Credit: Education Above All Foundation

This year, Gaza’s candidates took the Tawjihi online, many on phones in tents and cafés, while the ministry worked to bring the exam back into halls. With support from the State of Qatar, Education Above All Foundation, UNDP and the ministry have set up 110 learning spaces, partly for that purpose. Planners intended these spaces, a mix of prefabricated units and tents, as a transition. Gaza’s students are using them for years, while sun, heat, humidity and cold wear them down.

Gaza’s people now crowd into less than 40 per cent of the Strip. Crews must clear rubble and check for unexploded ordnance before they can build. When they clear land for a learning space, displaced families can move onto it and stay. Others shelter in partly destroyed buildings. A school site now competes with the most basic need of all: somewhere to live.

Picture one of those 95,000 candidates. She has studied for this exam for years, first at a desk at home, then by phone light in a tent. The war has taken her father, perhaps her mother too, and most of the family who would have waited for her results. She may walk on crutches where a leg used to be. Strikes still fall at night, and she revises anyway. All she wants is the chance to sit the exam. Behind that chance stand a salvaged photocopier, a rebuilt desk and a negotiated liter of fuel, each one liable to fail. The UN reports that shortages once managed through reuse have become unmanageable, and critical systems are failing. Judged against a cancelled examination, against a school able to order a replacement part, it reveals an avoidable burden.

I am from Gaza, and I work for one of the foundations that funds this response. That makes the question personal: have we become so used to celebrating what Palestinians can salvage that we no longer ask why they must salvage it? An examination held amid continuing strikes is an achievement. It is also evidence of a world that has allowed the conditions for education to be dismantled.

As the speeches in New York wind down, leaders can measure their words against practical tests. Let paper, printer parts, school furniture and textbooks into Gaza without months of negotiation. Fund classrooms built to last years, not seasons. Pay the teachers who keep the system running. Gaza’s educators have shown what they will do to keep education alive. The question before the world is what it would take for Gaza’s schools to stop needing miracles.

Hani Shehada, Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, and is Regional Manager at Education Above All Foundation’s Al Fakhoora programme.

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Members of Smallholder Farmer Alliance in Haiti with first harvest of regenerative cotton. Credit: Thomas Norielle/SFA

By Hugh Locke
NEW YORK, Oct 2 2026 (IPS)

In November 1952, the United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear device at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The test, code-named Ivy Mike, erased the island of Elugelab and scattered a signature of plutonium across the planet that remains in lake beds, ice sheets and ocean sediments today.

This month, scientists writing in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment proposed this moment as the start of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch shaped by human activity. Co-author Victor Galaz of the Stockholm Resilience Centre called the date “a tragic reminder of the highly unjust impacts of planetary change.”

I take that proposal seriously, because it carries hope as well as warning, and it connects to the argument of my new book, Whole Earth Farming.

Hugh Locke

The idea of the Anthropocene was popularized in 2000 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. In 2020, a paper in Nature found that human-made materials now outweigh all living things on Earth. Yet in 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences declined to formally recognize the Anthropocene. Officially, we are still in the Holocene.

The new paper, led by Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Waters and Martin J. Head, draws on 12 stratigraphic records worldwide and identifies the 1952 rise in plutonium as the clearest marker of the new epoch. Whatever the geologists decide, the substance stands: human beings have become a force of planetary consequence.

Nobody set out to launch a new geological epoch. The Anthropocene is the unintended result of billions of decisions about energy, industry, consumption and land use. That is sobering. It is also, strangely, encouraging.

If humanity can alter the chemistry of the atmosphere without meaning to, then we are clearly capable of transformation at planetary scale. The only question is whether we can do it on purpose, in a direction that heals rather than harms.

Galaz’s point about injustice matters too. The Marshall Islanders had no say in what happened at Enewetak, yet bore its consequences. Those who contributed least to planetary change are often hit hardest, among them the world’s smallholder farmers. Any real transformation must put them at the center.

There are some 475 million smallholder farming families in the world, roughly one quarter of humanity, and yet they are largely absent from conversations about the future of food and climate.

Whole Earth Farming argues that these families could lead an agricultural revolution. It draws on 21 farmer stories from 18 countries and on decades of work, including in Haiti, where I co-founded the Smallholder Farmers Alliance. Its central argument is that if half the world’s smallholders adopted regenerative practices, they could produce all the additional food needed by 2050 while reducing agriculture’s net climate impact.

There is a fitting symmetry here. The Holocene began with a climate stable enough for humans to start farming. The Anthropocene could likewise coincide with a new global agricultural movement, one that restores the land rather than depleting it.

The changes of the 1950s spread without any global plan, as new tools and habits moved from place to place until they gathered their own momentum. A regenerative transformation can spread the same way: through practices that work, farmers who see them working on a neighbor’s land, and the support to adopt them.

The farmers in the book are already rebuilding soil, planting trees alongside crops and restoring water cycles. What they lack is not ingenuity but recognition, investment and connection to one another.

I once suggested that the historical epoch now taking shape will one day be named for the moment we began to reorganize ourselves around the principle of oneness. I still believe that.

The Anthropocene is, in one sense, the geological record of our failure to see ourselves as one people sharing one planet. A regenerative transformation led by smallholders would be the opposite: a practical expression of oneness, rooted in the recognition that the health of the land, the wellbeing of the farmer and the future of humanity are inseparable.

If a single morning in 1952 can mark a new chapter in the Earth’s geological history, then surely the choices of hundreds of millions of farming families can mark a new chapter in human history. We have already proven that we can change the planet. Now it is time to prove that we can do so with intention, with justice, and with the whole Earth in mind.

Hugh Locke is president and co-founder of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance, president of the Impact Farming Foundation and author of Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation (George Ronald Publisher, 2026).

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

When nurses are overworked, unheard or afraid to speak up, safety, dignity, learning and retention all suffer. Fernando Zhiminaicela / Pixabay

By External Source
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 1 2026 (IPS)

Nurses are often called the backbone of the health system. We praise their compassion, commitment and resilience. On Nurses’ Day we thank them. During emergencies and crises, we call them heroes. But there is a harder question Malaysia, like most countries around the world, needs to ask more seriously: what happens when the people who care for everyone else are not safe, supported or respected at work?

This question is not only about patient safety. It is first about nurses’ own rights, dignity and wellbeing. A safe and healthy working environment is recognised by the ILO as a fundamental principle and right at work.

Nurses deserve safe workplaces not only because patients depend on them, but because no worker should be expected to absorb abuse, bullying or harassment as part of the job.

The health and care sector is highly feminised, with women making up around 70% of the global workforce. This is even more pronounced in nursing, where women account for 85% of the workforce, according to WHO’s 2025 State of the World’s Nursing report. This means workplace violence against nurses is not only an occupational safety concern. It is also a gendered issue.

As a female-dominated profession, nursing is often positioned lower in hierarchical health systems, where authority is unevenly distributed. Gendered assumptions - such as women being “naturally caring,” patient or obedient - can normalise mistreatment, silence complaints and discourage reporting

As a female-dominated profession, nursing is often positioned lower in hierarchical health systems, where authority is unevenly distributed. Gendered assumptions – such as women being “naturally caring,” patient or obedient – can normalise mistreatment, silence complaints and discourage reporting.

Because nurses are also frontline caregivers, they are exposed to aggression from patients, families and colleagues. Gender therefore shapes both how violence is experienced and how seriously it is taken.

For many nurses and frontline health workers, workplace violence extends beyond physical assault. It involves verbal abuse, bullying, humiliation, intimidation, sexual harassment, disrespectful treatment, harsh hierarchy and psychological pressure.

These forms of violence may not always leave visible injuries. But they can leave deep marks on confidence, mental health, family life, professional motivation and the decision to stay in the nursing profession.

Studies from several Malaysian healthcare settings show that workplace violence is more common than we may think across hospitals, emergency departments and primary healthcare facilities.

A study conducted among 90 nurses in Kuala Lumpur found that more than 90% had experienced verbal abuse. Similarly, a survey of 838 primary healthcare workers in Selangor reported that 68.5% had experienced workplace violence, with verbal abuse the most common form and nurses the most affected professional group. In Melaka, research among 455 female registered nurses found that 51.2% had experienced sexual harassment, most commonly verbal, but also visual, psychological, non-verbal and physical. Nearly three-quarters of those affected reported psychological effects.

Behind each of these figures is a person trying to do their job while staying calm, professional and compassionate. A nurse explaining treatment to an anxious family. A frontline worker managing a crowded clinic. A junior staff member afraid to speak up. A mother finishing a night shift and going home to another set of care responsibilities. These numbers should not be read as statistics alone. Rather, they are warning signs of workplace systems and cultures and the need for stronger prevention, reporting and response mechanisms.

Malaysia already has important foundations in place. Existing occupational safety and health obligations, together with MOH guidance on workplace violence, provide a strong basis for prevention and response. The challenge now is to build on these measures and ensure they are visible, trusted and consistently implemented in hospitals, clinics and frontline services.

This concern was clearly articulated in a focus group discussion with nurses and frontline health workers in Sabah. Participants described workplace violence and bullying as part of a wider picture of pressure: too many patients, too few staff, missed breaks, unpaid or poorly compensated overtime, limited recognition, burnout and difficulty balancing shift work with family responsibilities.

One district clinic was described as seeing around 600 to 800 patients a day, with only a small number of frontline staff managing the flow. In hospital wards, nurses described caring for 10 to 20 patients and sometimes up to 25 patients alone. Staff often missed lunch breaks, stayed beyond official hours to complete patient care and documentation and sometimes worked while sick because no one else was available to replace them. Heavy documentation and uneven digital systems added another layer of pressure.

In the same Sabah discussion, one participant described bullying as something that particularly affects newcomers and junior staff. Another explained that many young workers feel they have little choice but to endure difficult treatment because they need the job. As one participant put it, many feel they must “just bear with it” because speaking up can feel risky.

The human cost also reaches beyond the workplace. One nurse described leaving for work while her children were still sleeping and returning home when they were already asleep again. This is not only a personal story. It is a policy issue. When nurses are overworked, unheard or afraid to speak up, safety, dignity, learning and retention all suffer.

This is why workplace violence must be discussed together with Malaysia’s nursing shortages, retention concerns and migration of nurses. Nurses do not leave only because of salary, although salary and fair compensation matter greatly. They also leave when they feel unsafe, unheard, unsupported and unable to grow.

When nurses feel unable to speak up, silence becomes part of the system. When junior staff are humiliated instead of mentored, learning suffers. When bullying becomes normalised, workers may begin to see leaving as the only realistic option. For a mostly female workforce, these pressures do not affect nurses alone. They also affect families, communities and how society values care work.

Training more nurses will not solve the problem if the working environment pushes nurses away. The real question is not only how we produce more nurses, but also how we ensure that nurses can stay, work safely and be treated with dignity. A serious response to workplace violence in healthcare should include several practical steps.

First, nurses should have a stronger voice in decisions that affect their work. Frontline nurses, nursing leaders, professional bodies and unions should be meaningfully involved in shaping policies on staffing, workplace safety, reporting systems, mental health support, digitalisation and service delivery. Collective representation matters because individual nurses should not have to carry the burden of speaking up alone.

Second, trusted systems for preventing, reporting and responding to workplace violence, bullying and harassment should continue to be strengthened. Nurses need to know they can safely report any kind of violence without fear of being ignored, blamed or punished. Too often, incidents go unreported because people do not believe anything will change. A safe workplace starts with systems that people trust.

Third, addressing staffing shortages and excessive workloads is also essential. When nurses are caring for too many patients, missing breaks and regularly staying late to finish their work, everyone pays the price. Safe staffing is not a luxury. It is essential for both patient care and health worker wellbeing.

Fourth, supporting nurses also means looking beyond individual resilience. Nurses need time to rest, supportive supervisors, access to mental health support and workplaces where people treat each other with respect. Supportive mentoring and teamwork can make a real difference – especially for junior staff and newcomers.

Finally, workplace safety needs to be considered alongside career development, fair compensation and better systems. Nurses need fair recognition for overtime and workload, opportunities for specialisation and higher education, and digital systems that reduce administrative burden rather than adding to it.

Ultimately, this is about recognising that nurses are not an endless resource. They are people, often women, who care for others every day while carrying their own pressures, responsibilities and challenges. Ensuring their safety, dignity and wellbeing is not only the right thing to do. It is a smart investment in a stronger and more resilient health system.

Malaysia has an opportunity to build on the measures already in place and further strengthen workplace safety, staffing, support and working conditions. Everywhere in the world, health systems depend on nurses at every stage of life – from birth to old age, from routine check-ups to medical emergencies. Malaysia is no exception.

Safe patients need safe nurses. And safe nurses need workplaces where respect, dignity and rights are non-negotiable.

By Sergo Chikhladze, Johanna Riha, Sapna Mishra (UNU Global health) and Nicholas Hulus (Sabah Medical Services Union (SMSU))

From a distance, an island nation can appear to possess everything: pristine waters, a thriving tourism industry and a strong cultural identity. Its income figures may suggest prosperity.

James Alix Michel

This is the paradox confronting small island states. We are judged by what we earn on paper, while our future is shaped by what we must endure in reality. President Dr Patrick Herminie of Seychelles brought this question to the United Nations this month, urging international finance to “measure reality correctly”. He called for affordable, accessible, long-term finance, meaningful debt relief and effective implementation of the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI).

His appeal continues a case Seychelles has made for many years.

In 2009, Seychelles warned at the United Nations that small economies were especially exposed to global economic instability and the impacts of climate change. In 2013, it called for financing mechanisms and concessional conditions tailored to small island developing states. In 2015, it argued that attaining a higher-income classification should not automatically exclude an island nation from concessional support. The message has remained consistent: development gains do not erase structural vulnerability.

For too long, eligibility for grants and affordable loans has depended heavily on GDP or gross national income per capita. Income matters, but it cannot tell the whole story. It reveals little about a country’s exposure to shocks or its capacity to recover. A small state must maintain ports, airports, hospitals, schools, power systems, water supplies and coastal defences with a limited population and tax base. It may depend on one or two sectors, such as tourism or fisheries. When global prices rise or supply chains fail, the consequences can be felt across the entire nation at once.

This is not an argument against sound national management. It is an argument for recognising realities that good management alone cannot remove. Countries may graduate from an income category; they do not graduate from geography, climate exposure or limited economic scale.

Nor is this a Seychelles concern alone. From the Caribbean to the Pacific and across the Indian Ocean, island countries have long pressed for international finance to reflect vulnerability rather than income alone. Barbados has advocated measures that better capture vulnerability and resilience, while the Alliance of Small Island States has argued that the financial system must recognise the distinctive circumstances of its members. There is a shared understanding here: a prosperous-looking average can hide a profoundly fragile foundation.

The MVI offers a way to make that foundation visible. It is intended to complement, not replace, income measures by assessing structural vulnerability and resilience across economic, environmental and social dimensions. It asks decision-makers to look beyond a single number towards the pressures an island country faces: remoteness, economic concentration, disaster risk, climate exposure and the limited room to absorb shocks.

In August 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 78/322 on the MVI, an important recognition that national income alone is an inadequate guide. But adoption is only the beginning. An index will not protect a coastline, keep a hospital open or help a family recover after a storm unless it changes financing decisions. Will lenders and development partners use it to widen access to concessional finance? Will it help countries obtain adaptation funds before disaster strikes? Will it inform debt arrangements that leave governments room to protect essential services after a crisis?

That is the true test of the international community’s commitment. A fairer system would provide more grants and affordable long-term finance for resilience. It would include clauses that pause debt repayments after major disasters. It would treat coastal protection, water security, renewable energy and the restoration of reefs and mangroves as essential investments, not discretionary extras to be considered only when funds remain.
We know the price of waiting. When a storm destroys infrastructure, a country may have to borrow to rebuild what it could not afford to protect. Debt then limits future investment, leaving it more exposed to the next shock. Financing resilience in advance can break that cycle. It protects lives, public finances and development gains. This is not charity; it is sound economics.

The question also reaches beyond island states. Across the developing world, countries facing climate shocks, volatile markets and heavy debt are too often assessed through indicators that overlook their lived circumstances. When scarce public money goes towards expensive borrowing instead of health, education or adaptation, the poorest communities bear the greatest cost. A financial system that responds only after calamity is neither efficient nor just.

Seychelles has voiced this concern since 2009, and President Herminie’s appeal shows why it remains urgent. The MVI gives the world an opportunity to turn recognition into action. Those who govern international lending must now decide whether vulnerability will matter when resources are allocated, not merely when speeches are delivered.

An island is more than an income figure. It is a society, a culture, an ecosystem and a future, living close to risks often created far beyond its shores. To measure that reality correctly is the beginning of fairness. To finance it fairly must follow.

James Alix Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

IPS UN Bureau

A stronger future for coffee starts by strengthening the places and communities where that journey begins. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Boubaker Ben Belhassen
ROME, Sep 30 2026 (IPS)

Imagine your morning coffee. You smell the aroma as steam rises from the cup. It wisps and swirls, thins, then disappears. You lift the cup to your mouth. The first pure joy of the day.

That coffee may have begun beneath shade trees in Ethiopia, on a Colombian hillside, in Viet Nam’s highlands or among the coffee farms of Brazil. Long before it reached your cup, someone planted and tended the trees from which it came. Then came the harvest. Ripe cherries were picked with care, and the coffee began a journey that would carry it far from the place where it was grown.

Building a stronger future for coffee therefore begins where coffee itself begins: with productive and resilient farms, open and transparent markets, and greater economic opportunity in producing countries

Few agricultural products connect people across such long distances. Coffee is among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Coffee supports the livelihoods of up to 25 million farmers worldwide, while millions more people participate in the economic activity created along the coffee value chain.

Coffee’s extraordinary global reach has created livelihoods and economic opportunities across continents. It has also connected millions of small producers to a market in which shocks can propagate quickly. Building a stronger future for coffee therefore begins where coffee itself begins: with productive and resilient farms, open and transparent markets, and greater economic opportunity in producing countries.

International Coffee Day is a moment to celebrate what coffee has made possible. It is also a moment to ask what its future will require.

Recent years have shown why. International coffee prices have experienced large fluctuations as weather has affected production in major producing countries and supplies have tightened. Droughts, frosts and excessive rainfall can disrupt harvests, while pests, diseases, rising costs, geopolitical tensions and shipping delays can add further pressure.

That exposure is amplified by the concentration of production in relatively few places. Brazil and Viet Nam together account for nearly half of global coffee production, while five countries supply around 70 percent of global coffee bean exports. With such concentration, a shock in one major producing region can quickly reverberate far beyond it.

Those shocks are transmitted unevenly through coffee value chains, with producers generally more directly exposed to fluctuations in international prices. The answer is not to prevent prices from moving. Markets respond to changes in supply and demand, and prices will inevitably rise and fall. Greater resilience therefore depends on strengthening the capacity of producers and producing countries to adapt and respond when conditions change.

The first priority is production itself. Coffee farming must remain productive and competitive while adapting to changing conditions. More resilient farming systems, innovation and technology, effective management of pests and diseases, and better tools for managing risk can help stabilize production and incomes and boost investment in the future of the crop.

Transparent markets and timely information are essential. Better and timely information on crop conditions, stocks, trade flows and prices reduce uncertainty and help producers, governments and businesses understand changing market conditions and adjust sooner. At a time when disruption in one major producing region can affect markets around the world, international cooperation and greater transparency become even more important.

Stronger production and better markets provide the foundation. But there is also an opportunity to create more economic value from the coffee that producing countries already grow.

The bean’s economic journey is far from finished when it is harvested. Coffee is processed and transported, then may be roasted, packaged, branded, distributed and eventually sold to consumers. Each stage requires investment, expertise and enterprise, while creating opportunities to generate additional economic value.

Much of the coffee produced in low- and middle-income countries is exported in raw form as green beans for processing and distribution elsewhere. Coffee therefore often enters international trade relatively early in its economic journey, leaving opportunities for producing countries to develop more economic activity around the later stages of the value chain.

Where commercially viable, improvements in quality can help producers reach different and potentially higher-value markets. Processing can create additional economic activity, while certification and branding can provide further scope for upgrading within coffee value chains. The opportunities will vary across countries, and investments should focus on areas in which producers and businesses can compete successfully.

Greater resilience in coffee production and greater economic opportunity around what happens after it is produced are complementary ambitions. Productivity, innovation and risk management can strengthen the productive foundation of the sector. Transparent markets can help participants respond to changing conditions. And commercially viable upgrading can broaden the economic opportunities created around the crop.

Realising these opportunities requires cooperation across the coffee value chain. Producers, traders, processors, roasters, retailers and governments perform different roles in moving coffee from the tree to the consumer. International cooperation, market transparency, innovation and investment can strengthen those connections and support a coffee sector that is more productive, competitive, resilient and sustainable.

Coffee already demonstrates what international trade can achieve. A crop grown by millions of farmers, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, reaches consumers across the world and sustains economic activity throughout its journey. The next opportunity not to miss is to strengthen this connection while creating more economic possibilities in the places where coffee is grown.

Tomorrow morning, the journey begins again. Steam will rise from your cup. Somewhere far away, coffee trees will be tended and another harvest prepared.

The journey from crop to cup already connects millions of people around the globe. A stronger future for coffee starts by strengthening the places and communities where that journey begins.

Boubaker Ben-Belhassen is Director of the Markets and Trade Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Excerpt:

Media personnel watch a digital screen showing leaders of member states gather for a family photograph during the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on 13 September 2026. Credit: Arun Sankar/AFP

By Samuel King and Inés M. Pousadela
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 30 2026 (IPS)

At the 18th BRICS Summit, held on 12 and 13 September in New Delhi, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought together presidents Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran, along with Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, representing the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Around the table sat longstanding rivals such as India and China and, in the case of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, states on opposite sides of an ongoing war. That the summit produced a joint declaration every member could sign was a modest multilateralist success.

The summit took place against a fast-changing backdrop. With the USA under Donald Trump an unreliable partner and often a hostile power bent on bullying others into submission, numerous states are seeking new alliances as a counterweight. BRICS, whose 11 members account for 49 per cent of the world’s population and 28 per cent of the global economy, could become a more significant forum as a result. But what is on offer is a profoundly old-fashioned, state-centric form of multilateralism, in which the people in whose name states claim to act have little say.

A hollow declaration

At the summit, Xi called for international rules to be ‘written by all countries’, even though he leads a one-party state where increasingly only he writes the rules. Putin urges greater representation for Africa, Asia and Latin America at the UN Security Council, while routinely wielding his veto to stop the council acting on his war in Ukraine.

The New Delhi Declaration’s silences speak loudest. It is explicit on Palestine, calling on Israel to end its war on Gaza and backing a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. But on the war in Iran, it only urges ‘maximum restraint’ without naming the warring parties, reflecting the fact that Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sat around the same table. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not mentioned at all, a regression from past declarations and a troubling sign that Putin has no interest in ending the fighting. The text condemns ‘indiscriminate rising tariffs’ and ‘unilateral sanctions’ without naming the USA, sparing the blushes of members such as India, which is reportedly finalising a trade deal with Washington. The declaration preserves consensus at the expense of resolve.

Closed civic space, open defiance

Most BRICS governments have no fear of being held domestically accountable for the compromises they have made. Civic space is closed in seven of BRICS’ 11 states and obstructed or repressed in the rest. Russia jails and exiles opposition voices and has made protest almost impossible. China subjects its people to mass surveillance and crushes any expression that departs from ruling-party lines. Iran violently suppresses protest movements, including through the death penalty. Saudi Arabia and the UAE recognise no legitimate role for independent civil society. Host and self-styled mediator India has seen Modi’s government erode press freedom, restrict civil society funding and stoke hostility towards religious minorities.

Domestic repression translates directly into a closed international forum. After 18 summits, BRICS still has no treaty, no published membership criteria, no permanent secretariat, no budget and no mechanism for civil society to hold its members to account. This is no accident. It leaves powerful leaders free to pursue their interests, and it means civil society has less influence in BRICS than in comparable blocs such as the G20, and much less than in UN processes.

Civil society mobilised regardless. Three weeks before the summit, over 200 delegates from farmers’ organisations, people’s movements, trade unions, women’s organisations and other civil society groups gathered in New Delhi for the People’s BRICS Summit. Its resolution denounced BRICS states for reproducing extractivist, inequitable development models, and insisted that cooperation between global south states be judged by the dignity and rights it delivers to people and communities, not by the freedom it grants states and capital. It called for debt restructuring, a publicly accountable energy transition, food sovereignty, universal social security, women’s political representation and an end to the persecution of civil society activists, and for BRICS to take a clear stand against military intervention, occupation and genocide. BRICS governments chose not to listen.

Ambition without accountability

BRICS’ biggest ambition, on display in the New Delhi Declaration, is to reshape international finance. Development of payment systems independent of the US dollar would chip away at the USA’s unique ability to sustain its power by printing more dollars, despite mountainous debt, to meet unceasing demand. But it would also let repressive states such as Iran and Russia sell oil and gas more easily, funding their repression while blunting international sanctions.

This ambition comes with no commitment to accountability. The bloc has no channel through which the people most affected by its decisions can make their voices heard, and no human rights conditions are attached to its initiatives.

None of the emerging responses to the rapidly changing international order promises to be more democratic than the current system. So far, neither BRICS nor any of the other alternatives now taking shape has matched its growing ambition with greater accountability.

Samuel King is a researcher at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, working on ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition, a Horizon Europe-funded project. Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Member of Smallholder Farmer Alliance in Haiti with tree she is about to plant. Credit: A.F. Cortes/SFA

By Hugh Locke
NEW YORK, Sep 30 2026 (IPS)

Years ago, standing in a small farmer’s field in Haiti, I began to suspect that we had agriculture backward. The development world saw a man in need of rescue. I saw a farmer who might help rescue the rest of us.

That distinction matters. Over the next 25 years, humanity will need to grow much more food on a planet with degraded soils, shrinking biodiversity and a destabilizing climate. The usual instinct is to seek a technical fix. I want to suggest another source of help: a moral idea rooted in religion.

I am not a theologian. I am a development worker. In 2010, Haitian agronomist Timote Georges and I co-founded the Smallholder Farmers Alliance. We now work with about 10,000 farmers throughout Haiti who grow more food while rebuilding degraded land. Our “tree currency” rewards them for planting and caring for trees with credits they can exchange for seeds, tools and training.

Hugh Locke

Roughly 475 million smallholder farms, each under five acres, already produce about 30% of the world’s food despite limited access to finance, markets or technical support. In my new book, Whole Earth Farming, I argue that if even half of these families received support to adopt regenerative methods, they could produce the additional food humanity will need through 2050 on 12% of the world’s arable land, with a climate benefit comparable to offsetting the aviation industry’s annual emissions.

The Green Revolution averted famine, but its gains often came with degraded soils, diminished biodiversity and polluted water. Regenerative farming aims not merely to limit damage but to restore soil, rebuild biodiversity, improve farmers’ wellbeing and deliver a net climate benefit.

That is the language investors expect. Yet a case study more than a century old anticipated this approach, and its foundation was not market logic but morality.

From 1901 to 1921, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, one of the central figures of the Baha’i Faith, directed a farming settlement called ‘Adasiyyih in the Jordan Valley. Long before the term “regenerative agriculture” existed, the community used crop rotation, agroforestry, water conservation and integrated livestock management to make the land productive without exhausting it. Just as important was the framework behind those techniques: the belief that the earth is one country and humanity one interdependent family, expressed through consultation, equality and a rejection of extraction for its own sake. Farming at ‘Adasiyyih was not simply commodity production. It was a way to build community.

Regenerative agriculture does not require religious belief. Many successful regenerative farmers are secular, and the science stands on its own. But ‘Adasiyyih addressed, on a limited scale, a coordination problem that still hinders the movement: how can independent farmers, financiers, governments and companies be persuaded to treat soil health, water and biodiversity as a shared obligation?

‘Adasiyyih began with a moral premise rather than a technical formula. That premise is worth borrowing, whether one calls it stewardship or enlightened self-interest. Farmers, buyers and governments must act as though what happens to one plot of land is everyone’s concern, because increasingly it is. For generations we have asked how much the earth can give us. We should also ask what we owe in return.

Regenerative agriculture is at a fragile moment. By my estimate, some 15 million farms and ranches worldwide now use regenerative practices, and some 25 million acres, mostly in the United States, are certified under third-party standards, though almost none of that land is farmed by smallholders. The movement is growing faster than the systems meant to support it. Farmers can face lower yields and higher costs during the transition, there is no consensus on how to measure results, and financing, training and market rewards lag well behind farmers’ interest. A shared obligation is what can turn these isolated successes into lasting change.

This is not a case for religious agricultural policy, which would be unworkable in a pluralistic world. Smallholders are not waiting for a new theology. They need capital, training and markets. But the case for providing that support may rest more persuasively on the old idea of shared stewardship than on another spreadsheet of carbon calculations.

The next great agricultural transformation may begin not on the world’s largest farms but on hundreds of millions of its smallest. Given the means, smallholders may help determine whether the next 25 years of food production heal the planet or finish degrading it.

Hugh Locke is president of the Impact Farming Foundation and author of Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation (George Ronald Publisher, 2026).

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: United Nations

By Shihana Mohamed
NEW YORK, Sep 29 2026 (IPS)

“Artificial intelligence (AI) must be shaped by humanity, with humanity, and for all humanity… Life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. Killer robots must have no place in our future.”

With those words, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres opened the high-level debate of the 81st session of the General Assembly (UNGA 81). He also warned: “Women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion and abuse… Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds.”

Both technological transformation and the erosion of women’s rights were placed before the world, yet the political response to each was markedly different.

Opening speeches focused heavily on technology. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that a few powers could decide the planet’s future through AI and urged states to build independent, open-source models; UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for global cooperation on transparency and ethics; China’s Vice President Han Zheng stressed a people-centered approach to narrowing the digital divide; and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for the UN to lead AI rule-setting through equal participation.

U.S. President Donald Trump focused on U.S. technological leadership. He declared that the United States was outcompeting the world and called for a change in terminology: “From this point forward, all U.S. documents—and hopefully the world—will use the more accurate term super rather than artificial. So, it’s super intelligence.”

Shihana Mohamed

The question is unavoidable: why has the international system shown such urgency in governing emerging technologies while allowing the erosion of women’s rights to remain a secondary concern?

Twin Transformations
The 81st session convened under the theme, “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.” That theme highlights two defining transformations: the rapid expansion of generative AI and the growing political backlash against the rights of women and girls.

The United Nations treats both as critical to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, yet world leaders are not giving them equal political weight. AI is being elevated as an urgent global governance challenge, while gender equality is increasingly treated as a goal that can wait.

That is a dangerous disconnect.

AI is already reshaping economies, labour markets and public life. It will influence who gets opportunities, whose work is automated, and whose voices are represented in the systems that increasingly influence daily life.

Declining Gender Momentum
AI has ascended to the top tier of global political concerns. Leaders are focused on governance, innovation, digital sovereignty, security, and technological competition.

Meanwhile, the momentum on gender equality is moving in the opposite direction. UN Women and UN DESA report that one in three institutional mechanisms for gender equality has lost institutional power over the past two years. Around one in four have seen their operating budgets cut, while nearly one in ten have lost control of their budgets altogether.

Globally, progress on women’s political and executive participation is reversing. At the current rate of progress, the report projects that global gender equality could be achieved only by 2197, far beyond the UN’s 2030 target.

There is a basic leadership question that Member States have yet to answer: Why has no woman ever been selected as Secretary-General of the United Nations?

The problem is not a shortage of promises but the widening gap between rhetoric and political action.

The Funding Disparity
The resource gap makes that contrast tangible.

Global venture-capital investment in AI firms reached $258.7 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of total global VC investment, according to the OECD. Philanthropic investment is also growing, including the Gates Foundation’s September 2026 commitment to spend at least $1 billion over two years on equitable access to AI and AI-enabled solutions.

Funding for women’s rights is contracting.

Funding for gender equality fell 13% between 2023 and 2024, while funding for women’s rights organizations declined by 28% over the same period.

This is not merely a funding problem; it reflects what the international community considers urgent.

The world is mobilizing enormous capital to build the technologies that will define the future while reducing resources for the organizations working to ensure that women have an equal place in it.

Women Left Behind in the AI Economy
The gender gap is already visible inside the AI economy.

UN Women’s 2026 Gender Snapshot reports that women account for around 22% of AI professionals globally and fewer than 14% of senior leadership positions, based on an analysis of nearly 1.6 million AI professionals.

Women are around 20% less likely than men to use generative AI tools. The result is a persistent gap in both the development and adoption of AI—and a fundamental question about whose perspectives are shaping the future of work.

The International Labour Organization finds that female-dominated occupations are almost twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male-dominated occupations—29% compared with 16%. Women’s concentration in clerical, administrative, and business-support roles, where many tasks are routine and codifiable, contributes significantly to this disparity.

AI is intensifying digital violence against women in public life. UN Women reports increasing use of AI-generated deepfakes, manipulated images and coordinated online harassment against women in public-facing roles. Such abuse can intimidate women and undermine their participation in public life.

UN Women estimates that 90–95% of online deepfakes are non-consensual pornographic images, with around 90% depicting women.

This is where the two crises converge. The same technology being celebrated as transformative is also being used to threaten women’s economic security, public participation, and personal safety.

Immediate Mandates for AI and Gender Equality
More than three decades after the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action set a global framework for gender equality, the world remains far from its commitments.

The General Assembly must move beyond another cycle of declarations and voluntary targets and act where technology, funding and gender rights now intersect.

• Enforce Financial Reciprocity via a Global Tech Solidarity Fund: The General Assembly should establish a mechanism requiring a fixed share of global digital-transformation investment to support grassroots women’s organizations, and strengthen their technical capacity, infrastructure and advocacy.

• Establish an International Enforcement Mechanism with the Urgency Applied to AI: The UN should address the erosion of women’s rights with the same urgency applied to emerging technological threats. The General Assembly should establish a global monitoring mechanism empowered to impose diplomatic and financial consequences on states that roll back women’s legal protections.

• Criminalize Technology-Facilitated Abuse and Mandate Safety-by-Design: The General Assembly should advance a binding international treaty classifying AI-generated deepfakes weaponized against women in public life as violations of international human rights law. Technology companies should be required to address algorithmic bias and security failures that endanger women’s participation in public life.

If world leaders truly intend to “manage transformation” and “restore trust,” they cannot continue treating women’s empowerment as a secondary issue.

The willingness to govern the digital frontier must extend to protecting the women who live and work within it.

Otherwise, the “super intelligence” that leaders celebrate will not simply become an engine of economic growth. It could also become a powerful tool for reinforcing the structural exclusion of half the human race.

Shihana Mohamed is the President of Asia Global Forum (www.AsiaGlobalForum.org) and a US Public Voices Fellow on advancing the rights of women and girls. She is the founder of the UN Asia Network for Diversity & Inclusion (www.UN-ANDI.org) and a dedicated human rights activist and a strong advocate for gender equality and the advancement of women.

IPS UN Bureau

Smaller generations are entering the workforce as larger generations retire and begin receiving pension benefits. Credit: Shutterstock

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Sep 28 2026 (IPS)

Dozens of government-funded pension programs providing benefits to hundreds of millions of men and women face growing fiscal strain and long-term sustainability challenges. These pressures are largely driven by rapid demographic transitions, including ageing populations, declining fertility, rising life expectancy, and shrinking workforces.

Many state pension systems rely on current workers to finance benefits for current retirees. In countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States, these systems face increasing financial pressure as the number of workers supporting each retiree declines, while retirees live longer and collect benefits for more years.

Smaller generations are entering the workforce as larger generations retire and begin receiving pension benefits. This demographic shift is placing growing pressure on pension systems and raising concerns about their ability to meet future obligations.

As a result of these significant demographic changes, relatively fewer workers are paying into pension systems to support growing numbers of retirees who are living longer and collecting benefits for more years.

At the same time, extended families, local communities, and other traditional forms of support for retirees are weakening. Moreover, formal pension systems, including government-backed programs, have proven to be difficult to reform and, in some cases, financially unsustainable. In a growing number of countries, government pension programs are also facing insolvency.

Global life expectancy at age 65, for example, has reached 18 years, a 50% increase from 12 years in 1960. At the same time, the share of the world’s population aged 65 and older has more than doubled, from 5% in 1960 to 11% today. Global fertility has also fallen sharply, from 4.7 births per woman in 1960 to 2.2 today. Moreover, these demographic trends are expected to continue well into the 21st century (Table 1).

Source: United Nations.

Population ageing is particularly evident in some more developed countries. For example, a quarter or more of the populations of Germany, Italy, and Japan are aged 65 and older.

Moreover, the proportion of older persons is expected to increase significantly in many countries in the coming decades. By mid-century, for example, about a third or more of the populations of China, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Spain are projected to be aged 65 and older (Figure 1).

Source: United Nations.

As a result of significant demographic changes in age structure, longevity, fertility, and the workforce, the number of pension beneficiaries is growing relative to the number of workers whose payroll taxes often finance these programs.

By 2050, the ratios of workers to retirees are expected to decline significantly in many of the world’s largest economies. In 2020, these ratios ranged from about 2 workers per retiree in Japan to about 5 in China. By 2050, the ratios are projected to fall to between 1 to 2 workers per retiree in these countries.

Furthermore, despite population ageing, increased longevity among older persons, and fewer workers per retiree, official retirement ages for receiving government pension benefits have remained largely unchanged.

Countries are moving closer to the point when their pension programs may be unable to pay full scheduled benefits. Unless governments take action, pension revenues will become insufficient in many countries to cover scheduled benefits, with financial shortfalls expected to grow substantially over the coming years

Consequently, pension costs are projected to rise as more workers reach retirement age, while slower population and economic growth constrain the tax bases that support many of the pension programs.

As the ratio of workers to retirees worsens, government officials face difficult choices about raising retirement ages, adjusting benefits, and increasing taxes.

Countries are moving closer to the point when their pension programs may be unable to pay full scheduled benefits. Unless governments take action, pension revenues will become insufficient in many countries to cover scheduled benefits, with financial shortfalls expected to grow substantially over the coming years.

The longer governments delay necessary reforms, the larger the adjustments are likely to be to close these financing gaps. Such adjustments could involve changes to revenue, benefits, retirement ages, or other program provisions.

Despite repeated warnings from pension officials and approaching financial shortfalls, pension reform has received relatively little government attention. Policymakers have generally avoided proposing comprehensive legislation to ensure the long-term financial solvency of their pension programs.

The growing pension peril underscores the urgency of addressing these financial challenges well before programs reach their projected insolvency dates. Acting sooner would give policymakers more time to make gradual changes and restore long-term financial balance.

As some countries have done in the past, governments could establish national commissions to examine the long-term finances of their pension programs. These commissions could develop recommendations and present them to government officials well before projected insolvency dates, giving policymakers adequate time to consider and implement reforms.

Governments have several options for addressing expected pension shortfalls. Policymakers could eliminate or raise the ceiling on earnings subject to payroll taxes, increase payroll tax rates paid by employers and employees, reduce cost-of-living adjustments for high-income beneficiaries, and gradually raise the retirement age as life expectancy increases.

Many of these measures, however, are politically difficult and unpopular with much of the public. Some countries, for example, are considering raising their official retirement ages, but such proposals are opposed by large proportions of the public.

Opinion surveys also indicate a preference for lower retirement ages. For example, respondents in 18 mostly middle-income countries say, on average, that the best age to retire is around 58 (Figure 2).

Source: Pew Research Center.

In sum, many national pension systems are in peril. Significant demographic changes – especially population ageing, increased longevity, declining fertility, and shrinking workforces – are placing growing financial pressure on many government pension programs and threatening their long-term sustainability.

Despite these well-known challenges and the prospect of growing financial shortfalls, government leaders have shown limited willingness to make the difficult policy choices needed to address them. Unless policymakers act, many national pension programs could face serious funding gaps, potentially leading to significant reductions in scheduled benefits for retirees and other beneficiaries.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division, and author of many publications on population issues.

The 1944 Bretton Woods (BW) conference accepted the US demand to use the dollar to settle international financial transactions. This arrangement would require a US balance-of-payments deficit to issue enough dollars.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Bretton Woods
At BW in July 1944, 44 allied nations met to design the post-war world monetary system. John Maynard Keynes represented the UK, no longer financially dominant due to its heavy public debt fighting two world wars.

Harry Dexter White represented the US, which then held two-thirds of the world’s monetary gold, while other countries needed dollar loans for trade and reconstruction. The US promised foreign governments and central banks to convert dollars to gold.

With the US BW promise to redeem an ounce of gold for $35, the dollar became the world’s reserve asset. Every other currency’s exchange rate was fixed against the dollar, in principle, adjustable with IMF approval.

Instead, Keynes proposed a reserve currency, Bancor, managed by an international clearing union to avoid any national currency becoming dominant; a payments system using a national currency could eventually force others to accept its national policies and priorities.

Unsustainable by design
The BW agreement also created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Each member nation was assigned a quota, partly paid in gold and its own currency.

A member nation’s quota determined both its voting weight and how much it could borrow if it needed to borrow when its own currency came under pressure.

The dollar-gold peg was vulnerable by design. For the arrangement to function, the world needed a growing supply of dollars for reserves and international transactions.

In principle, the US had to have enough gold to honour all claims against it. This requirement was met in 1944, when its gold reserves were vast, while other economies were ruined. However, these conditions were not met for long.

As currency devaluations were stigmatised, currency pegs were rarely adjusted. Governments defended unrealistic exchange rates, unjustified by their reserves.

Instead of adjusting gradually, fixed exchange rates would adjust abruptly, typically after crises, as with sterling in 1967 and the dollar in 1971.

Keynes had insisted on allowing governments to manage cross-border capital movements, expecting free-flowing speculative capital to undermine fixed exchange rates.

For a decade and a half, most European governments used the IMF’s sixth Article of Agreement to restrict how freely money could leave their countries and thus defend their currency pegs.

As strong post-war recoveries turned Europe’s dollar shortages into surpluses, capital controls were gradually loosened from the 1960s.

London Gold Pool
The US Congress ignored Triffin’s warning. Instead, in late 1961, the US organised seven European central banks into the London Gold Pool, coordinated by the Bank of England rather than by treaty.

It worked for a while. Whenever private demand pushed the gold price over $35/ounce, participating banks sold their bullion to bring the price down, to buy gold!

From 1962, currency swap lines involving the same central banks withdrew dollars from circulation abroad to reduce demand for gold. Both efforts used a formula based on each country’s original contributions.

Rising US government spending made things worse. The Johnson administration financed both the Vietnam War and Great Society programmes without raising taxes. More dollars flowed out of the US, expanding the supply of Eurodollars.

In March 1967, without any parliamentary mandate or transparent treaty, West Germany’s Bundesbank President privately promised the Fed it would not convert its large dollar reserves from its fast-growing trade surplus into gold.

But France’s president had never accepted Washington’s abuse of the post-war arrangement. In February 1965, De Gaulle complained of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege.

This referred to the US ability to settle its liabilities abroad by issuing more dollars, instead of earning foreign exchange like others. In June 1967, France refused to continue subsidising the dollar peg by withdrawing from the Gold Pool.

Britain devalued the pound in November 1967. As speculative pressure on gold rose, other Pool central banks had to sell even more gold until they gave up on 17 March.

Two tiers
In the subsequent two-tier system, the $35 gold price was only used for transactions between central banks and governments. Another floating free-market price traded well above it.

US gold reserves, almost $20 billion shortly after WW2, were halved by 1971 as foreign governments’ and central banks’ dollar claims rose over $50 billion!

When member governments safely created official liquidity by introducing a new reserve asset, the Special Drawing Right (SDR), in 1969, the problem was highlighted again.

SDRs were allocated directly to member countries rather than tied to either gold or the US trade or current account deficit. The SDR was supposed to supplement, not replace, gold and the dollar as reserve assets.

By mid-1971, when President Nixon unilaterally ended the dollar’s gold convertibility obligation, the debate was no longer about whether the gold window could hold, but over how to close it without triggering a currency-market panic after years of speculation.

IPS UN Bureau

A Rohingya refugee carries Myanmar's national flag during a Genocide Remembrance Day rally marking the anniversary of their mass exodus at a refugee camp in Bangladesh on 25 August 2026. Credit: Abdul Goni/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Sep 25 2026 (IPS)

On 15 September, Norwegian police and security services raided the headquarters of Telenor in Oslo. Authorities accuse the multinational telecoms company, majority owned by the Norwegian state, of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity in Myanmar and breaching sanctions.

Telenor sold its Myanmar subsidiary in March 2022, in the wake of the military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected government in February 2021. An August 2025 Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation investigation reported that ahead of its exit, Telenor had complied with military requests to hand over customer data. It’s alleged that call log and location data may have helped the military track, capture and kill democracy activists, including campaigner Ko Jimmy, executed in July 2022.

Civil society warned of the dangers when Telenor prepared to sell its subsidiary to a joint venture between a Lebanese group and Thein Win Zaw, a Burmese entrepreneur accused of having close military ties. It has kept up the struggle for accountability. Justice for Myanmar, a covert activist group, worked with the International Commission of Jurists to collect documentary evidence on Telenor’s role and filed police complaints in December 2024 and October 2025.

Telenor is also subject to a lawsuit brought by a group of civil society organisations last October, alleging the company passed on data of over 1,200 people. In addition, the company has been found in breach of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct.

International complicity

The Telenor case focuses attention on the wider networks of companies and states that are propping up the regime and keeping Myanmar’s civil war going.

Following the coup, almost all states refused to recognise Myanmar’s military rulers and continued to regard the exiled National Unity Government as the country’s legitimate representative. But several authoritarian states have since swung behind the junta. Russia leads the pack, with Vladimir Putin hosting junta leader Min Aung Hlaing for repeat visits in Moscow. China, India, Singapore and Thailand have joined Russia in supplying weapons.

Many Chinese companies collaborate with the regime, among them Geedge Networks, a tech company with close links to the Chinese state that specialises in online surveillance. The company is helping the military install a version of China’s ‘great firewall’ so it can systematically restrict internet use, access users’ data and identify and track down dissenters.

The junta made a concerted effort to gain international legitimacy with a sham election in December 2025 and January 2026. It extensively prepared the ground by replacing the civilian electoral commission with a military-controlled body, banning pro-democracy parties and prohibiting political rallies, ensuring a military puppet party faced only token opposition. A new election law enabled it to criminalise over 300 people for criticising the election. Authorities jailed some merely for liking social media posts and handed 37-year sentences to eight activists for taking part in a protest calling for a boycott. There were also reports of threats to withhold aid from displacement camps unless people voted.

After the military’s party duly won, Min Aung Hlaing transitioned from general to civilian and became president in April. That same month, a group of civil society organisations filed a complaint against him in Indonesia over his role in the 2017 genocide of Rohingya people. Despite this legal action and the election’s evident lack of credibility, an array of non-democratic states including Belarus, China and Russia were happy to endorse the result.

While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) didn’t recognise the election, its most authoritarian members, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, backed it anyway, and the bloc has consistently stuck with its failed Five Point Consensus, a plan agreed with the junta in April 2021 that the military has never respected.

The US government has also shifted its position. In 2025, the Trump administration cut funding to independent Burmese media, lifted sanctions against junta-controlled businesses and arms dealers supplying the regime and removed protections from Burmese refugees living in the USA, citing governance improvements. It treated the junta as a legitimate counterpart by sending it a letter about tariffs. In May, it was revealed the junta gives Roger Stone, a long-time Donald Trump ally, US$50,000 a month to rebuild relations with the USA. Mineral deposits are likely in the Trump administration’s sights.

Civil war continues

The Telenor raid has momentarily brought Myanmar back into the headlines. Its civil war has otherwise gone on for almost five and a half years with little global attention. Sparked by the army’s violent suppression of democracy protests, it pits the military against armed pro-democracy forces, both backed by a variety of ethnic militia. The army controls the main population centres and has recently regained some territory, but there’s no end in sight.

The army has committed numerous crimes against humanity and war crimes. A September 2025 UN report painted a harrowing picture of airstrikes on schools and the destruction of villages. This year, the conflict has escalated across the Magway Region, with the army and associated militia mounting armed assaults on villages, burning homes and using drones to kill civilians, including children.

Recent escalations of conflict have driven further displacement. At the same time, monsoon rains across several regions in July and August caused floods that left villages isolated and increased disease risks. As needs have grown, the healthcare system is collapsing due to military attacks on facilities and workers, while humanitarian aid and vital health supplies are further constrained by military checkpoints, road closures and movement restrictions.

The Telenor case has the potential to challenge impunity. It should refocus the minds of democratic states and companies headquartered in them, offering a warning that they can be exposed for complicity in the junta’s atrocities. It should give fresh impetus to civil society’s efforts to hold states and companies to account. By standing with civil society, in Myanmar and around the world, democratic states can put themselves on the side of human rights and justice.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Credit: Amanda Cotton / Ocean Image Bank

By Gareth Johnstone and Jan Thomas Odegard
OSLO, Norway, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

As Norway undertakes Vendepunkt, or “Turning Point,” its reflection on the future of Norwegian development policy, it is critical that oceans remain a priority. Donors around the world are running similar audits, deciding which long-term partnerships to keep, and why. Norway has decades of expertise to offer, but also something significant at stake: healthy and well-governed oceans underpin food, livelihoods and economic activity in partner countries while supporting global seafood supply chains in which Norway itself participates.

West Africa demonstrates what sustained investment in oceans can achieve. More than a decade of cooperation on illegal fishing has helped countries strengthen their own capacity to monitor and protect their waters. But the ocean cannot be managed country by country. Fish stocks are shared, vessels move across borders, and climate change is shifting marine resources into new waters. Strong national capacity must therefore be matched by the ability of countries to cooperate.

That cooperation depends on the relationships between countries that allow information to be shared, trust to develop and authorities to act together. These relationships are not simply a by-product of capacity building. They are essential development infrastructures particularly when the resources being protected cross borders.

Gareth Johnstone

The connection between West Africa and Norway makes this tangible. Fish caught off West Africa enters international supply chains as fishmeal and fish oil, including feed used in aquaculture thousands of kilometres away. A fish caught off Guinea-Bissau can ultimately help feed a salmon in a Norwegian fjord. In one investigation supported by TMT, authorities took action against the factory vessel TIAN YI HE 6 after it received fish from a Turkish-flagged vessel, with the resulting fishmeal transported onwards to international markets. The case resulted in fines for unauthorized fishing operations, illegal transshipment and obstruction of inspectors.

Jan Thomas Odegard

Technology has transformed what fisheries authorities can do. An inspector can now examine a vessel’s movements and history before deciding whether it should enter port. Recorded use of the Vessel Tracking Tool, developed by fisheries intelligence organisaiton, TMT, more than doubled between 2024 and 2025.

Despite this, turning information into action requires trained officials, functioning institutions and trust between agencies and countries. In the West African region where TMT, and its partners have focused support, the relationships resulted in the deterrence of illegal fishing took more than a decade to build. An independent assessment by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management of this work, supported by Norway, found that some of the strongest results came when governments shared information regionally.

One case began with a concern raised by a fisheries inspector in Ghana about the vessel NOVA ZEELANDIA. Officials in Côte d’Ivoire, Angola and South Africa checked their records and shared information. Angola subsequently fined associated trawlers for unauthorized transshipment and barred NOVA ZEELANDIA from its waters, while Cameroon separately fined the vessel owners US$2.1 million for breaches of inspection rules.

The vessel later changed its name and flag and remains in operation. It is a reminder that effective ocean governance requires sustained cooperation across jurisdictions.

Relationships are development infrastructure

Development programmes routinely count the numbers of people trained, systems established and institutions strengthened. The value of the relationships built alongside them is harder to measure. Yet a fisheries officer knowing who to contact in a neighbouring country can be as important as the technology on their desk.

These relationships take years to build and can be fragile. One or two funding cycles may establish a system or deliver training, yet they are less likely to embed the institutional memory, expertise and relationships that allow it to survive and adapt.

Long-running development partnerships and support should therefore not automatically be viewed as evidence that localisation has failed to materialise. A better test is whether they are evolving toward stronger national institutions, greater regional leadership and with less dependence on external technical expertise, while preserving cooperation where challenges remain shared.

Oceans belong in Norway’s Turning Point

Norway brings decades of experience in fisheries management, marine research and ocean governance. Norway is itself a fishing and aquaculture nation, connected through the same ocean systems and global seafood supply chains.

Norway’s investment in oceans can therefore combine locally led capacity with international cooperation because illegal vessels do not respect borders.

The evidence from West Africa shows why sustained investment matters. National enforcement capability and regional networks have been built over more than a decade. Withdrawing support before those systems are sufficiently resilient risks losing hard-won gains, continuing to invest allows national leadership to deepen and relationships to mature.

Norway’s challenge is not unique. Development partners are increasingly being asked to make harder choices and reduce dependency without dismantling the relationships and cooperation needed to address problems that are inherently international. As Turning Point asks where Norway has particular strengths and where its development cooperation can have greatest impact, oceans deserve a prominent place in the answer.

The question should not simply be which partnerships Norway can eventually leave. It should also be which are worth sustaining and deepening because the same fish stocks, vessels and networks are what is at stake. Strong national capacity and international relationships are not competing goals. One makes the other possible. And in an ocean that connects Guinea-Bissau’s fishing communities with Norway’s fjords, Norway has both the expertise and the interest to keep investing in both.

Gareth Johnstone is the Executive Director of Norwegian based fisheries intelligence organization, Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT). He has over 30 years’ experience as an environmental scientist, researcher and policy expert. He is also the former Director General of WorldFish.

Jan Thomas Odegard is a Norwegian environmental and development expert with 30 years’ experience spanning the UN, NGOs, private sector and research. He is co-founder and Chair of the Trygg Mat Tracking Board and former Secretary General of Friends of the Earth Norway.

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Credit: IAEA
 
IAEA’s 70th General Conference highlights growing strains on safeguards and nuclear security as attention shifts to the first review of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.

By Katsuhiro Asagiri
VIENNA, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

The international nuclear order is facing another test as governments move from an inconclusive review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in New York to renewed disputes over safeguards and nuclear security in Vienna—and toward the first Review Conference of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) later this year.

The 70th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), held in Vienna from September 14 to 18, came less than four months after the 11th NPT Review Conference ended without consensus on a substantive outcome.

It was the third consecutive NPT Review Conference, following those in 2015 and 2022, to conclude without agreement on substantive conclusions and recommendations—underscoring the growing difficulty of reaching consensus amid heightened nuclear risks and geopolitical tensions.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed disappointment at the outcome while reaffirming the NPT as a cornerstone of the global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime.

The IAEA does not negotiate nuclear disarmament. Its responsibilities include promoting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and applying safeguards to verify that nuclear material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

Yet the issues confronting the Agency—from Iran and North Korea to Ukraine and naval nuclear propulsion—show how safeguards, nuclear security and armed conflict are increasingly intertwined with wider questions about the future of the international nuclear order.

Map of Iran

Iran remains one of the most difficult issues facing the Agency.

For the IAEA, the central question is not simply the political dispute surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme, but whether it can maintain the continuity and credibility of independent verification.

Restrictions on access and uncertainty surrounding nuclear material, including highly enriched uranium, have intensified concerns about the effectiveness of safeguards.

The issue has taken on an additional dimension following attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. Beyond competing political and military claims lies a wider question for the international community: how can nuclear facilities—and the verification system surrounding them—be protected during armed conflict?

Ukraine Tests Nuclear Safety in Wartime

Ukraine presents another challenge.

The war has placed major nuclear facilities in or near areas of military operations, with the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant remaining at the centre of international concern.

The IAEA has maintained experts at the site as part of efforts to reduce risks to nuclear safety and security.

Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of actions threatening nuclear installations. While those claims remain contested, the underlying issue extends beyond this war: international nuclear governance mechanisms must now operate in circumstances where a major nuclear facility can be exposed to prolonged armed conflict.

Water is used to cool processes at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Credit: IAEA/Fredrik Dahl

North Korea and the Limits of Verification

Credit: journal-neo.org

The IAEA continues to monitor developments in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from outside the country and maintains its readiness to resume verification activities should political circumstances permit.

The case illustrates a fundamental limitation of international verification: even sophisticated monitoring institutions ultimately depend on access and cooperation.

More broadly, the Vienna conference reflected the growing difficulty of achieving consensus. Political divisions are increasingly affecting debates even within an institution whose work is largely technical, encompassing safeguards, nuclear safety and security, and peaceful nuclear applications.

At the same time, progress in other safeguards cases shows that multilateral verification can produce results when governments provide access, transparency and sustained cooperation.

Civil Society Bridges the NPT and TPNW

Hideto Matsuura, head of Nihon Hidankyo, addresses an event hosted at the sidelines of the 2026 NPT Review Conference. Credit Naureen Hossain/IPS

At the 2026 NPT Review Conference, Soka Gakkai International (SGI) was among civil society organizations advocating nuclear disarmament education, nuclear risk reduction and greater attention to the humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons.

On April 30, SGI and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation co-organized a side event examining extended nuclear deterrence through the lens of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.

Hideto Matsuura, an atomic bomb survivor representing Nihon Hidankyo, described how radiation-related illnesses continue to affect Hibakusha more than eight decades after the atomic bombings.

The discussion raised a question that lies at the heart of the continuing debate over nuclear deterrence: whether security should be viewed primarily from the standpoint of states or also through the lens of human security.

Such civil society engagement provides a link between the NPT process and the humanitarian approach that contributed to the emergence of the TPNW.

From Vienna to New York

The next major stage of the 2026 nuclear diplomacy cycle now moves back to New York.

From November 30 to December 4, states parties to the TPNW will hold the treaty’s first Review Conference at United Nations Headquarters.

United Nations Headquarters. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri

The TPNW does not replace either the NPT or the IAEA.

The NPT combines three pillars—nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear disarmament and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy—while the IAEA provides much of the safeguards and verification machinery supporting the non-proliferation regime.

Credit: IAEA

The three frameworks therefore address distinct but interconnected dimensions of the nuclear order.

The 2026 NPT Review Conference demonstrated the difficulty of reaching political agreement on disarmament and non-proliferation. Vienna, meanwhile, highlighted the practical challenges confronting verification and nuclear security amid armed conflict, regional proliferation disputes and geopolitical divisions.

The first TPNW Review Conference will now examine what the prohibition treaty can contribute under these conditions.

Nuclear-armed states remain outside the TPNW, placing clear limits on what the treaty can achieve on its own. At the same time, its states parties and supporting civil society organizations have placed the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and their elimination at the centre of international debate.

When delegates gather in New York on November 30, the discussion will therefore extend beyond the implementation of a single treaty.

After another NPT Review Conference ended without substantive consensus, a broader question remains: how can established and newer multilateral frameworks work alongside one another to reduce nuclear risks, strengthen verification and advance nuclear disarmament?

From Vienna to New York, that question is set to remain at the centre of nuclear diplomacy in 2026.

This article is brought to you by INPS Japan in collaboration with Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

After decades in which the high seas were too often treated as a distant frontier—vast, ownerless and beyond meaningful protection—the High Seas Treaty entered into force on 17 January 2026.

It was a landmark achievement for international cooperation and a reminder that, even in an increasingly divided world, nations can still come together in defence of the common good. But celebration must not be confused with protection. A treaty on paper will not restore depleted marine life. It will not prevent harmful activity and it will not ensure that the benefits of ocean science are shared fairly. Nor will it secure a healthy ocean for future generations unless the international community gives it the resources, institutions, scientific capacity and political courage necessary to succeed. That is the real test now before us.

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty, creates a framework for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. It addresses four essential areas: the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from marine genetic resources; marine protected areas and other area-based management tools; environmental impact assessments; and the capacity-building and transfer of marine technology. These areas will secure the future of the global ocean—and, by extension, the future of every nation whose climate, food security, economy and heritage depend upon it.

For small island developing states, it is our climate regulator, our food source, our economic space, our history and our future. We do not look at the sea as a faraway expanse beyond our borders. We live with it every day. We prosper or suffer according to its health.

During my years as President of Seychelles, this understanding shaped my conviction that the ocean had to be placed at the centre of national development. Seychelles chose to pursue a blue-economy vision at a time when the phrase was less familiar than it is today. We worked to protect large areas of our maritime space, advanced marine spatial planning, and explored innovative approaches to ocean finance, including debt-for-nature arrangements and the blue bond.

Our actions were not driven by the illusion that a small island nation could fix a global crisis single-handedly. Instead, we acted out of a core conviction: true leadership belongs to more than just the largest landmasses, the richest economies, or the most dominant militaries. While we are a small island state in land, we are a vast ocean nation. We possess a wealth of experience, strategic maritime vision, and deep resolve. It is this exact spirit—proving that stewardship is measured by commitment rather than geographic size—that must anchor and define the High Seas Treaty.

The treaty rightly recognises the special circumstances of developing states, including small island developing states and coastal African states. It acknowledges that access to data, research, equipment, technical knowledge, monitoring systems and trained people is essential if all countries are to participate meaningfully in ocean governance. However, this principle must now be honored in practice. Too often, developing countries are invited to global negotiations only to discover that the real advantages remain concentrated elsewhere: locked away in distant laboratories, research vessels, satellites, and data systems. If the benefits arising from marine genetic resources are to be genuinely shared, then access to the knowledge and tools required to understand and use those resources must also be shared. The ocean cannot become another arena in which wealthier nations draw the greatest benefit while poorer and more vulnerable countries are asked merely to endorse the rules.

The first Conference of the Parties for the High Seas Treaty, scheduled to take place in early January 2027, will be a critical moment. It must not become a narrow exercise in procedure or a meeting dominated by those already best equipped to influence outcomes. It should establish an implementation culture based on ambition, inclusion and urgency. It must ensure that the financial mechanism is strong enough to support developing countries, that scientific cooperation is meaningful, and that capacity-building is not reduced to occasional workshops or vague promises. The treaty’s decision-making body is expected to convene within its first year in force, making the coming months decisive for how this new era of ocean governance is shaped.

There is another important lesson here. The world has too often separated environmental protection from development, as though nations must choose between conserving nature and improving the lives of their people. For island states, this is a false choice. A healthy ocean is development. It supports fisheries and livelihoods. It protects coastlines. It regulates climate. It sustains tourism, culture and community. It offers scientific discoveries that may help humanity confront disease, food insecurity and environmental change. To protect the ocean is not to turn away from progress. It is to redefine progress so that it can endure.

This is why the High Seas Treaty matters so deeply. It offers a chance to move beyond a culture of reaction—responding only after a fishery declines, a species disappears, a reef bleaches or an ecosystem is damaged beyond repair. It gives the international community an opportunity to act with greater foresight: to assess environmental risks before they are allowed to grow, to establish protected areas before the last refuge is lost, and to place stewardship alongside opportunity. But no agreement, however historic, can substitute for political will.

The treaty will need champions: governments willing to invest in its success; scientists willing to share knowledge; institutions prepared to support fair access; civil society determined to hold leaders accountable; and young people who refuse to accept that the ocean’s future should be decided without them. Seychelles has long believed that the world must see the ocean not as a boundary between nations, but as the great connector of humanity. That belief is even more urgent today.

The high seas belong to no single country and its condition affects us all. The High Seas Treaty is therefore more than a legal instrument. It is a test of whether multilateralism can still respond to the challenges that no nation can solve alone.

The ocean has a law and now the world must give it life.

James Alix Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

IPS UN Bureau

Dr. Agnes Kalibata, speaking at the opening ceremony of the Africa Food Systems Forum in 2019. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

By Agnes Kalibata
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

I was born in Rwanda, but my family soon became refugees in Uganda during the conflict and unrest on the cusp of independence. My father was a teacher and went to great lengths to make sure I was well educated. My parents were also smallholder farmers, and I saw firsthand the challenges my parents and other refugee families faced.

After I received my doctoral degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I returned to a new Rwanda in 2005, managing a World Bank agriculture project with the government. In 2008, I became Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, and over the next six years, I oversaw the country’s transition from food deficit to food security, as Rwanda cut its global hunger index by more than 50 percent. We implemented what we understood to be true: effective deliberate agricultural investment drives poverty down.

Agricultural growth is up to four times more effective at reducing poverty than growth in other sectors, and it underpins food security besides. Yet despite that evidence, Africa’s agriculture sector faces an estimated $200 billion annual financing gap.

Less than a year ago, I joined the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee because I have seen firsthand how GAFSP is a collaborative platform that connects governments, farmers, civil society and leverages the private sector and multiple partners to tackle food insecurity. Among its inaugural investments was a 60 million dollar investment in Rwanda’s Land Husbandry and terracing program which allowed farmers to reclaim degraded land by mobilizing more than 10 times this initial capital, reached hundreds of farmers and contributed to land restoration, food security and poverty reduction all at the same time.

GAFSP’s Business Investment Financing Track (BIFT) has made its second allocation (its first allocation was to the African Development Bank). Announced at the Africa Food Systems Forum “Investing in Africa’s Agri-Food Systems: Nourishing Nations, Growing Jobs, Building Resilience,” Rwanda’s BIFT allocation is a concrete step toward the GAFSP vision that sharing risk deliberately, and cooperatively, rather than leaving it with farmers alone, moves capital that reduces food insecurity. This $6 million allocation has already unlocked $15 million more from IFAD, the Bank of Kigali and Aceli Africa – 2.5 times GAFSP’s own contribution – reaching an expected 215 farmers’ organizations and 35,000 smallholders.

What is most encouraging about this funding is the paradigm shift it represents against the challenging context of reduced Overseas Development Assistance. Capital structured to absorb risk can shift lender considerations to bring private finance into a domain the private sector has avoided, catalyzing transformational change for smallholder borrowers.

The central obstacle isn’t capital or conviction – it’s risk. Agricultural lending is constrained by the risk of accelerating climate shocks and by the practical cost of financing smaller loans. Roughly 90 percent of staple food production in Sub-Saharan Africa depends on rain-fed agriculture, leaving households with no buffer when a season fails. Farmers in low-income countries bear the highest burden of worsening weather conditions, while African countries lose the most GDP to escalating natural disasters, from drought to surging storms. Finally, the loans these farmers need are relatively small, and small loans cost lenders more to appraise and administer.

As Rwanda’s Agriculture Minister, coordinating across ministries to run programs like the Land husbandry program mentioned above alongside the One Cow per Poor Family – a critical source of nutrition for poor families taught me that risk-sharing across government agencies, communities and financiers is what makes ambitious programs work.

It is now a question of scale. What worked for smallholders in Rwanda can work for millions more, if development finance institutions and private lenders treat risk-sharing as standard practice. I have spent my career watching farmers do more with less. Give them the finance they’ve earned, and there is no question they will transform the food system to be more efficient, resilient and a stronger driver of prosperity at scale.

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: Matt Palmer / Unsplash
 
This guest post is authored by V. Ram Ramanathan, Durwood Zaelke, and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and is informed by a presentation that Ramanathan is set to give at the Vatican on September 26.

By V. Ram Ramanathan, Durwood Zaelke and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco
NEW YORK, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

Among the three of us, we have 15 decades of high-level experience in climate science, policies and actions, and we have never been more alarmed than we are at this moment. The United Nations has just officially declared that the world has failed in limiting global warming to a safe level. During the last decade, heat-trapping pollutants nearly doubled the rate that heat is being added to the planet—a rate that will push temperatures across the 1.5°Celsius threshold in five years or less and breach the first barrier of the Paris Agreement. This will further destabilize natural climate systems and amplify weather extremes, which are already costing the world economy more than $ 2 trillion annually. At the current rate of warming, the global temperature is likely to cross 2° Celsius in about 15 years, the outer limit of the Paris Agreement, taking us into a climate not witnessed by homo sapiens, ever.

High altitudes in the Tibetan-Himalayan region and the Alps are already warming at two to three times the global average (which may be implicated in the recent Nepal / Tibet floods that left 1400 confirmed dead and 5,000 missing). Other disastrous impacts of reaching 2°Celsius include the the transition of the Amazon from a forest into a savanna. The health impacts could be the worst of all. At 2°Celsius, heat deaths in 2050 could reach a staggering two billion in a worst-case analysis by actuarial experts at Exeter University.

If that weren’t bad enough, a new scientific study raises the possibility that the current rate of warming, if continued, could eventually shut down the ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—AMOC. The Gulf Stream is a major part of this vital ocean current, which plays a dominant role in winter weather over north America and Europe. Worryingly, AMOC is already slowing down.

At today’s rate of warming AMOC could begin to collapse at warming as low as 2° Celsius, which could be crossed by the time today’s infants are in college. Impacts would be punishing, stranding heat in the already too hot tropics, while robbing northern countries of heat now transported north to keep temperatures temperate, leading to bitter winters. If AMOC collapses, currently a low-probability event, it could trigger massive forced internal and international displacements, ushering in the world’s largest crisis of forced migration ever.

Crossing 2°Celsius will trigger other irreversible impacts too, further amplifying warming through the loss of sea ice and glaciers. The depletion of ice and snow will make the planet darker, resulting in more absorption of incoming solar radiation, amplifying warming by 25% or more.

The good news is that we can avoid this fate if we cut the rate of warming quickly—by 50% within 15 years, which is feasible in two parts.

First, we need to cut the super-pollutants of climate. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), methane, lower-atmosphere ozone, and black carbon soot from diesel and cooking smoke. These short-lived climate pollutants are called super pollutants because they are tens to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in heating the planet and are currently contributing more than half of the warming the planet has witnessed. However, and this is crucial–they dissipate from the atmosphere within two decades, whereas carbon dioxide, the best-known climate pollutant, takes multiple decades to a century to significantly decline.

Technologies exist to quickly and affordably reduce the super pollutants. In many cases we have the policies and laws as well. HFCs are being cut through the 2016 Kigali amendment to the successful Montreal Protocol—the treaty that has slowed warming by several decades while restoring the protective stratospheric ozone layer.

Methane pollution is getting more attention recently, including from Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, who is recommending a binding international agreement —inspired by the Montreal Protocol—to prevent the oil and gas industry from wasting natural gas, which is 90% methane. Other local solutions can reduce or even eliminate methane from landfills, starting by reducing food waste. There are many other such practical, off-the-shelf solutions.

The immediate task at hand is to thin the invisible heat trapping blanket. If we implement super pollutant solutions before 2030 and scale to full potential in less than10 years, the rate of warming can be reduced by 30% by 2040s. But we need to cut the rate of warming by half, i.e. 50%. The super pollutants should be our first target, because the technologies and policies are there and once we put them into action, the blanket-thinning will start immediately.

Second, as the recent IPCC report affirms, we need to focus on removing CO2. The human-made CO2 blanket up there weighs about 1,200 billion tons and we have to thin it by 5%, or 60 billion tons. Nature-based solutions are currently removing about 2 billion tons per year. Chemical/biological/technological solutions are actively pursued. Scaling to 4 billion tons per year would remove the needed tons in 15 years.

Together, these two measures would halve the rate of warming from today’s nearly 0.4° Celsius per decade to less than 0.2° Celsius per decade. We know of no other measures of thinning the heat-trapping blanket to provide the rapid cooling needed to allow us to survive and thrive. Even with rapid actions, climate disruption will continue for decades. We must make people and ecosystems resilient. Since we are all interconnected, we require global cooperation to make people and ecosystem climate resilient. Towards this global cooperation, we propose creating: One Million Climate Advocates to empower the public to support local and national actions; and One Million Climate Champions to connect civil society, governments, and industries to turn climate mitigation policies into actions at the local to the global level.

It’s time to move forward, always forward. Adelante, Siempre Adelante. Those were among the last words Pope Francis offered one of us (Suárez-Orozco). Not forward when the politics are perfect or opposition relents. Forward now, with the urgency of a species that has finally seen the iceberg but still has time to turn the tiller toward safety.

V. Ram Ramanathan is a distinguished research professor at the University of California at San Diego and the winner of the 2026 Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy.

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston & the UCLA Wasserman Dean Emeritus.

This article was issued by the LegalPlanet and is being republished from the original with their permission.

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples protest exclusion and lack of recognition at the UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Credit: Lucas Wasson for Rights and Resources Initiative

By Bayarsaikhan Namsrai, Gregoria Jimenez Amaya, Isabel Davila Pereira and Stephen Basele
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, Sep 23 2026 (IPS)

Rightsholders came to Ulaanbaatar from across the world, carrying declarations, demands and years of experience defending the lands on which their communities depend. Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth were equally clear about what they needed from COP17. But being in the room is not the same as having power in the room.

In a year when the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and the three Rio Conventions were supposed to create momentum for rights, recognition and implementation, the negotiations showed how quickly those gains can be diluted when the people concerned are not able to shape the language that governs their lands.

What happened in Ulaanbaatar should concern anyone advancing land restoration, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. These cannot succeed while the rights of the people who govern these landscapes remain negotiable.

Ahead of COP17, the demands were clear: 2026 could not be a symbolic year. It had to be a year when secure and customary tenure for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, pastoralists, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth was translated into real protections and implementation across the Rio Conventions.

Pastoralists, Mobile Peoples, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities are proven leaders in land stewardship, biodiversity conservation and climate resilience. Achieving global restoration goals requires recognizing their rights, knowledge and leadership.

Secure and flexible tenure and mobility rights were an urgent ask in the context of the IYRP. RRI’s legal analysis of seven countries found that only Nepal and Niger recognize pastoralists as distinct rightsholders and only Niger considers mobility as a fundamental right. Even where rights exist on paper, they routinely fail against agricultural encroachment, mining, conservation expansion and green energy projects. Tenure should not be secondary to these initiatives, but a pre-condition before any projects are attempted in community lands.

Communities requested land and customary governance rights as a formal and permanent agenda item following past land tenure decisions, with customary institutions recognized as implementing bodies rather than consulted stakeholders and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a precondition for any Land Degradation Neutrality action.

Finance is not a technical question. It is a question of power. At a COP supposedly focused on implementation, it should have been a central matter that communities cannot implement priorities they did not define, using resources they do not control. Yet too much climate, biodiversity and land finance still travels through institutions far removed from the communities whose territories generate environmental benefits.

For communities, direct and flexible finance is about more than getting money to the last mile. It is about trusting organizations and customary institutions to decide what resilience, restoration and development mean in their own territories.

Rightsholders were ready to advance their distinct rights during COP17. The presence of pastoralists at COP17 was significant, but presence alone does not translate into influence. Pastoralists arrived organized, with a global declaration and clear demands, yet the experience of the negotiations showed that meaningful participation requires more than being present in the conference halls. It requires the knowledge, resources, relationships and sustained capacity to follow negotiating texts, understand procedures, build alliances and influence language as decisions are being shaped.

On Land and People Day, the Indigenous Peoples Caucus delivered the Sacred Lands Declaration directly to the UNCCD Executive Secretary, demanding recognition grounded in self-determination, a permanent seat on the Committee on Science and Technology, and a dedicated fund for Indigenous-led restoration.

The local communities caucus asked for institutional status equal to the Indigenous Peoples’, Gender and Youth Caucuses rather than as a facilitative mechanism sidelined when convenient, plus a self-determined representation model and sustained funding for its operation.

Afro-descendant Peoples asked for what the other two Rio Conventions have already conceded: to be named. Afro-descendant Peoples across Latin America and the Caribbean steward territories degraded or acutely at risk — drylands, deforested frontiers, dry forests, riverine and coastal lands. They asked the UNCCD to open an Afro-descendant desertification agenda for the first time.

Women’s demands cut across all of this. Parties have built agreed gender language across three COPs. The ask was that it hold and be implemented.

For youth, being called “the future” has become another way of postponing their participation in the present. Young rightsholders are already living the consequences of drought, shrinking mobility, changing economies and pressures on their territories. They are not waiting to inherit these challenges. What they need is more than a voice now, it is representation, resources and authority in the institutions making decisions about their future. Their minimum requests included recognition as drivers of present-day adaptation, a permanent space within UNCCD processes, culturally appropriate education, and direct financing for youth-led organizations.

How the Negotiations Went

Based on prior COP decisions, COP17 should have been the continuation of a road towards implementation. Instead, the days in Ulaanbaatar became much more focused on protecting past progress rather than operationalizing it.

The institutional failures began on day one. At the opening plenary on 17 August, only two State Parties objected to agenda items, yet no vote was held and instead the presidency provisionally adopted the agenda. Future Strategic Framework, synergies with other conventions, gender, and participation of civil society were all deferred pending consultation. The COP closed with no decision at all on civil society participation, the Riyadh mandate to bring the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus and the Local Communities’ Caucus to full Terms of Reference under Decision 5/COP.16 was pushed to COP18, and Rio synergies were removed from all decisions. Gender never reached the negotiation floor; instead, a quiet Gender Caucus convened in Plenary as the agenda block was sustained.

Still, IYRP advocacy proved successful to some extent. Parties agreed to recognize the critical role of pastoralists as stewards of rangeland ecosystems, including the importance of transboundary mobility. However, compromise language was adopted, replacing “traditional knowledge” with “knowledge accumulated by pastoralists” in order to remove wording related to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

This distinction matters. Pastoralist knowledge is not simply a body of information accumulated over time; it is embedded in living institutions, relationships, territories and systems of customary governance. When knowledge is separated from the peoples and institutions that hold and transmit it, it becomes a technical resource while the rights and authority of its holders remain unrecognized. Draft decisions on land tenure and sand and dust storms also advanced, but only by leaving the naming of rightsholders behind. The lack of language on Indigenous Peoples and local communities was one of the biggest gaps. Many negotiators backed Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights in plenary, but behind closed doors, agreed to language so general it protects no one in particular. Language proposed replacing references to Indigenous Peoples with “common places” or “common people.” In the land tenure text, “affected areas” was pushed toward “common areas,” a phrase with no grounding in any multilateral mechanism and no obligations attached.

This dilution of language is particularly consequential as pressure on rangelands grows from competing global agendas. Rangelands are increasingly being presented as spaces for carbon sequestration, renewable energy, conservation and large-scale restoration, often without adequately recognizing the pastoralists who already govern and steward these landscapes.

And this is where the politics of rangelands becomes unavoidable.

Rangelands are increasingly being seen as spaces for carbon, renewable energy, conservation and large-scale restoration. The danger is that landscapes already governed and stewarded by pastoralists begin to be treated as empty spaces available for solving someone else’s global environmental problem.

A green transition cannot become a new form of land dispossession.

If pastoralists are displaced in the name of renewable energy, excluded in the name of conservation, or turned into carbon credits in the name of climate action, then changing the colour of development does not change its underlying politics.

Climate, biodiversity and land restoration objectives must not be pursued by treating pastoralist territories as empty spaces or global environmental infrastructure while sidelining the people whose livelihoods, cultures and institutions are rooted in them.

The same principle applies to emerging carbon and other environmental markets. Pastoralist rangelands cannot be reduced to carbon sinks whose value is defined externally while the cumulative ecological, economic and cultural value of pastoralism remains invisible. Any financing or market mechanism operating in these territories must begin with secure tenure, meaningful participation, Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and fair recognition of the rights and contributions of pastoralist communities.

Right through the final day, negotiators discussed whether to reference synergies among the Rio Conventions, and whether to include gender at all. These questions were either resolved by adopting ambiguous and broad language that betrays the protection from past COP decisions or by simply delaying any decisions to COP18.

Across every draft negotiating text currently available, rangelands, drought, sand and dust storms, land tenure, Afro-descendant Peoples do not appear at all. Not contested and diluted; simply absent. On the year of the three Rio Conventions, this demonstrates how UNCCD is lagging. CBD Decision 16/6 made the Convention on Biological Diversity the first Rio Convention to name them explicitly and at UNFCCC COP30 they appeared in core negotiating text. The bridge that could have carried that recognition into the UNCCD was the synergies item blocked on day one. These synergies are urgent to deal with the intersections across climate, land degradation and biodiversity conservation.

When it came to drought, the COP also fell short. Decision ICCD/COP(17)/L.15 runs to four operative paragraphs: continue discussions at COP18 with a view to adopting a decision on proactive drought management; make drought a stand-alone agenda item; ask the secretariat and Global Mechanism to keep supporting Parties; and report back. After deferring at COP16 and again here, the working group toward a binding instrument did not materialize; the next window is 2028. In the current text, Indigenous Peoples and local communities appear as people affected by drought and consulted, rather than as rightsholders.

COP17 presented an unprecedented situation in which a small number of Parties blocked key issues from meaningful consideration. There is no Land Degradation Neutrality without human rights, no resilience without gender equality, no sustainable land governance without Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities.

COP17 also taught us something uncomfortable about participation. It is possible to be visible everywhere at a COP and still have very little influence over what finally enters the negotiating text.

Influence requires preparation. It requires people who understand the Convention, know the procedures, follow the text, build relationships with negotiators, organize across constituencies and remain engaged long after the cameras leave. Pastoralist movements have strong knowledge of their lands and livelihoods. What they need now is equal investment in the political and technical capacity required to defend that knowledge and those rights in global decision-making spaces.

If pastoralists want to shape the next COP, they cannot only prepare declarations. They must prepare negotiators.

What Happens Next

The answer cannot be another declaration.

The remaining COPs of 2026 must turn recognition into implementation. That means three things: name the peoples whose rights are at stake; put resources directly into the hands of their organizations and institutions; and give them meaningful authority over the decisions affecting their territories.

At CBD COP17 and UNFCCC COP31, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities must be recognized as rights-holders and implementing partners, not folded into generic “vulnerable groups” language. At UNCCD COP18, the gains made on pastoralists, tenure and customary governance must not be allowed to disappear into vague language.

But the responsibility does not rest with the conventions alone. Pastoralist movements must also build the capacity to influence these processes. The period between COPs must be used to coordinate positions, prepare negotiators, track decisions and negotiating texts, build alliances across the Rio Conventions and engage governments between sessions. Pastoralist organizations need investment not only to attend COPs, but to understand and shape what happens inside them.

COP18 must deliver the adoption of Terms of Reference for the Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Caucuses, restore gender and synergies to the agenda, open an Afro-descendant desertification agenda, advance a drought decision with the communities who live its consequences first, and restore the full recognition of traditional knowledge.

Vague language does not merely fail to establish obligations. It blurs the content of rights and leaves earned recognition in a regression limbo.

Naming peoples is the beginning of recognition, not the end of it. Recognition must lead to rights, rights must be backed by institutions and finance, and those institutions must have the authority to shape the decisions that affect their territories.

The peoples who shepherd the vast majority of the world’s lands do not need another symbolic year. They need their names written into the decisions, and their voices, institutions and authority protected long after the COP is over.

Bayarsaikhan Namsrai (Steps Without Borders), Gregoria Jimenez Amaya (CITAFRO/ODECO), Isabel Davila Pereira (Rights and Resources Initiative), Stephen Basele (Pastoralist Goals Foundation)

IPS UN Bureau

Treating the polycrisis as one undifferentiated agenda has never worked; treating them as three coherent families might. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By External Source
APEX, North Carolina / SAN FRANCISCO, California / VIENNA, Austria / SHEFFIELD, United Kingdom / GENEVA, Switzerland, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

In March 2025, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres launched “UN80”. Recognizing that the world is in a state of dramatic and rapid change at a time when funding for the UN is under threat from budget cuts, Guterres declared that, on the anniversary of the UN’s 80th birthday, a review of its work was long overdue. Now, UN80 is coming to a head with a set of recommendations that cover almost every aspect of the UN’s work.

Some of the recommendations are focused on reducing budgets. With some major governments cutting their funding and heavily in arrears, the UN needs to cut its spending.

The current target is a reduction of roughly 20%. This has already resulted in a decision to shift staff from high-cost duty stations like New York or Geneva, to lower-cost locations such as Bonn and Nairobi.

There has also been more “structural and programmatic alignment”—in other words, finding ways to make different parts of the UN work together more efficiently, or even merge different groups. So far, this has included the UN General Assembly agreeing to merge the UN System Staff College (UNSSC) and the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) into the UN Institute for Capability and Learning Innovation.

On the research side, the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has been integrated into the UN University. Meanwhile, the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) has been absorbed into the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Finally, in the development agenda, there have been proposals to merge the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), and to join together the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, while also integrating the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) into existing programs.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation: Improving Multilateral Environment Agreements

But what about all-important environmental issues? Does UN80 address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution?

The short answer is, yes. UN80 includes “Work Package 27” dealing with the environment. We are delighted to see the inclusion of several issues we believe would improve how multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are organized, including the idea of “clustering.”

The UN80 process of the past 18 months has generated some excellent ideas. The window for acting on them is narrower than it looks: a new Secretary-General takes office in January 2027, and proposals that have not been anchored in a mandate by then will be inherited by someone who did not make them. Now is the time to bring them to fruition

Over the past year, we have advocated taking up an idea first mooted by UNEP’s Executive Director Klaus Töpfer back in the 2000s. He proposed grouping—or clustering—MEAs and making them work more closely and effectively together. These could be grouped along the lines of the triple planetary crisis (or “polycrisis”): (i) chemicals, waste and pollution; (ii) biodiversity loss and (iii) climate change.

The logic of the groupings matters. Chemicals and waste are fundamentally about pollution and health; biodiversity is about conservation and sustainable use, while climate change sits at the nexus of these challenges. This means effectively exploiting all synergies. Treating the polycrisis as one undifferentiated agenda has never worked; treating them as three coherent families might.

Achim Steiner, who took over from Töpfer as Executive Director of UNEP in 2006, made the first attempt at clustering. The chemicals and waste conventions—Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm—agreed a synergies process that produced joint decisions and, from 2010, back-to-back conferences of the parties, a shared secretariat structure and common administrative services.

It has been largely a success on the terms it set itself: it improved collaboration and cut costs, even if programmatic integration has gone less far than administrative integration.

Steiner also started efforts to cluster MEAs focused on biodiversity. However, this process was never completed. We believe UN80 provides an ideal opportunity for this to be revisited and moved forward.

We are pleased to see that UN80 recommends establishing “a time-limited, independent and regionally representative Consultative Group of Ministers or High-level representatives of UN Member States to evaluate benefits, feasibility and possible options for MEA consolidation.” (Action 5.1)

This group should focus on two areas: clustering the three biodiversity conventions administered by UNEP—the Convention on Biological Diversity, CITES and the Convention on Migratory Species—with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as a unifying umbrella; and bringing the Minamata Convention on Mercury closer to the other chemicals and waste MEAs (Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm).

If achieved, such clustering would strengthen both the treaties seeking to address biodiversity loss and those dealing with chemicals and waste.

Clustering the three UNEP-administered biodiversity conventions is only the start: working relationships will also be needed with the biodiversity-related conventions outside UNEP—Ramsar (wetlands), World Heritage, the Plant Treaty, and Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) —and with the other Rio conventions.

We already have more than a decade of experience of what the chemicals and waste cluster has achieved and believe there is much to learn from it, and to replicate.

Better Science

Another recommendation that should be implemented is the better coordination of environmental science, and closer links between science and policy.

This matters because so many environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, are interlinked. Connecting the scientific work in these areas helps us “join the dots” and also develop and implement better policy.

The UN80’s recommendations include several very good ones on science coordination and science policy. For instance, it proposes that we:

• “Institutionalize a periodic science–policy dialogue anchored in UNEP’s science function that informs UNEA, as well as MEAs and other UN entities governing-bodies, as appropriate.” (Action 2.1)
• “Promote structured coordination and collaboration among chairs of MEA scientific and technical bodies and other science-policy interfaces, using existing mechanisms while respecting mandates.” (Action 3.1)
• “Build a user-driven, modern knowledge ecosystem and repository of environmental science and knowledge as a shared UN asset, linking country-to-global data and existing science platforms through shared standards and interoperable search.” (Action 3.2)

These are also the cheapest recommendations on the list, and the ones with the widest benefit. It is worth making this very clear at a moment when everything is being weighed against a 20% savings target: coordination costs very little and duplication costs a great deal.

With the global community appearing to be so divided and splintered across so many issues, we understand that not all ideas will command universal support.

This is why we applaud the idea of developing “coalitions of the willing” or communities of practice around various MEAs. We believe UNEP can and should play a convening role in this, as well as related discussions about how the Rio treaties dealing with climate change, desertification and biodiversity loss can work more closely and effectively together.

Environmental Interlinkages

When UNEP was set up in 1972, one of its key missions was to help coordinate environmental work by different UN bodies. Much of this has fractured over the years as new MEAs and organizations have emerged to address major environmental issues like climate change. However, we believe it is time to reinvigorate UNEP’s mission.

UN80 addresses this by proposing that the UN’s Environment Management Group (which is chaired by the head of UNEP) should:

• “Develop and roll-out a new EMG strategy and operating model. (Action 4.1)
• “Adopt a common UN system-wide results framework for environmental mainstreaming.” (Action 4.2)
• “Establish effective linkages with the UN Secretary-General and key governing bodies (e.g., UNEA, World Health Assembly, Human Rights Council, World Meteorological Congress, etc.).” (Action 4.3)

It is worth being clear about which of these the UN can simply decide to do, and which it cannot. The science function, the knowledge ecosystem and a reinvigorated Environment Management Group are Secretariat matters: they can be delivered by the UN system itself. Clustering conventions is not.

MEAs are autonomous treaties, and only their Parties can agree to consolidate them. That is precisely why Action 5.1 proposes a group of ministers rather than an administrative decision—and why governments, not officials, will determine whether this part of UN80 goes anywhere.

Strengthening Political Leadership

What else should be done? In 2025, we proposed reintroducing the Global Ministerial Environment Forum—a body that met annually through the 2000s in conjunction with UNEP’s Governing Council, until it was superseded by the creation of the UN Environment Assembly. The Forum’s goal was to elevate discussions on environmental issues to a high political level.

Work Package 27 suggests a slightly different approach, but with similar aims. It suggests a Global Environment Leaders’ Summit, to be held every four years and attended by heads of state and government. We support this (or similar) initiatives intended to bring presidents and prime ministers to the table. In short, we need decision makers at the highest level coming together to address global environmental matters.

But four years is almost too long given the speed and acceleration of global environmental change. A simpler answer is available: a ministerial segment attached to each session of the Environment Assembly, which already meets every two years and already has universal membership, with a leaders’ summit every four. That adds almost no additional costs, and it builds political attention into a cycle that already exists rather than competing with it.

A New Secretary-General — and the Question of Who Carries This Forward

There is one complication none of this can avoid. UN80 is António Guterres’ initiative, and his term ends in December 2026. The recommendations in Work Package 27 have been prepared for a Secretary-General who will not be in office to implement them.

Whoever succeeds him will inherit these proposals rather than own them—and on the evidence of the selection process so far, will arrive with no particular commitment to them. Eight candidates have published vision statements and taken part in interactive dialogues with the General Assembly since April.

So, what can we expect? Continuity on the efficiency agenda, almost certainly. Every candidate has endorsed UN80 in some form, and the Organization’s financial position leaves little choice.

Several have committed to sustained mandate discipline, which the General Assembly’s March 2026 resolution on the creation, implementation and review of mandates now underpins. That is genuinely useful, and over time it should reduce reporting burdens across the system.

But it carries a risk worth naming. Mandate discipline affects Secretariat mandates. It does not reach the treaty bodies, whose mandates are made by their own Parties.

If an incoming Secretary-General treats Work Package 27 primarily as a savings exercise, clustering becomes consolidation by austerity. This means the functions most likely to be cut are precisely those with no treaty constituency to defend them: science coordination, the knowledge ecosystem, the Environment Management Group.

Two practical conclusions follow. The first is that the Consultative Group proposed under Action 5.1 should be established now, with a mandate and a reporting line designed to survive the transition, rather than left to a successor to constitute. The second is that in whatever dialogue remains before the appointment, candidates should be asked a question none has yet been put to them: what do you intend to do with Work Package 27?

Optimism and Action

The suggestions in UN80 and Work Package 27 offer a new approach to environmental issues and show great potential. A more empowered UNEP could provide stronger systemwide coordination across the UN and significantly enhance the integration and coherence of science, policy, and environmental protection.

To succeed, decision makers will need to be bold and to move forward quickly and decisively. The UN80 process of the past 18 months has generated some excellent ideas. The window for acting on them is narrower than it looks: a new Secretary-General takes office in January 2027, and proposals that have not been anchored in a mandate by then will be inherited by someone who did not make them. Now is the time to bring them to fruition.

Prof. Felix Dodds and Chris Spence have participated in United Nations talks on climate change and other environmental negotiations since the 1990s. They co-edited Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage (Routledge, 2022) and wrote Environmental Lobbying at the United Nations: A Guide to Protecting Our Planet (Routledge, 2025). Their next book, Political Heroes of the Environment: Profiles in Courage, is due for release in 2027.

Hugo-Maria Schally is former Head of the Multilateral Environmental Cooperation Unit at the Directorate-General for Environment, European Commission.

Peter Bridgewater is an Associate Researcher at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.; Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia; a former Director of the Division of Ecological Sciences in UNESCO; and former Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

Craig Boljkovac is Executive Director of Green Cross International, a Geneva-based Senior Advisor with a Regional Centre for the Basel and Stockholm Conventions, and an independent international environmental consultant with over 35 years of experience in relevant fields. He has participated in several INCs and related meetings for the global plastics agreement.

The opinions expressed in this article are the personal views of the individuals listed and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations with which they are affiliated.

For many couples cohabitation has become an alternative to marriage rather than simply a step toward it. Credit: Shutterstock

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

Marriage is declining in many countries, with fewer people marrying and many postponing marriage until later in life. At the same time, increasing numbers of men and women are choosing cohabitation instead of marriage.

Various social, economic, and legal factors have contributed to this shift from marriage to cohabitation. Moreover, cohabitation is increasingly not simply a prelude to marriage but, in many cases, an alternative to it. Although its prevalence varies considerably across regions and countries, cohabitation among unmarried couples has continued to rise in many parts of the world.

Historical demographic trends indicate that marriage has become less common over the past several decades, with particularly pronounced declines among younger adults. Nearly 90% of the world’s population lives in a country where marriage rates are declining. This change in union formation is part of the broader transformation in family and household patterns around the world.

In the mid-20th century, about 65% to 70% of adults worldwide were married. By 2021, however, the global share had declined to approximately 50% to 55%.

The proportion of married adults has declined across major age groups. In the United States, for example, the share of adults who were married decreased across all major age groups between 1960 and 2010 (Figure 1).

Source: U.S Census Bureau.

In addition, declines in marriage rates have been accompanied by substantial delays in marriage. Several decades ago, women in many countries typically married in their early or mid-twenties. Today, the median age at first marriage for women has risen to the late twenties or early thirties in many developed countries.

Historical demographic trends indicate that marriage has become less common over the past several decades, with particularly pronounced declines among younger adults. Nearly 90% of the world’s population lives in a country where marriage rates are declining. This change in union formation is part of the broader transformation in family and household patterns around the world

Marriage is therefore becoming less common in an increasing number of countries. At the same time, cohabitation has become increasingly widespread.

Once more common among people with lower levels of education and socio-economic status, cohabitation has in recent decades spread across educational and socioeconomic groups, making it a more broadly established form of partnership.

Cohabitation is particularly common in Central and South America, where levels are among the highest in the world. Rates of 40% or more of all unions are found in Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

Brazil provides another striking example. In 2022, nearly 40% of couples were in consensual or cohabiting unions, compared with about 38% in civil and religious marriages. For the first time, consensual unions surpassed civil and religious marriages as the most common form of union.

The rise of cohabitation in Latin American countries has also been accompanied by increasing proportions of children being born outside of marriage. From roughly 2016 to 2020, approximately 75% of children in Latin America were born outside marriage. The proportions ranged from about 60% in Guatemala and Ecuador to more than 80% in Colombia and Panama.

By contrast, cohabitation remains less common in Asia and the Middle East. These lower rates are generally attributed to the continuing influence of traditional family structures, marriage practices, and cultural and religious norms.

In addition, some countries have cultural restrictions and laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage, effectively making cohabitation illegal. These include Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. In most of these countries, a large majority of adults aged 18 to 49 are married.

Various factors have contributed to the shift from marriage toward cohabitation in many countries. Unlike marriage, cohabitation generally involves fewer legal procedures, costs, and formalities and may avoid some of the financial and legal complications that may arise from divorce (Table 1).

Source: Author’s compilation.

Cohabitation also gives men and women opportunities to get to know each other, assess their compatibility, financial circumstances, and make decisions about their future without immediately assuming the legal obligations of marriage. For many couples, therefore, cohabitation has become an alternative to marriage rather than simply a step toward it.

The widespread availability of modern contraceptives has given men and women greater flexibility in forming personal relationships and greater control over the timing and number of their children. Other important factors include urbanization, rising educational attainment, increasing female labor-force participation, financial pressures and unemployment, changing priorities regarding careers, personal growth, and independence, and evolving social and economic roles of men and women.

Additional factors include the rising costs associated with marriage, the potential financial consequences of divorce, changes in laws governing unmarried couples, and growing social acceptance of cohabitation.

Among OECD countries, about 12% of adults aged 20 and older lived in a cohabiting union around 2023. The proportions were considerably higher in some OECD countries, including Iceland (22%), Sweden (20%), and France (19%).

As in many Latin American countries, a large proportion of the births in OECD countries now occur outside marriage. A half century ago, fewer than 10% of children were born outside of marriage in most OECD countries. By 2020, that share had risen to more than 30% in most countries and to more than half in several, including Denmark, Estonia, France, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

In sum, although substantial regional variations persist, particularly in more traditional and religious societies, marriage has declined significantly in most countries over the past several decades. Many men and women are also postponing marriage until later in life. At the same time, cohabitation among unmarried couples has become increasingly common, reflecting a broader transformation in partnership patterns.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division.

Solar energy panels installed in a dry rural landscape powering agricultural irrigation infrastructure alongside a traditional windmill. Credit: Katja Forster/iStock

By Debisi Araba
KIGALI, Rwanda, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

Africa is emerging as the world’s fastest-growing technology market, with its innovation ecosystem attracting increasing global investment. The European Investment Bank’s recent €40 million commitment to the sector underscores this growing confidence.

However, this surge in technological innovation has yet to address some of the continent’s most persistent challenges – hunger, food insecurity, and poverty. Agricultural productivity still depends more on land expansion than on innovation and efficiency gains. The recently concluded Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali focused on investing in Africa’s agrifood systems, exploring policy interventions to attract investment, boost productivity, build resilience to multidimensional shocks, and improve livelihoods. Discussions at the 9th Africa Agriculture Science Week in Abuja reinforced a clear message: Africa must invest far more in agricultural innovation systems and capabilities.

The continent’s population is projected to reach nearly 2.5 billion by 2050, thereby accounting for a quarter of the world’s population. Rapid urbanization and changing diets are accelerating food demand, creating significant opportunities for market expansion. However, climate shocks and slow-growing productivity have stalled progress toward food security.

The productivity gap is not rooted in a lack of promising technologies. Rather, it reflects limited adoption, weak complementary investments, and high transaction costs that constrain farmers and markets alike. Accelerating progress toward ending hunger and eradicating poverty in Africa will therefore require a coordinated bundle of technical, institutional, and socio-political innovations, designed not only to raise yields but also to strengthen the systems that enable productivity gains to take hold and endure.

Shaping Africa’s Technological Transformation: The Policy Landscape

Africa already possesses sound policy frameworks designed to promote technology-driven transformation. Agenda 2063, the continent’s blueprint for sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development, places technology at the center of Africa’s long-term trajectory.

Similarly, the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa sets out a continental framework to harness digital technologies for inclusive growth, job creation, poverty reduction, and the narrowing of digital divides, while safeguarding Africa’s ownership of its digital future.

Together with the recently adopted Kampala Declaration, these frameworks lay important foundations for technological acceleration.

How, then, can Africa make the technological leap? The answer lies not in a proliferation of new pilot projects, but in the systematic deployment and scaling of existing technologies, backed by coordinated action across institutions and sectors.

The “technology frontier” is therefore not a single breakthrough, but the integration of biological, digital, engineering, ecological, and institutional innovations within a supportive political economy that enables scale, equity, and resilience.

Scaling Technological Interventions for Africa’s Agrifood System Transformation

Across the continent, the building blocks of technological advancements are already visible. From climate-resilient seeds and precision irrigation to AI-enabled advisory platforms and digital marketplaces, many of the tools needed to raise productivity and strengthen food security are already being deployed.

For example, in Mali and Senegal, AI-enabled geospatial tools are improving yield forecasting, helping farmers plan further ahead. Meanwhile, digital advisory platforms in Kenya are improving decision-making and market access, helping farmers increase productivity and sell their produce. Advances in gene-edited crops, such as drought-tolerant and pest-resistant crops, are narrowing yield gaps and strengthening resilience in countries like Nigeria, where improved maize and cowpea varieties are already delivering measurable productivity gains.

The challenge is coordination and scale. The 17th edition of the Annual Trends and Outlook Report underscores this point, calling for deliberate, system-wide interventions to expand the application of existing and emerging technologies and ensure their widespread, efficient use.

Africa’s Path to Technology Leadership

Against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding portfolio of complementary tools, Africa is well-positioned to translate its technological potential into system-wide performance. Realizing that ambition, however, will require coordination across five key areas.

First, Africa must invest in its innovation ecosystems. Frontier technologies cannot scale without strong science institutions, stable R&D financing, and coherent regulatory systems. Scaling new technologies demands long-term public investment and regional collaboration, not episodic pilot projects.

Second, technological dissemination must become inclusive and structured. Technologies spread fastest when embedded within trusted networks. Digitally enabled producer organizations, strengthened extension systems, and service-market models for mechanization and irrigation can aggregate demand, lower transaction costs, and ensure that marginalized groups and small-scale farmers are not excluded from the benefits of innovation.

Third, digital and climate intelligence infrastructure must expand. Precision agriculture, digital twins, and AI forecasting depend on reliable geospatial data, weather networks, compatible data standards, and rural connectivity. In this data-powered era, digital public infrastructure will become as essential to agriculture as roads and irrigation canals.

Fourth, climate adaptation and resilience must be mainstreamed into technological agendas. Drought-tolerant crops, solar-powered irrigation, water-efficient production systems, low-emission livestock practices, and circular bio-based innovations are not optional enhancements but prerequisites for resilient growth across the continent as it battles the harshest impacts of climate change.

Finally, governance and accountability must keep pace with innovation. An estimated US$77 billion in annual financing will be needed for transforming Africa’s agrifood systems by 2030. Coordinated public–private partnerships, harmonized regulatory frameworks, and transparent monitoring systems will be key to mobilizing private capital, boosting productivity, scaling innovation, and sustaining reforms – while placing farmers at the center of Africa’s agrifood transformation.

With its vast arable land, youthful workforce, and expanding digital capacity, Africa is uniquely positioned to pioneer climate-smart, resource-efficient agricultural models. The continent does not need another wave of breakthrough inventions to transform its food systems; what it requires is a decisive shift from fragmented adoption to system-wide modernization. The challenge is no longer to experiment at the margins, but to redesign the system at scale.

Debisi Araba is Managing Director, AKADEMIYA2063

IPS UN Bureau

The UN General Assembly will soon vote – most likely favourably – on Bangladesh’s request to postpone the country’s graduation from the UN’s Least Developed Country (LDC) category, currently scheduled for November this year. The request for a 3-year extension was endorsed by the ECOSOC following the recommendation of the UN’s Committee for Development Policy (CDP). It is highly likely that the extension will also be justifiably granted to Nepal and Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao, PDR) – the two other countries scheduled to graduate with Bangladesh, given the fast deteriorating global economic situation and recent natural disaster in Nepal. In fact, the same argument for an extension may be admissible to all prospective graduating countries, such as Solomon Islands (2027), Cambodia (2029) and Senegal (2029).

Anis Chowdhury

The background

The United Nations established the LDC category in 1971 for low-income countries facing severe structural barriers to sustainable development and to direct special international support toward them such as preferential market access, financial aid, and technical cooperation. The idea of a special category for low-income, structurally weak countries originated in the first session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964.

Since the creation of the LDC category, the UN organised five international conferences, the first being in 1981, to draw up comprehensive ten-year frameworks for supports with specific goals. The current programme is the Doha Programme of Action (DPOA) for the Decade 2022–2031, preceded by the Istanbul Programme of Action (IPOA) for the Decade 2011–2020.

The decision to establish a separate LDC category was undoubtedly commendable. The global consensus around the comprehensive action programmes also reflected the goodwill of the international community.

However, none of the programmes could reduce the vulnerability of LDCs. The number of LDCs steadily increased from the 1971 list of 25 countries, reaching a peak of 51 countries in 2003. The number now stands at 46, still nearly double that of the original list. Only 9 countries exited the list – one, Sikkim, through India’s annexation in 1975.

Although the inclusion of newly independent countries partly explains the lengthening of the LDC list, one cannot avoid the judgement of an overall failure of the international community’s good-intentioned programmes. This is especially so in light of the development successes of countries which did not join the group despite their eligibility.

The Reckoning

The failure became staggering by the time the international community met in Istanbul in 2011. After four decades since the special LDC category was created, only three countries – Botswana, Cabo Verde and Maldives – exited the group. Furthermore, the post-graduation experience has been disappointing.

For example, life-expectancy in Botswana, the first country to exit the LDC group, declined from 61.6 years in 1988 to 50.08 years in 2003, while it remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, holding the 9th highest income Gini coefficient globally. Botswana, although hailed for macroeconomic stability, failed to transform structurally with the share of manufacturing hovering below 6% of GDP, and it remains extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in international commodity markets, especially diamond. Thus, growth has declined significantly since the mid-2000s and the unemployment rate has increased to very high levels, around 26%.

Therefore, the core goals and targets of the IPOA included:

• Enable half of all LDCs to achieve graduation status by 2020.
• Attain sustained, equitable, and inclusive economic growth of at least 7% annually.
• Strengthen education, health, and nutrition.
• Build productive bases and diversify economies to generate decent jobs, especially for youth

Unfortunately, only 6 countries – Maldives, Samoa, Equatorial Guinea, Vanuatu, Bhutan and São Tomé and Príncipe graduated – during 2011-2024, and 3 countries – Bangladesh, Nepal and Lao PDR – became eligible to graduate this year. Again, the experience is not very encouraging for the graduated countries, while the fear of graduation has gripped the countries soon to graduate.

In 2021, UNCTAD concluded that 50 years of LDC experience is “sobering”. It found that half of the LDCs fell behind the rest of the world in terms of per capita income and other dimensions of development. Hence, the economic gap between these countries and the rest of the world has widened over the last 50 years.

Rejecting “LDC insult”

Zimbabwe, a land-locked country, rejected the UN’s recommendation to be classified as a LDC in 2006 despite facing severe economic hardships. Zimbabwe viewed the UN recommendation “to be downgraded to LDC status” as an insult, while the neighbouring land-locked Zambia was among the first group of countries classified as an LDC in 1971.

When Zimbabwe’s per capita GDP plunged to USD341 in 2008, resource-rich Zambia’s per capita GDP was around USD1,376. Today, after more than half a century as an LDC, the per capita GDP of Zambia, one of the world’s leading producers of copper, cobalt, and semi-precious gemstones like emeralds, is around USD1,318, while Zimbabwe’s per capita GDP recovered within a decade to around USD3,445 in 2017.

Vietnam, coming out of a quarter century long devasting war in 1975, facing the challenge of unifying the country during the worst global economic situation with a paltry per capita income of around USD85, chose not to join the LDC group. Instead of aid dependence, it opted for the trade and investment route to development. Today, its per capita GDP is approximately USD5,066, while Bangladesh which joined the LDC group in 1975 with a per capita income of around USD230 could manage to raise its per capita GDP to approximately USD2,960.

The Republic of Korea (ROK), one of the poorest countries of the world in the 1960s, could also join the LDC group in 1971 when it was created; but it did not. Maintaining its policy independence and choosing the trade and investment route, ROK has become a full-fledged developed country in 1996 (member of OECD) within three decades. It managed to increase its per capita GDP from USD158 in 1960 to USD36,227 in 2025.

What may have gone wrong?

UNCTAD attributed the “sobering” experience to the LDCs’ inability to exploit international support measures (ISMs) strategically to develop their productive capacity. Others offered different reasons such as failure to understand the complex development process and appreciate the dangers associated with increased integration of structurally weak economies to the rapidly changing global economic system.

Add to these, complicity. Countries joining the group took ISMs as guaranteed; they did not take serious steps to mobilise domestic resources, diversify their economies and expand markets. Take the case of Bangladesh, a country regarded as the best utiliser of ISMs.

Bangladesh’s tax-GDP ratio is dismally low, experiencing a decline from a peak of around 10% to around 7%. Its ready-made garment (RMG) sector’s dominance increased from around 67% of export earnings in 2018 when the country first met the graduation criteria to around 85% by 2025 while it should have been declining as the graduation deadline was approaching.

Bangladesh has also failed to diversify its export markets away from the EU and the USA, accounting for close to 80% of RMG exports. It does not have any meaningful trade agreement with any country or trading bloc, while Vietnam has 17 bilateral FTA and is a member of Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership as well as Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest free trade agreement, covering roughly 30% of global GDP.

Ironically, the sector that propelled Bangladesh’s industrialisation, made the country more vulnerable. Worst, too big to ignore, the RMG sector has captured Bangladesh’s political and policy space. The CDP’s recommendation in favour of Bangladesh’s extension request has been made subject to the country’s commitment to reforms. However, political will for reforms may waver when the state is captured by a dominant sector.

Curse or Boon?

Thus, what was supposed to be a boon, for many LDCs, the category has become a curse, trapping them in a perpetual state of underdevelopment and vulnerability. It fits the narrative of William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden; unfortunately, the international community may feel burdened and grant an extension to the “fearful” LDCs even when its “good-intentioned” efforts have produced so little good.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). He held senior UN positions in Bangkok and New York and served as Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor for Finance (with the status and rank of State Minister) in the Professor Yunus-led Interim Government. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com; a.chowdhury@westernsydney.edu

IPS UN Bureau

A group of armed defectors from the RSF arrives in the west of Omdurman on 19 August 2026. Credit: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Sep 21 2026 (IPS)

Sudan’s civil war grinds on. It’s close to three and a half years since the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia began their battle for supremacy, and the two forces and their allies continue to slaughter civilians with impunity. As a recent UN report makes clear, the killing is enabled by numerous foreign powers that continue to supply weapons, personnel and logistical support. They have made a civil conflict their proxy war, and their self-interest is sustaining the killing.

Drone warfare

Things are relatively quiet in the capital, Khartoum, where the curfew was recently lifted following its recapture by the SAF last year, but the RSF still controls significant areas, with fighting concentrated in the Darfur and Kordofan regions to the west and Blue Nile state in the southeast.

Both sides now extensively use drones to kill civilians. In February, a suspected RSF drone strike on an aid convoy in South Kordofan killed three humanitarian workers and wounded four more. In May, a suspected SAF drone strike on a crowded market in Ghubaysh, an RSF-controlled town in West Kordofan, killed 28 people as they shopped for food. In August, another likely SAF strike on a court session in an RSF-controlled village killed 35 people.

The RSF are attacking El Obeid, a city of around half a million people in North Kordofan. RSF drones have hit hospitals and schools. People fear a repeat of what happened when the RSF took the city of El Fasher last October. The UN’s Fact-Finding Mission concluded that the ensuing massacre, in which the RSF killed at least 60,000 people, bore the ‘hallmarks of genocide’, with ethnically targeted killings and widespread sexual violence.

Humanitarian and civic space emergency

The war has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Over 11 million people have been forcibly displaced within Sudan or to surrounding countries, and around 20 million are experiencing acute food insecurity.

There’s a great need for the help civil society offers, but it’s hard for humanitarian organisations to provide aid because of security dangers and access and movement restrictions. The Sudanese government is also attacking the ability of civil society organisations to operate. In February, authorities revoked the licences of four organisations with missions to provide aid, help victims and promote peace.

Journalists, particularly women journalists, are under attack, making it harder to tell the truth about what’s happening on the ground. In January, the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate recorded that 14 journalists and other media workers had been killed in 2025. In December 2025, it was reported that 40 per cent of women journalists had experienced sexual assault, physical violence, harassment or threats.

Foreign powers behind the war

Sudan’s people can expect little help from the deadlocked UN Security Council. In August, the US government proposed a resolution to expand an arms embargo that currently applies to Darfur to the whole country, explicitly including drones. The Sudanese government condemned the proposal and Russia rejected it, which, given its veto power as a permanent member, means the resolution won’t advance further unless significantly watered down.

Russia initially sold weapons to both the RSF and SAF but more recently has swung behind the SAF, becoming a major arms supplier in return for gold and a potential Red Sea naval base. It’s joined by several other states with a direct stake in the conflict. The UN’s Fact-Finding Mission has set out how the SAF are using foreign-supplied drones while transnational networks are keeping the RSF supplied.

Alongside Russia, states that supply arms or other military support to the SAF, or have done so at some point since the war began, include Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Turkey and Ukraine. Those that have backed the RSF in various ways include the Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda and, most notoriously, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Weapons originating from countries including Canada, China, Israel and the UK have also been used. In most cases, states deny involvement.

There’s ample evidence that the UAE extensively supplies the RSF with mercenaries and weapons via African transit routes, in return for gold and in the hope of securing a regional foothold. The UAE funded Colombian mercenaries who played an active role alongside the RSF in the slaughter in El Fasher. It was recently revealed that individuals and entities linked to the RSF’s leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have acquired properties worth over US$24 million in Dubai, likely paid for with smuggled gold.

The UAE’s reliance on states that border Sudan to allow its convoys to cross brings the risk of conflict spillovers, as seen in alleged SAF airstrikes on a military convoy in Chad in August.

Push for accountability

A new initiative to hold foreign figures accountable offers some hope for justice. In June, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a group of civil society organisations made a legal submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC), asking it to investigate several foreign officials for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes in Sudan. The submission provided evidence of the involvement of the governments of Egypt, Iran, Turkey and the UAE.

The ICC has an ongoing investigation into the situation in Darfur, scene of a 2003-2005 genocide. It has confirmed that human rights crimes committed during the current war fall under its jurisdiction as part of this investigation, and in June it announced it had ‘concrete evidence’ linking RSF leaders to atrocities in El Fasher.

It’s vital that leaders responsible for human rights crimes face justice, and this must include the leaders of the countries waging a proxy war. If there is to be peace and justice, the impunity of the foreign powers that are sustaining the war must be challenged.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

By Linda Latsko Lockhart
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 18 2026 (IPS)

For the young women I met through Global Give Back Circle’s HER Lab in Kenya, displacement was not the end of ambition. It had interrupted school, separated families from stability, and narrowed the choices available to them. But it had not erased their hopes. What they wanted was not pity. They wanted skills, work, confidence and the chance to rebuild their lives with dignity.

Linda Latsko Lockhart

Their stories point to what migration debates often miss: displacement is not only about movement, but also about whether people can rebuild their lives in safety and dignity. If work and opportunity do not exist locally, the question is not only how to manage migration. It is how to create opportunity in their host country.

Kevine and Monica’s experiences reflected a wider reality. UNHCR recorded 117.8 million people forcibly displaced worldwide in 2025. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported 83.4 million people living in internal displacement across 117 countries and territories in 2024.

This is where Africa’s local experience matters, not as a continent people are simply leaving, but as one already hosting many of its own displaced people. African migration remains predominantly regional. The African Union and the International Organisation for Migration reported that 20.8 million people had moved between African countries. They also found that 86% of refugees and asylum seekers from African countries were hosted within Africa, compared with 9.6% in Europe.

This should reset the debate. Most African refugees and displaced people are already hosted within the continent. The challenge is not simply whether Europe or the United States should receive more people, but whether African host countries have the systems, resources and investment to help refugees rebuild locally. When opportunity exists, onward migration becomes less about desperation and more about choice.

This is not an argument against migration or the right to seek asylum. Migration can benefit individuals, communities and economies. But forced movement should not be the only route to dignity. Refugees need recognised skills, training, routes into work and confidence that their futures are not on hold. That means investing in education, accredited training, entrepreneurship, financial inclusion and community acceptance, so refugees can contribute to host economies.

The kind of local capacity needed is not abstract. In Kenya, Global Give Back Circle’s HER Lab, delivered in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, shows what this can look like in practice. Across Kajiado and West Pokot counties, HER Lab supports 32 young refugee women: 19 in Kajiado from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and 13 in West Pokot from South Sudan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are receiving training in fields ranging from coding and electrical installation to fashion, food production, cosmetology and agriculture. The HER Lab model combines market-aligned skills, mentorship, confidence-building, financial inclusion and pathways into employment or enterprise.

HER Lab reflects a broader shift. Through its $300 million partnership with UNHCR, the Mastercard Foundation is supporting half a million young refugees and displaced people across Africa to complete their education and enter dignified work.

In Dadaab, Dadaab Refugee Voices is applying the ILO’s Rural Employment Services model to connect refugees and host communities with job registration, guidance, matching, skills support and digital training. Already, 6,189 jobseekers have registered and received support, showing how local systems can move people towards work and self-reliance.

During and after the 12-month HER Lab programme, young women are building businesses in poultry, beauty, beadwork, retail and regenerative farming, while others are gaining skills in plumbing, agribusiness, digital literacy and electrical work. Through the HER Financial Freedom Programme, hundreds of previously unbanked rural women have gained access to savings and credit in addition to membership in a women-operated tea production cooperative. These are local routes to dignity, income and self-reliance.

That is why local capacity is central to the future of migration policy. Without the resources to educate, train and economically include refugees, displacement will continue to drive onward migration. With support for local initiatives and building inclusive systems, host countries can address some of the pressures that force people to move.

The policy response is clear. Governments, donors, development finance institutions, philanthropies and the private sector should back efforts that are locally rooted, measurable and designed for scale. Western governments, in particular, have a role beyond deterrence or crisis response. Investing in African countries and locally led initiatives can expand education, skills, livelihoods and financial inclusion for refugees and host populations alike. It can also turn migration partnerships into a shared effort to reduce forced movement.

The strongest migration policy is not one that pretends movement can simply be stopped. It is one that gives people real choices before movement becomes unavoidable. Africa is showing what inclusion can look like when opportunity is built locally.

The world should not look away. It should invest in helping that approach scale.

Linda Latsko Lockhart is the Founder and CEO of Global Give Back Circle, a serial social entrepreneur focused on the empowerment of women and girls in Africa and beyond. Named to Forbes “50 Over 50: Impact List”, she brings over 25 years of global leadership designing scalable, gender-based financial independence models. Through her organisation, Lockhart helps marginalised women and girls gain education, financial tools, and lasting economic resilience.

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Gender discrimination begins early and accumulates over time, leading to a narrowing of job opportunities and loss of belonging as they get older. Credit: Shutterstock

By Kim Samuel and Bridget Sleap
TORONTO / LONDON, Sep 17 2026 (IPS)

Chung Sun-cha started collecting cardboard, plastic, and other recycling materials off the streets of Incheon, South Korea, to sell when she was in her mid-70s. She is now 87. Without an adequate pension, Chung worked six days a week, sometimes seven, in the wind, rain, and snow until she fell and broke her arm while working in 2025. “I couldn’t find any other work because of my age,” she said.

Chung Sun-cha is not alone. In 2024-2025, Human Rights Watch interviewed 41 women ages 28 to 87 in researching working conditions for women in South Korea. They described how their career opportunities narrowed drastically from their 40s onward to a handful of low-paid, precarious jobs that often caused physical and mental harm, and eroded their sense of belonging.

Work by Belonging Forum in the UK indicates that this loss of belonging in older age is not confined to South Korea. Data from the Belonging Forum’s UK-wide 2026 Belonging Barometer reveals that nearly 19 percent of people ages 65 and older reported that they “not really” or “not at all” feel they belong. Furthermore, 16 percent of respondents 65 and older said they felt lonely “often or some of the time.”

October 1 marks the annual International Day of Older Persons. The United Nations theme for 2026 is “Rethinking Longevity.” Longer lives may bring increased opportunities, including in employment, but for many women, gender discrimination begins early and accumulates over time, leading to a narrowing of job opportunities and loss of belonging as they get older.

These entrenched, negative attitudes, known as “gendered ageism,” coupled with discriminatory employment policies and practices, lock women out of the broader workforce as they age, and isolate them in narrow and undervalued roles

Governments have a vital opportunity when they meet in October at the United Nations in Geneva to continue work on a new international treaty on the rights of older people. The proposed treaty should not merely add age-specific language to existing rights; it should fundamentally reimagine how we value older age.

In South Korea, Jung Kyong-sook, 55, worked as a bookkeeper before stopping work in 1994 to raise her three children. When she re-entered the workforce in 2013, the door was largely shut: “Most of us [women] in our 50s go to work in supermarkets as a cashier or cook in schools. We can’t really pursue our career.”

These outcomes stem from systemic gender and age discrimination that restrict women’s economic opportunities and reduce their sense of belonging and value in society. These entrenched, negative attitudes, known as “gendered ageism,” coupled with discriminatory employment policies and practices, lock women out of the broader workforce as they age, and isolate them in narrow and undervalued roles.

Even the government reflects these prejudices. Jobs the Ministry of Employment and Labor promotes for women in their 30s to 50s on Work24, its online hiring platform, revolve predominantly around beauty, caregiving, and education. The platform funnels women ages 50 or over into low-paid care work, cleaning, kitchen assistance, cooking, and social service jobs, reflecting societal expectations.

For many older women, work is necessary for survival, not a matter of choice. In 2025, women in their late 50s in South Korea faced a 50 percent gender pay gap. Women eligible for the National Old Age Pension faced an average gender pension gap of 47 percent. The average monthly pension for women was just KRW367,000 (£200), 18 percent of the national minimum wage.

Yet work offers something beyond economic survival. Work also gives many of the older women we interviewed a sense of purpose, agency, and belonging. This sense of purpose is a key determinant of the internationally protected right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. Being systematically segregated into ever-narrowing workplaces simply for being a woman considered “too old” – undermines this sense of belonging.

Research from the Belonging Forum shows that belonging does not happen by accident. It is built or broken by the systems, services, and environments that surround people throughout their lives. It depends on access to economic and social structures that determine whether older people have the time, resources, support, and security to participate in family and community life on an equal footing.

Older people can experience an erosion of dignity when society fails to recognize their equal rights and inherent value, operating under the ageist assumption that older age is a period of inevitable decline rather than continued development. The UK Belonging Barometer found that approximately 51 percent of respondents 65 and older “rarely/never” feel that they are working together with others for mutual benefit – pointing to the risk of social marginalization and exclusion in older age.

By embedding dignity, inclusion, equality, economic security, and belonging in the international treaty, we can ensure that women like Chung Sun-cha and Jung Kyong-sook are no longer treated as invisible low-wage workers, but instead as active and valued rights holders thriving in older age, in line with spirit of the International Day of Older Persons.

Kim Samuel is founder and chief architect at the Belonging Forum. Bridget Sleap is senior researcher on the rights of older people at Human Rights Watch.

Bangladesh is rightly praised for saving lives during cyclones and floods. Early warning systems, cyclone shelters and community mobilisation have turned once-catastrophic disasters into emergencies in which evacuation is often possible. But behind that success lies a quieter national failure: millions of people are being uprooted inside the country, often more than once, without a clear path back to secure homes, land or livelihoods.

Dr Mohammad Zaman

In Bangladesh, this distinction is not academic. A Rohingya family that fled Myanmar into Cox’s Bazar is rightly understood as part of a refugee crisis. A Bangladeshi family forced from a riverbank in Kazipur-Sirajganj, a cyclone-hit village in Barguna or Patuakhali, or a landslide-prone hillside in Chattogram is internally displaced. The first case draws international refugee law and a global humanitarian apparatus. The second is too often dismissed as local misfortune, seasonal migration or urban poverty—even when the displacement is forced, repeated and long-term.

The drivers are unmistakable. Monsoon floods, cyclones, storm surges and landslides trigger large annual movements. Slower disasters—riverbank erosion, salinity intrusion and coastal land loss—make return impossible for many families. Conflict and violence produce smaller annual movements, but protracted displacement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts remains unresolved. Development projects, urban evictions and infrastructure expansion can also uproot communities when resettlement and compensation fall short.

The numbers show why Bangladesh can no longer treat internal displacement as a temporary humanitarian footnote. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported about 2.4 million disaster-related displacements in Bangladesh in 2024, up from about 1.8 million in 2023. Monsoon floods alone triggered around 1.3 million movements, including an estimated 723,000 in Sylhet division in June. Cyclone Remal added roughly 1.1 million displacements, many of them pre-emptive evacuations that saved lives but still disrupted homes, schools, work and local economies. Conflict and violence accounted for about 2,800 displacements.

New national evidence makes the picture starker. The International Organization for Migration’s Displacement Tracking Matrix estimated 5 million disaster-induced IDPs in Bangladesh in its 2025 nationwide assessment. Nearly two-thirds had been displaced before April 2020, meaning many have lived with displacement for years, not weeks. One quarter were concentrated in just four districts—Chattogram, Sirajganj, Bhola and Noakhali—while Chattogram and Dhaka divisions together hosted about 40 per cent of the estimated displaced population.

These figures expose an unequal geography of risk. Coastal households face cyclones, storm surges, saline water and embankment failures. Riverine communities in the north and centre lose land to erosion. City slums absorb families who arrive after disasters, only to place them in flood-prone, insecure and poorly serviced neighbourhoods. Women, children, older people and persons with disabilities face particular barriers in evacuation, shelter access, documentation, employment and safe housing. Displacement is not simply movement from one place to another; it can strip people of assets, identity, social networks, education and political voice.

Bangladesh’s IDP crisis is best understood as a development crisis with humanitarian symptoms. The country is comparatively strong at emergency response: it can warn people, open shelters and move communities away from immediate danger. The harder work begins after the water recedes—restoring land, rebuilding homes, returning children to school, replacing fishing gear or livestock, securing tenure in safer locations, and preventing displaced families from being pushed into exploitative labour or unsafe housing. Without durable solutions—safe return, local integration or planned relocation—each disaster deepens the last.

Bangladesh has a policy foundation, including its National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management. What it lacks is implementation at the scale demanded by climate reality. Internal displacement must be built into land-use planning, social protection, climate adaptation, urban housing, education, health care and local government finance. Data systems should distinguish short-term evacuations from protracted displacement. Relief, relocation and resettlement must be transparent, participatory and centred on livelihoods—not merely a transfer from one unsafe place to another.

Ashrayan, Bangladesh’s flagship housing program for landless and homeless families, offers both a useful model and a warning. Since 1997, it has given many poor households a legal roof, a small plot and access to basic services. For families living for years on embankments, khas land, riverbanks or in insecure urban settlements, secure shelter can be life-changing. But Ashrayan also shows why housing cannot be mistaken for rehabilitation. A house in the wrong place—without work nearby, transport, drainage, schools, health care or local accountability—can become another form of confinement. The real test is not how many units are handed over, but whether families can rebuild livelihoods and belong to the communities that receive them.

The recurring failures are practical and political. Too many Ashrayan-style resettlement sites are chosen because public or khas land is available, not because the location offers a realistic route out of poverty. Weak construction, poor drainage, inadequate sanitation, limited maintenance and exposure to floods or erosion can undermine relocation itself. Governance failures—unclear beneficiary selection, local influence, informal payments, land disputes and weak grievance systems—can be just as damaging. When these problems occur, families may gain a roof while losing the social networks, markets and informal economies that kept them afloat. Some commute long distances; some rent out or abandon the unit; some move again. That is not a failure of the displaced. It is a warning about policy design.

The future will be harsher if policy remains reactive. Climate change will intensify the hazards that already uproot families—heavier rainfall, stronger storm surges, sea-level rise, salinity and river erosion—while urbanisation will keep pulling displaced people into already strained cities such as Dhaka, Chattogram and secondary urban centres. Bangladesh has proved through cyclone preparedness that public policy can save lives. Its next test is whether those who survive disaster can also recover dignity, income and security afterward.

That begins with treating IDPs as rights-holders, not as casualties of bad weather. Bangladesh must move beyond emergency shelter toward secure housing, restored livelihoods and accountable national systems backed by climate finance. Resettlement must be written into land policy, local budgets, urban planning, social protection and climate adaptation before the next flood or cyclone arrives. The choice is stark: displacement can remain a conveyor belt into poverty, or it can become a national commitment to safety, citizenship and a future people can rebuild.

Dr. Mohammad Zaman is an internationally recognized scholar and practitioner in resettlement and development projects across Asia and Africa. His work brings together academic scholarship, field-based practice, social safeguards, and policy engagement, with a particular focus on how affected communities experience, negotiate, and reshape development interventions. Dr. Zaman’s most recent book is Anatomy of Resettlement: Ethnographic Accounts and Stories in Retrospect (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).

IPS UN Bureau

Sidi Haidara leads a community dialogue in Mopti, Mali, where families, young people and local leaders discuss girls' rights and ways to end female genital mutilation. Credit: UN Women/Dieneba Deme

By UNFPA
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 2026 (IPS)

In Mali, an estimated nine out of ten women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM). And for years, Sidi Haidara, a father and recognized leader in his community, believed the practice was simply part of life.

Like many people in his community in central Mali, he saw it as a tradition passed down through generations – one that should be preserved.

Today, he walks from village to village with a very different message: No tradition should come at the expense of a girl’s health, rights, or future.

His story goes beyond one man’s personal transformation. Across parts of West and Central Africa, FGM remains deeply rooted – with Mali having one of the highest rates in the region and no laws that specifically criminalize the practice. Even recently, some men in Mali have launched an all-male pro-FGM campaign on the grounds of protecting tradition.

In places where social norms are deeply entrenched, change often begins with trusted voices from within the community – voices like Haidara’s.

After spending years defending female genital mutilation, Sidi Haidara now leads community dialogues in Mopti, Mali, encouraging families to protect girls’ rights and abandon the practice. Credit: UN Women/Dieneba Deme

How UN Women and partners are shifting mindsets and empowering new anti-FGM advocates in Mali

“I used to believe that this practice was part of our traditions and needed to be preserved”, says Haidara.

Nothing suggested that he would one day become one of the people advocating for its abandonment.

His perspective began to change after taking part in training sessions, workshops, and community dialogues organized through the Men and Boys as Agents of Change project, implemented by UN Women with financial support from the Government of Germany.

As he listened to different experiences and learned about the consequences of FGM, he began questioning his beliefs – beliefs he had never challenged before. He also came to understand that lasting change cannot simply be imposed – it grows through dialogue, trust, and community ownership.

“UN Women’s trainings – with the support of Germany – transformed my understanding of female genital mutilation. I learned about the physical, psychological, and social consequences that this practice imposes on girls.”

How to end FGM in Mali: Begin with listening, questioning, and conversing

“Today, I regularly organize awareness-raising sessions with families, religious leaders, young people, and women”, he explains.

Rather than telling people what to think, he encourages conversations about what it means to protect girls and challenges long-held beliefs through dialogue.

Little by little, those conversations are making a difference. “I can see change: more parents are asking questions, several families are abandoning female genital mutilation, and discussions about protecting girls have become more open.”

“I am convinced that protecting girls today means investing in the future of our entire community.”

People can change – and so can social norms

Haidara’s journey is part of a broader movement taking place across the regions of Mopti and Gao in Mali.

With support from the Government of Germany, UN Women works alongside religious and traditional leaders, women, young people, and men like Haidara who are committed to community-driven initiatives that prevent violence against women and girls and challenge harmful social norms.

To date, 50 community initiatives have been implemented across the two regions, while eight community-dialogue platforms provide spaces for people to discuss girls’ rights, their protection, and ways to prevent gender-based violence.

For Haidara, abandoning a harmful practice is about more than leaving a tradition behind. It is about giving girls the opportunity to grow up safely, stay in school, and shape their own futures.

His journey shows that some of the most meaningful changes happen when those who once upheld harmful social norms become the people helping to transform them.

Haidara knows traditions do not change overnight. But every conversation creates an opportunity for reflection. Every family that chooses to protect its daughters helps write a different future from the one that generations before them inherited.

In Mopti and Gao, these conversations are showing that lasting change does not necessarily begin with a new law or policy. More often, it begins when communities themselves decide to imagine a different future for their girls.

Source: UNFPA

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

When host governments negotiate with investors, they typically suffer from the fact that investors know more about the value of the minerals than governments do. Credit: Shutterstock

By Karl P. Sauvant and Louis T. Wells
Sep 15 2026 (IPS)

“Critical minerals” are critical in the eyes of firms and governments in industrialized countries because they are indispensable for products such as modern automobiles, AI, computers, drones, and many other consumer and defense products.

Mining, and especially processing, of many critical minerals are today concentrated in China; withholding access to them provides China with a powerful bargaining tool when tensions arise with the West. Consequently, governments and firms of industrialized countries are scrambling to develop new mines and processing facilities outside China to secure their supplies.

Many deposits are in developing countries, but most of the countries must turn to foreign firms for the capital and know how needed to extract rare earths and other critical minerals. Exploration and development contracts determine the rights and responsibilities of both investors and host governments for, often, decades. Because most investors are protected by investment treaties, host countries need to get the contracts “right” at the outset.

Technologies are changing rapidly: what is in demand today for, say, batteries, might be different in a few years. Hence, “use-it-or-lose-it” clauses in contracts are essential: if investors fail to develop mines by an agreed date or meet output requirements, contracts must provide that the investors’ rights end so that government are then free to seek other investors

The bargaining power of developing countries is often greater for critical minerals than for other minerals. This is due to the eagerness of private firms from industrialized countries as well as their home governments for access to critical minerals and their desire to keep them out of the hands of competitors.

When investors are eager, host countries can insist on gaining beneficial financial terms (taxes, royalties), avoiding broad stabilization provisions, including programs to develop local suppliers, ensuring proper mine-closure arrangements, etc. Sometimes, host countries can insist on investors processing ores locally.

Another opportunity is the chance to exploit the strong interest of investors’ home governments to ensure that their investors control critical minerals. Host countries can insist that these governments provide benefits such as finance for projects or increased aid for infrastructure projects even beyond those needed for the mine.

Obtaining real benefits from home governments is more likely if host governments have in-depth knowledge about the investors and their home countries’ policies, as well as information about mining agreements concluded elsewhere. Special to critical minerals are multilateral and bilateral arrangements that are being built to develop and stabilize critical mineral supplies. They include FORGE and stockpiling attempts such as Project Vault.

Exploiting these emerging opportunities to obtain benefits from investors’ home governments may require that host governments involve their foreign affairs ministries as well as the usual ministries concerned with mining. This adds to the common problem of coordination within governments.

Host countries also face certain risks. Particularly important is the risk that investors conclude agreements, but never actually invest. Or they stop short of producing expected levels of output. Or companies may sign agreements only to keep deposits out of the hands of other firms or as backup, “just in case.

Also, technologies are changing rapidly: what is in demand today for, say, batteries, might be different in a few years. Hence, “use-it-or-lose-it” clauses in contracts are essential: if investors fail to develop mines by an agreed date or meet output requirements, contracts must provide that the investors’ rights end so that government are then free to seek other investors.

When host governments negotiate with investors, they typically suffer from the fact that investors know more about the value of the minerals than governments do. And governments often lack the legal, financial and technical expertise required to negotiate successfully with well-resourced international investors.

Even when they have negotiated mining contracts in the past, the expertise acquired can be lodged in the heads of officials who have moved on to other positions, in government or in the private sector. The imbalance may be even greater when it comes to the complexities and special opportunities posed for negotiating agreements covering critical minerals.

Thus, exploiting the opportunities developing countries have is not an easy task. Outside expertise can help governments to optimize mining agreements. But the poorest developing countries typically lack the financial resources to hire international expertise such as lawyers, geologists, engineers, financial analysts, market specialists, and environmental experts.

Multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation can help in developing policies and laws for foreign investment and mining, but they drop out when it comes to actual negotiations with individual firms.

However, there are sources of pro bono advisors that provide help in the negotiation stage. The International Senior Lawyers Project and the African Legal Support Facility offer legal support. The CONNEX Support Unit provides not only legal support, but also other expertise required for specific projects.

Governments should consider calling on such external support when they are negotiating contracts for critical minerals. But they should work closely with the providing organization to select advisors who meet their specific needs and with whom they are comfortable.

The chosen advisors should have the necessary technical knowledge, but also the consulting skills that are required to bring together the ministries and agencies that have an interest in proposed mines—often a challenging task. In the end, advisors, or teams of advisors with different skills, can only advise. The governments of countries with minerals make the decisions.

One word of caution, though. Governments need to be careful not to overplay their hand. They need to aim for contracts that reflect, in a balanced manner, the long-term interests of all parties involved. Only then will they stand the test of time.

Karl P. Sauvant is Senior Fellow, CCSI, Columbia University, and former Director of UNCTAD’s Investment Division; Louis Wells is the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, Emeritus, Harvard Business School. The authors are members of the CONNEX Advisory Committee.

Members of the Uyghur delegation pose with the director of their host organisation, CADAL, during their visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, 23 August 2026. The sky flag is strictly banned by the Chinese government under anti-separatism laws. Credit: CADAL.

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 15 2026 (IPS)

On 24 August, I took part in a human rights conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Days before it opened, the city legislature cancelled the intended venue after the Chinese ambassador complained to the Argentine government about the participation of prominent Uyghur human rights defenders, including Dolkun Isa, an activist exiled in Germany. Beijing has waged a campaign of mass detention and forced assimilation against the mostly Muslim Uyghur population for years.

The organisers found another venue at the last minute, and the conference went ahead, but the episode was revealing. This was a small gathering, of no great consequence to anyone beyond those in the room, in a global south city over 19,000 kilometres from Beijing, yet China still went out of its way to stop it. The episode showed how China aims to deny its critics any platform, however modest, anywhere. A phone call to a compliant government is the least of what it does in pursuit of this objective.

China’s global campaign

China is the world’s leading perpetrator of transnational repression, the practice of reaching beyond borders to intimidate, punish and silence critics in exile. Its new ‘Ethnic Unity Law‘, in force since July, lets the government target dissidents abroad when they are deemed to be ‘undermining ethnic unity’ or ‘creating ethnic division’. Freedom House has documented at least 319 instances of China’s physical transnational repression targeting Hong Kong democracy activists, Tibetans and Uyghurs, in addition to Taiwanese civil society and political figures, whom it treats as if they were Chinese nationals.

China’s transnational repression spans the spectrum of severity. At the far end, dissidents disappear. Chinese dissident Yi Haihua reportedly vanished in Dubai in April, having fled China via Hong Kong the previous November. China also uses prosecution and imprisonment to punish dissent abroad. Those targeted include a student who was handed a six-year sentence when he returned to China after participating in a pro-democracy protest in Australia.

Less extreme but far more widespread are surveillance, intimidation and repression by proxy, through which China monitors and threatens dissidents abroad and pressures family members back home. China also applies economic leverage against states, as seen in April when the government of Zambia, a state heavily indebted to China, called off the RightsCon digital rights conference, over the participation of Taiwanese activists, days before it was due to open in Lusaka.

Beyond China

China is not alone. Vietnam and Russia are the second and third worst offenders, and at least 54 states have engaged in transnational repression, with six — Afghanistan, Benin, Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe — identified as using these tactics for the first time in 2025.

Latin America, once largely spared, is now home to transnational repression. In June 2025, former Nicaraguan army major Roberto Samcam, an outspoken critic of dictator Daniel Ortega, was shot dead at his home near San José, Costa Rica, the third such killing of a Nicaraguan exile there in recent years. Nicaragua has also taken the lead in stripping dissenters of nationality. Since 2023, the government has removed citizenship from over 300 former journalists, opponents and political prisoners and confiscated their assets, leaving them stateless and unprotected.

Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro pursued its opponents with similar determination. In February 2024, men in fake police uniforms abducted exiled former army lieutenant Ronald Ojeda from his apartment in Santiago de Chile. His dismembered body was found buried under concrete nine days later. Chilean prosecutors concluded the killing was ordered by the Venezuelan government and carried out through a Venezuelan gang, part of a growing practice of outsourcing violence that offers plausible deniability. In October 2025, gunmen in Bogotá opened fire on exiled activists Yendri Velásquez and Luis Peche. Fortunately, they survived their multiple gunshot wounds.

Weak response

In March 2025, a New York jury convicted two members of an Eastern European crime ring hired by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard over a 2022 plot to kill exiled journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home. This June, a UK court convicted two men of spying on UK-based Hong Kong democracy activists, and in July, it convicted those responsible for a knife attack on exiled Iranian television presenter Pouria Zeraati. The USA has imposed visa bans on Thai officials responsible for forcibly returning Uyghurs to China.

Yet these are exceptions in a pattern of host states quietly enabling the repression they claim to oppose. On top of failing to do enough to prevent transnational repression on their soil, many are facilitating it through their border and immigration systems, with geopolitical calculations and political pressure to curb immigration numbers trumping human rights protections.

In June, Germany deported Tajik opposition activist Asadullo Boboev and his son despite a documented risk of arrest. Tajik authorities detained Boboev on arrival. The USA has repeatedly returned Russians to the authoritarian government they fled, and has let officials from Iran’s consulate into US detention facilities to help process Iranian asylum seekers for deportation, including Christian converts and women’s rights protesters. In 2025, the UK reopened the door to extraditions to Hong Kong, five years after suspending cooperation over the territory’s draconian national security law. The Trump administration’s 2025 dismantling of USAID and freeze on democracy funding have cut off support that once helped threatened activists relocate and rebuild their lives.

The European Parliament, the G7 and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have all formally acknowledged transnational repression as an assault on human rights and state sovereignty, but recognition hasn’t brought stronger responses. Democratic states must resist pressure, impose consequences on foreign officials who order transnational repression and refrain from returning exiles to face danger. Democracies must not prioritise calculations of trade and diplomacy over the protection of the people seeking safety.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

On 11 September 2001 I was in New York, on one of my frequent visits to the United Nations, to which I was tied by a consultancy contract. That morning I woke up late, around eleven, sleeping off the jet lag of the flight from Italy. I was staying at the Hyatt Park, today the Millennium. A hotel a few metres from the Glass Palace, built to serve the world of the United Nations.

Roberto Savio

When I came down to the lobby, I was taken aback by an extreme state of agitation, from the staff to the guests. I tried to speak to a bellboy I knew, but he ran off without answering. So I went to reception, where everyone was on the telephone and no one paid me any attention. Finally, someone I knew told me: “They’ve attacked the Twin Towers!” And then she too rushed away.

At that point, with the professional deformation of the journalist, I went out into the street to take a taxi and get to the scene. But the street was deserted. Not a car in sight, and the few passers-by were running as well, certainly to get home.

So I did the only intelligent thing left to me, which was to watch television. The images were clear and terrible. But the anchors were groping in total darkness, in a bewilderment I had never seen. It was clear that this was an attack and not an accident. But by whom? And why? The CBS presenter was asking: “But who could wish America harm, when we have always helped the whole world?” And the one on NBC: “The Evil Empire is over, it set with the fall of the Berlin Wall twelve years ago. Where does this hatred come from?”

New York comes to a halt

On the day of the attack, as on the day after, New York ceased to exist. The streets were deserted. Shops, restaurants, supermarkets, closed. There was no public transport. In my hotel, where the staff had not turned up, the managers improvised pathetic sandwiches, which was all that could be offered to the guests to keep them fed. Everyone was at home digesting the shock, avoiding unpredictable dangers, and watching television. Only on the second day, beyond the appalling images of people falling from the sky, of office workers and firemen covered in a mantle of ash, did figures and data begin to appear. And in those days, the American dream vanished.

The American myth and its crisis

The United States had been the clear winner of the Second World War. And from then on, the undisputed leader of the world, opposed only by the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. But American citizens saw the socialist world as politically absurd and economically backward, a place people were constantly fleeing in order to take refuge in the world of freedom, democracy and prosperity, the United States. It was they who had set in motion the reconstruction of Europe, which, though historically the centre of the West, was by then an arm of American hegemony. And their aid to the development of the Third World had saved millions of people from hunger and famine. In the collective imagination, this took on enormous proportions, which had nothing to do with reality. Shortly before 11 September, the New York Times had published a survey according to which the American “in the street” believed that development aid amounted to anywhere from a minimum of 5 per cent of Gross Product up to 10 per cent. In fact it was 0.10.

The common feeling in those days was disbelief. In the history of the United States, Americans had first read about and then watched wars, massacres and every kind of violence as distant events, even when their own sons were involved, as in the Second World War. But they had never suffered an attack at home. And the fact that this had been possible was the first, subconscious feeling of distrust towards the institutions — which, with other events and with time, would become an important part of today’s political reality. Until then, polls had always recorded a serene confidence in a State that guaranteed security.

From the American dream to Trump and Musk

To make an effective analysis of how the American dream progressively faded would require far more space than we have. But let me try to summarise the threads of the carpet that slowly covered the United States we knew, replacing them with those of Trump and Musk.

First of all, it should be remembered that in the decade of the Eighties a number of things happened that carried great significance not only globally, but with great weight inside the United States.

The first was the Conference of Heads of State in Cancún, in 1981, convened by the United Nations to continue the dialogue for a New World Order based on cooperation and international solidarity, adopted by acclamation by the General Assembly in 1973. I was head of communications for the Summit, and I lived it from the inside. The 25 most representative heads of state of the moment were there, and from Indira Gandhi to Mitterrand, from Nyerere to Trudeau, all spoke of the need to strengthen international cooperation. When Reagan’s turn came, elected shortly before, his speech was categorical, and was later taken up by Thatcher: “American citizens elected me to serve their interests and not those of others. And therefore I do not accept the straitjacket of United Nations resolutions. From now on, America will choose its own road.”

In those same years, at American urging, the international community adopted the Washington Consensus, drawn up by the American Treasury, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. The consensus broke with the economic doctrines that had prevailed since the end of the war. It eliminated every social component, making the market and its laws of absolute competition the centre of society. The State was to withdraw from its central role and let the market take its place. Expenditure that was not immediately productive, such as health and education, was to be taken over by the private sector. And competition, at every level, from the individual to the global, was to be the yardstick by which success is judged.

The result was that many factories and companies moved to countries with lower labour costs and fewer controls. America lost millions of jobs, of people who until then had been a middle class — white, rural, with a social conscience. But the same happened in the rural world, of white, conservative Americans with little education and an unconscious racism towards workers of colour.

The wars and the financial collapse

Nor should it be forgotten that after the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States began the war in Afghanistan, from which it would withdraw ignominiously twenty years later. And shortly afterwards, in 2003, it began the invasion of Iraq, from which it withdrew in 2011, giving life to the Islamic Caliphate (ISIS), which would become a great element of destabilisation throughout the Middle East. During these years, Americans discover that their country is not invincible. It was supposed to overcome the trauma of Vietnam. Instead, the failure of the most powerful military machine in the world continues. In the end, all that will remain is a tragic balance sheet of ruins and dead, and a total expenditure of around eight trillion dollars. To put it in perspective, the American budget today is thirty trillion dollars.

But in my view, the final blow to the American dream came a few years later, with the collapse of Wall Street, an event which once again found me present while it was happening. Finance without controls had gone so far as to turn the stock exchange into a genuine casino, a place of ever riskier bets. Under Clinton, in 1999, a law was repealed which since 1923 had established a clear separation between deposit banks (those serving citizens and businesses, loans and mortgages) and investment banks, that is, banks of speculation. The capital of the deposit banks, which were not very profitable, flowed into the investment banks. Americans do not say, as we Europeans do, that they “gamble” on the stock exchange, but that they “invest” in it. And a great many citizens do so, as do their pension funds.

In 2008 the speculative bubble bursts, sweeps away Lehman Brothers, an icon of Wall Street, and gives rise to a crisis which obviously affects the whole world. It is calculated that all the countries of the world together had to commit some 20,000 dollars in rescue money for every citizen of the planet in order to avoid a total collapse of finance. In the crisis, millions upon millions of Americans lose their savings. Their pensions too are in danger. Since the decade of the Eighties, the bargaining power of the unions has been in continuous decline. Wages in real, purchasing terms have been steadily falling. Many citizens are struggling with precarious and part-time jobs with which they can barely reach the end of the month. Many have to hold down two jobs in order to survive. The poverty rate rises to 15 per cent, and child poverty to African levels. UNICEF’s figures are dramatic. And so begins the conviction that the elites are the enemies of the people, that politics no longer has anything to do with citizens’ real concerns. Electoral abstention increases. And so the immigrant, the labour force on which America was built, becomes the enemy who takes my job, pollutes my child’s classroom, takes my place in the hospital, and commits crimes and outrages.

Religion, sovereignism and the new right

It is not only politics that digs out this feeling of frustration and anger, which explains Trump’s great success. It is also religion. Fundamentalist evangelicals now number 60 million in the United States, and their message takes up exactly the economic and social vision of the Washington Consensus. We must compete, because God judges us by our success; whoever is poor is poor because he has not fought. They support an Israel that recovers its ancient kingdom of Samaria and Judea (and therefore a vast ethnic cleansing), because they preach that Jesus will make a “second coming”, a return to earth, only when Israel has returned to the time of Jesus. And in this world flourishes the sovereignism of Bannon, who wants to turn the right into a great international (later overshadowed by Musk, who wants an anti-system sovereignism of the far right). Catholic integralism flourishes, embraced by J. Vance, the vice-president placed there by Silicon Valley and a possible next President. The integralism that leads the Secretary of Defense (or rather of War, as he prefers it) to bring religion into the armed forces, to present the war against Iran in terms of religion. And a population in which the level of economic and social distress reaches 20 per cent sees the flourishing of the first trillionaire in history (let us look at a trillion: 1,000,000,000,000), who boasts of paying no taxes, eliminates American development aid, and dismisses tens of thousands of public servants without criterion.

The internet and the end of shared truth

Shortly afterwards comes the development of communications technology. In 2004 Facebook is born, Reddit in 2005, Twitter in 2006. All at once, millions of Americans find themselves connected to one another, bypassing the enormous media system of the United States, which was in any case in few hands. I was one of the great champions of the internet, until (I believe it was Bill Gates) someone launched a slogan: “Now it is not important to know; it is important to know where to look” — which brought me to a state of great concern. If I find, but do not possess, what I have looked for, it will slide off me, like water off a goose’s back.

But the problem is that the internet was not born as a common good, as a service for humanity. It was born as a source of profit, and with the orgy of available information, being consulted became fundamental. Hence the abandonment of any meaningful mechanism of ethical or professional control over the information in circulation. So, in order to keep the connection and not lose the user, priority went to the most sensational, extraordinary, striking information. Before long this would be exploited by creators of false or tendentious news, with a great flowering of conspiracy theories which, for example, see in the President of the Republic and the Pope a network of paedophiles covered by the secret services. I read, again I think in the NYT, that the FBI estimated at 45 million the number of people adhering to these conspiracies, which stripped the institutions of all legitimacy. And so the internet gave them a megaphone, which carried the most incredible ideas from the bar to the whole of society. And above all to the extremists, infinitely more fanatical than ordinary citizens.

Numerous studies and statistics tell us of the impact of the isolation that leads young people, instead of socialising, to shut themselves up in the internet, in a virtual world in which AI becomes the real friend and adviser. This falls upon a society that has always idealised the individual against the social, and where a winning political line sees in the reduction of the State the freedom of citizens, in taxes an unjust expropriation of the fruit of their labour, and in social spending, such as medical care, a clear socialist imprint.

Obviously, a reaction of suffering is under way in the United States. The Mayor of New York, who declares himself a socialist, has been elected, and other openly progressive figures are entering the field. But this is happening with a strong polarisation, with an intolerant and profound confrontation, which offers no glimpse, in the immediate future, of a path towards national consensus, but quite the contrary. Trump calls the Democrats “communists”, and politics has by now become the great instrument of division. The future does not look at all like a return to the America of dreams.

Bin Laden’s legacy and Europe

Bin Laden could never have imagined, in destroying the Twin Towers, that he would set in motion such a mechanism of destruction.

But his legacy is not measured only in treaties. It is measured also in everyday gestures, which we have stopped recognising as such. Today no one is surprised at having to arrive at the airport two hours before departure: shoes and belts in the tray, liquids in hundred-millilitre bottles, queues, scanners, searches. The new generations experience it as a law of nature, because they never knew the before. It was enough to turn up half an hour ahead, check in, and go straight to the gate. No controls. That world disappeared on a September morning, and it has never come back. This is terrorism’s most silent victory: not to have changed our ideas, but our habits, to the point that we no longer remember having had different ones.

We should also analyse how this mechanism did not remain in the United States. With different characteristics, and in a different reality, it spread to Europe as well. One need only look at the Maastricht Treaty, on which our European Union is based. Concluded in the Dutch town in 1992, at the height of the intoxication with the extreme capitalism of the Washington Consensus, it provides for obligations and competences in the economic field alone. The social field is part of an added document, which has no binding value. And now, out of 27 member states of the Union, a majority are sovereignist, and therefore opposed to any real power for Brussels. Next year we will have elections in Spain, France, Italy and Poland. Countries of great weight. If sovereignism prevails in these too, Europeans — who look upon Trump as an aberration — will have fulfilled his dream: to destroy the European Union.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti-neoliberal global governance. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

IPS UN Bureau

An AfD election poster with the message: “Youth come to us”, reminiscent of both Nazi and Communist propaganda.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Sep 14 2026 (IPS)

During summer months there is a certain news drought. Nevertheless, this year social media has been crowded with news from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, while customary tales about grisly murders have not been neglected. In Sweden it is election year and summer reporting has been supplemented by a debate about “hate speech against ethnic groups”. If individual tragedies connected with murders upset people, many seem to be indifferent to the fact that entire population groups are targeted by politicians. Swedish social media is overloaded with outcries about “Muslim” immigration and concerns about Sweden becoming “Islamized” and in danger of being transformed into a new Afghanistan.

Prominent in this hyped propaganda are the Sweden Democrats. A nationalist, social conservative, and populist political party finding its roots in neo-Nazism. In the 2010 elections, this party entered the Swedish parliament with 5.7 percent of the national votes and it now reigns the nation in coalition with other right-wing parties. According to the Statistical Central Bureau, a state agency, was the Sweden Democrats with 18 percent of current approval Sweden’s second largest political party, after the Social Democrats, with 34 percent.

The Sweden Democrat’s chief ideologist is a former high school teacher, Richard Jomshof, who together with three comrades by the turn of the last century managed to steer away Sweden Democrats from the White Power Movement and neo-Nazism, while maintaining the party’s nationalist and anti-immigrant tenor. After the 2022 parliamentary elections the Sweden Democrats became part of the Government. Jomshof left his post as party secretary and became chairman of the Parliamentary Justice Committee, which prepares cases connected with the Swedish judicial system – courts, the prosecution service, the police and correctional services, as well as cases and laws related to the Criminal Code.

Jomshof used his position to propagate for a tougher stance against criminals with a “non-Swedish background” and to promote restrictions on immigration. One of Jomshof’s goals has been to warn Swedes about the “Islamization of our Homeland”. After publishing anti-Islamic cartoons on X Jomshof was close to be removed from his position as chairman of the Justice Committee. However, committee members sided with him while one of them characterized the accusations of “discrediting an entire population group” as nothing more than a common “political yap”. Nevertheless, a year ago, Jomshof stepped down as chair of the Committee, in protest after the Government had banned certain semi-automatic weapons.

After that Jomshof dedicated much of his time to write an “analysis” of Islam and recently published a book called Kafir, an Arab word for “infidel”, which has become a bestseller. Jomshof’s political stance and career as an “expert” on Islam is one example of the polarization that currently characterizes much of European politics – a tendency to turn any individual into a representative of an entire ethnic and/or religious group and throw her/him into one big pot where s/he becomes part of a one single problem – immigration.

Jomshof is an extreme nationalist representing an anti-immigrant political party, but that does not mean that every supporter of Sweden Democrats is a reformed Nazi and stout believer in Jomshof’s generalisations, likewise not every Muslim is a supporter of the extremist Islam Jomshof depicts. It is dangerous to bundle together individuals and label them all as extremists. Recently a young man equipped with sword and helmet entered a Swedish school and killed one pupil while gravely wounding two, a third escaped with minor injuries. He had apparently been inspired by the Norwegian Behring Breivik, who in 2011 massacred 77 people as a gesture to “combat multiculturalism and Muslim immigration”. In 2015, the Swede Anton Lundin-Pettersson murdered three persons for the same reason.

Gaining political advantages through xenophobia is just one ingredient in a larger European political landscape. That a small, marginal political party with Neo-Nazi roots after less than fifteen years ended up in the Swedish government re-confirms a phenomenon present all over Europe. On 15 September, there are general elections in Sweden and next year in France, Spain, Greece, Poland and Italy. All these countries have powerful parties with a nationalistic/xenophobic agenda. In France, the predecessor of National Rally was in 1972 founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and then included some former members of the Nazi Waffen-SS. The Spanish Vox was established in 2013, benefitting from donations by ultra-conservative lobbies, such as HazteOír and CitizenGo. The Greek Golden Dawn was dissolved in 2020, after members of its top echelons had been convicted for serious crimes. In 2023, the Greek Supreme Court blocked its successor party, Hellenes, from participating in the general elections, a ruling that still stands for the elections in 2027. However, a plethora of smaller parties have taken up its agenda. The Polish Law and Justice Party is a conservative outbreak from the labor movement Solidarność, with a huge following and an agenda based on political Catholicism, strong conservatism, anti-liberalism, nationalism, and Euroscepticism. Brothers of Italy finds its roots in MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano, a fascist party founded after the death of Mussolini. Through the general elections in 2013, Brothers of Italy gained nine seats in the Parliament, after obtaining two percent of the votes. According to the Italian polling and research firm Only Numbers, Brothers of Italy is currently Italy’s largest party and after the 2022 elections its leader, Giorgia Meloni, is Prime Minister of Italy. How could those originally small parties, some with a quite sordid background, in such a short time become so powerful?

One reason might be that by exposing outrageous and extreme opinions, which a political establishment would be ashamed of uttering, fringe parties might obtain attention from a generally liberal press. While warning the general public about such “fanatics”, liberal media spread their ideas and create an increasing interest. In a well calculated moment before the Swedish elections, Richard Jomshof published his untrustworthy and generalizing book about Islam. Although it was issued by a small and rather unknown publisher it received extreme attention by Swedish media – TV, newspapers and the web – and thus became an immediate bestseller. As Oscar Wilde once stated: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”.

A similar phenomenon is currently under way in Italy. In 2023, the general Roberto Vannacci self-published a book on Amazon, Il mondo al contrario , The Upside-Down World, sparking a furious backlash and drawing heavy criticism for its contents. The Italian Armed Forces quickly distanced themselves from General Vannacci’s ideas. The defence minister stated that he had “discredited the Army, the Defence and the Constitution.” Vannacci, grateful for all attention, continues to spread his homophobia and misogyny, attacking immigration policies and environmentalism, while defending Russia’s war on Ukraine. He is now a welcome guest on TV, participates in debates with reputed politicians and academicians, while he recently has founded a political party.

The recent landslide election victory of the AfD, Alternative for Germany, in the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt has sent shock waves through liberal Europe. While being part of the larger Federal Republic of Germany, Saxony-Anhalt hosts just three percent of the nation’s entire population and has its second lowest GDP per capita. Nevertheless, the victory of its Saxony branch now fuels AfD’s hope to take the reins of the entire German Republic. AfD’s ultra-nationalistic agenda claims that Germany has had enough of guilt feelings about the repression and mass killings of the Nazi Regime. The past has to be reinterpreted and the party now asserts that Germany is in need of “less Hitler and more Bismarck”, i.e. the Chancellor who in the 19th century united Germany under the slogan “Blood and Iron”.

AfD has accordingly re-introduced the concept of Völkisch, folksy, used by the Nazis to denote a battle against “radicalism” in the form of modern art and foreign influences, while fomenting pride in everything the Party deemed as “German”. However, the concept was older and originally developed in opposition to the socio-cultural changes of modernity. AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt party programme intends to purge ”slander” of Germany from school education. No funding will be granted to organisations maintaining sites of Nazi terror – AfD’s leadership has condemned Berlin’s Holocaust Monument as a “national disgrace” – and the the party has also demanded that the world-famous Bauhaus complex in Dessau ought to be closed. In the 1920s this learning centre was a highly influential focus of innovative approaches to art and architecture, until the Nazis closed it down in 1933. It did later re-emerge as a museum, research centre, and cultural landmark, being part of the UNESCO Heritage Sites. The Saxony-Anhalt branch of AfD is furthermore a representative of what has been called eastalgia, i.e. nostalgia for the times when Saxony-Anhalt was part of the Communist, Soviet dominated East Germany. Consistent with this perception and displeasure with the central government’s spending on Ukraine’s defence, AfD is a stout supporter of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Before the 1990 reunification of West and East Germany, Saxony-Anhalt was an important centre for a polluting heavy industry. One of East Germany’s most famous authors, Monika Maron, wrote a novel called Flugasche, Flying Ashes, in which she described the bleak, contaminated land of Saxony. Since then, the German Federal Republic has successfully cleaned up the traces of a ruthless industrialization and gradually transformed Saxony-Anhalt into an increasingly green state. However, this initiative came at the cost of the shutting down of several large industries, resulting in increased unemployment. Since 1990, Saxony-Anhalt has lost 750 000 inhabitants, mainly skilled young people, who have moved to the “West”, a fourth of the state’s population. Those left behind are an aging population and unskilled, unemployed young people, while the state has been partly repopulated by immigrants coming from foreign countries. They now constitute a tenth of the population. This has left a fertile ground for a populist party attracting disappointed old people and depressed youngsters, presented with the chimera of a happy pre-war Germany and/or Communist East Germany, which in reality are now forgotten and probably never existed.

A general sense of insecurity, reduced GDP and increasing unemployment harass several Europeans, not least young people. An embellished nostalgia for an actually forgotten past, assumed to have been annihilated by hordes of immigrants and corrupt liberals, has made Europeans affected by ultra-conservative parties, promulgating hazardous and divisive ideas. Representatives of murky ideologies are by media provided an attention they do not deserve. Excessive media interest, especially when marginal fanatics begin to spread their poisonous seed, might strengthen their outreach. Critical analysis, research and education are despised by dark forces who deliberately divulge their message through easy-to-understand, diluted and digestible propaganda and fake news. An ominous development that demands urgent action.

IPS UN Bureau

Most free trade advocates falsely claim that comparative advantage ensures developmental gains from trade liberalisation. Mainstream trade theory does not promise that partial trade liberalisation guarantees optimal international specialisation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Why should developing countries specialise in producing and exporting mineral or agricultural primary commodities? After all, most economists recognise the greater gains in growth, employment, and income from dynamic modern activities, especially manufacturing.

Comparative advantage supposedly gained by trade liberalisation supposedly ensures gains from international specialisation. However, tropical agriculture has instead experienced falling relative prices rather than higher-value-added secondary and tertiary activities in the North.

As Hans Singer and Raul Prebisch showed in 1950, export prices for primary commodities have fallen much more over the long term relative to the prices of manufactures. Bilge Erten has shown these trends continuing into the early 21st century.

Evidence since the late 20th century suggests that the prices of manufactured goods produced by developing countries have fallen relative to those of more sophisticated, high-tech goods from more developed economies.

Intellectual property rents
Due to intense competition among developing countries producing ‘generic’ manufactures, developed-country firms secure higher rents from intellectual property rights (IPRs) – namely, ‘surplus’ from monopoly power so conferred – on their manufactured exports.

The latter are priced higher due to the ‘exclusive’ monopoly power protected by IPRs and ‘branding’ strengthened by transnational law with the establishment of the multilateral World Trade Organization and related law on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS).

In fact, the prices of generic primary commodities and ‘unbranded’ manufactures have fallen due to more intense competition. In contrast, the prices of ‘exclusive’ products, due to monopoly IPRs and transnational corporate branding, remain higher.

However, such rents do not accrue to mass-produced generic products, whether primary commodities or manufactures made with easily accessible materials and production techniques, subject to intense market competition.

The last decade-long commodity ‘super-cycle’ price boom, which ended around 2004, generated windfall earnings and investible capital. While it undoubtedly lifted many boats for growth, if not development, it did not contradict longer-term trends.

Biased theory
The economic literature on development, trade, and monopolistic competition recognises the possibility of increasing – not just diminishing – returns to scale in manufacturing, enabling average costs to fall.

Such gains from trade are not from one-time ‘static’ improvements in resource allocation. Instead, these benefits stem from dynamic changes driven by production expansion, specialisation, and differentiation for larger markets.

Potential gains from greater external market access can be significant, but only if building on an existing industrial base, capacity and capabilities. Proactive support through appropriate industrial, investment, and technology policies can be crucial.

This pragmatic developmental approach to trade policy contradicts the neoclassical Heckscher-Ohlin ‘pure’ trade theory, the received conventional wisdom invoked by contemporary advocates of trade liberalisation.

Some Keynesian economists promoted balance-of-payments-constrained growth. Cross-border flows of goods and services are determined by the level and growth rate of economic activity, with the exchange rate determining relative prices.

This approach, implying fewer gains from trade, is rejected by trade liberalisation advocates. Developing countries’ gains from specialisation are reduced by falling relative prices, with consumers benefiting from productivity gains at the expense of producers.

If developing-country firms do not manufacture products at productivity levels comparable to those in developed countries, claims of trade gains from consumers’ ‘love of variety’ become quite irrelevant.

Agricultural trade liberalisation
The Western push for agricultural trade liberalisation sought to eliminate tariffs to ensure food security while ignoring subsidies that developed countries could afford.

Although agricultural export subsidies have been largely eliminated, OECD food producers continue to benefit from production subsidies, thereby enabling productivity and trade gains.

As many developing countries became net importers of subsidised agribusiness exports from OECD exporters, price increases due to subsidy withdrawal hurt consumers, especially in developing countries.

Comparable gains in developing-country agriculture have often been modest due to the decline in infrastructure and support services, especially after the imposition of the ‘neoliberal’ Washington Consensus by the West in the 1980s.

The increasing private foreign corporate domination of agricultural research, development, and extension has also significantly reduced net gains to developing-country smallholder farmers.

Neoliberal reforms, including structural adjustment programmes, have reduced, contracted out or privatised government and public-sector alternatives. This raised the costs of credit, marketing, and inputs, including seeds, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, machinery and fuel.

While trade liberalisation of manufactured imports eroded the policy space needed for investment and technology policies for development, agricultural trade liberalisation has undermined ‘food security’ in most developing countries.

Thus, many African net food-exporting nations became net food importers in the 1980s, following the neoliberal reforms imposed by structural adjustment programmes on indebted nations.

IPS UN Bureau

Central Asian states mark the 20th anniversary of the Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty with a joint foreign ministers' statement Credit: Kazakhstan MFA

By Katsuhiro Asagiri
TOKYO, Japan, Sep 11 2026 (IPS)

Twenty years after five Central Asian states signed a landmark treaty banning nuclear weapons across their region, their foreign ministers have used the anniversary to warn that faltering arms-control agreements, nuclear modernization and deepening international mistrust are placing global security under growing strain.

Central Asia Nuclear Free Zones

The ministers described the treaty as a symbol of Central Asia’s transformation from a region where nuclear weapons were once tested and deployed into one of the leaders of global disarmament efforts.

That history gives the anniversary weight. Semipalatinsk — now Semey — was the Soviet Union’s principal nuclear testing ground, where 456 tests were conducted between 1949 and 1989 across a site roughly the size of Belgium. An estimated 1.5 million people were affected by the fallout, and the health consequences have passed through three generations. Kazakhstan closed the site on August 29, 1991.

Semipalatinsk Former Nuclear Weapon Test site. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri

Warning After Another Failed NPT Review

The anniversary arrives at a difficult moment for the global nuclear order. The ministers reaffirmed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as the cornerstone of efforts to prevent proliferation and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons, but expressed regret that its Eleventh Review Conference, held in New York from April 27 to May 22 this year, ended without a substantive outcome — the third consecutive review conference to close without consensus, following those of 2015 and 2022.

They voiced particular concern over insufficient progress toward disarmament under Article VI of the NPT, the cessation of key arms-control arrangements and an alarming trend toward the modernization of nuclear arsenals, placing special responsibility on nuclear-weapon states and calling for new, verifiable mechanisms to prevent a renewed arms race.

Even as the review process stalled, the zones drew attention as one of the regime’s more durable achievements. At a Kazakh-hosted event on the margins of the conference, Robin Geiß, Director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, credited the Central Asian zone with a distinctive contribution in linking security to development, environmental protection and public health, while Mark Melamed of the Nuclear Threat Initiative cautioned that the zones’ achievements cannot be assumed to endure.

CTBT at 30 — Still Not in Force

On September 24, the CTBT will mark 30 years since it opened for signature. Yet it has still not entered into force. The Central Asian states called for its earliest possible entry into force and urged all states to refrain from any action that could undermine the norm against nuclear explosive testing.

The appeal follows a joint statement issued on August 29 — the anniversary of the test site’s closure, observed by the United Nations as the International Day against Nuclear Tests — in which Kazakh Foreign Minister Yermek Kosherbayev and Robert Floyd, Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, urged renewed action to end testing permanently. Much of the treaty’s machinery already functions despite its legal limbo: 308 facilities have been certified, bringing the International Monitoring System to more than 90 percent completion.

More than 300 International Monitoring System (IMS) facilities certified out of the 337 the CTBTO has planned are already in operation. Credit: CTBTO

The ministers also welcomed the 2014 signing by the five NPT-recognized nuclear-weapon states of the protocol providing negative security assurances to the zone. Four have ratified it; the ministers expressed hope that the United States would complete its ratification.

A Regional Model in a Fragmenting Nuclear Order

The declaration went beyond treaties to emphasize disarmament education, backing continued observance of the International Day for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Awareness — a Kyrgyz initiative marked annually on March 5, the date the NPT entered into force — and stressing the importance of involving young people.

Nuclear-weapon-free zones cannot substitute for the disarmament obligations of states that possess nuclear arsenals. But the Semipalatinsk Treaty demonstrates that non-nuclear states are not merely spectators in the global nuclear order: by acting collectively they can create binding regional norms and press nuclear-weapon states for security assurances.

Central Asia has also shown that such zones can become more than geographic prohibitions. The five states have signed memoranda of understanding with the African Commission on Nuclear Energy and with the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, which administers the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, and Kazakhstan hosted in Astana in August 2024 the second meeting of representatives of all existing zones. The limits are equally clear: three decades of advocacy have not produced a zone in the Middle East, which the ministers again called for.

Equally important is the link between diplomacy and human experience. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, which helped drive the test site’s closure, showed that public pressure could move nuclear policy — and for Kazakhstan, cooperation with civil society has since been less a supplement to disarmament diplomacy than part of its foundation.

September 8 carries another anniversary. On that date in 1957, before 50,000 young people gathered at a stadium in Yokohama, Josei Toda, second president of the Soka Gakkai, issued a declaration calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, condemning them as an absolute evil that threatened the right of people everywhere to exist and entrusting their abolition to the next generation. The peace activity of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a lay Buddhist organization, traces its origin to that declaration.

A Group photo of participants of the regional conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and nuclear-free-zone in Central Asia held on August 29, 2023. Credit: Jibek Joly TV Channel

Official portrait of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Credit: President of the Republic of Kazakhstan

For Japanese readers the connection is direct. Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced the use of nuclear weapons in war; Semipalatinsk experienced the consequences of testing them. During his visit to Japan in December 2025, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev warned at United Nations University in Tokyo that nuclear risks were rising again, invoking all three names in a call for concrete steps to reduce nuclear danger.

Twenty years after the treaty was signed, its significance may lie not only in what Central Asia chose to reject, but in what it has continued to build — a regional security architecture that seeks to make nuclear weapons less central, less legitimate and, ultimately, unnecessary.

Note: This article is brought to you by　INPS Japan in collaboration with Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: Conny Odengrund / Wiki Commons

By Jordan Ryan
Sep 11 2026 (IPS)

 
Late in August I stood at Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave in Uppsala. It is a quiet place, a long way from New York and from the wars the United Nations exists to prevent.

He died sixty-five years ago this month, on 18 September 1961, in an aircraft crash near Ndola, in what is now Zambia. He was fifty-six, on his way to seek a ceasefire in the Congo, where the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga had drawn a newly independent country into conflict and great-power rivalry.

Leaving the cemetery, I found myself thinking about the office he held and about a practice he helped build that the organisation has praised ever since but never fully sustained.

Hammarskjöld treated preventive diplomacy as a working method. He travelled repeatedly into crises, used the Secretary-General’s office when local conflicts threatened to become arenas of great-power rivalry, and kept an independent United Nations presence where member states could not or would not go. He negotiated before positions hardened and violence became harder to stop.

Suez, Lebanon and the Congo were very different crises, but he approached them as exercises of the same craft. He did not always succeed. The point was not that prevention always worked. It was that he regarded it as part of the job.

Preventive diplomacy has been restated as a priority many times since. Boutros Boutros-Ghali gave it a doctrine in An Agenda for Peace. Kofi Annan strengthened early-warning and mediation capacity. Ban Ki-moon issued the first Secretary-General’s report devoted to preventive diplomacy in 2011. António Guterres made the case again in A New Agenda for Peace. Member states restated it in the Pact for the Future, and the UN80 Initiative is reviewing how mandates are designed, implemented and assessed.

Doctrine is not what is missing.

Prevention remains politically difficult because success is hard to prove. A crisis that does not happen leaves no ruins, no displaced population and no peacekeeping budget against which the cost of prevention can be measured. Governments that will pay heavily once violence has escalated are often reluctant to fund the diplomacy that might have kept it from escalating.

The problem is also institutional. The United Nations is often better at identifying risk than at acting on it early. Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sahel, Myanmar and Gaza all illustrate, in different ways, how warning signs can accumulate while political space for preventive action narrows. Information moves through the system, but knowledge does not create an obligation to respond.

That is the problem the next Secretary-General will inherit.

Member states choosing António Guterres’s successor have asked useful questions about gender, regional representation, management and reform. They have also asked about prevention. Candidates have described it as a central responsibility of the office, proposed stronger mediation capacity and invoked Article 99 of the Charter, which allows the Secretary-General to bring to the Security Council’s attention any matter that may threaten international peace and security.

The harder question is what the office will do when warning signs are mounting, information is moving through the United Nations system, and the Security Council is unable or unwilling to act.

Hammarskjöld confronted that problem in a different era. In 1960, during the Congo crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded his resignation and proposed replacing the Secretary-General with a three-person ‘troika’ representing competing political blocs.

Hammarskjöld refused.

“It is very easy to resign; it is not so easy to stay on,” he told the General Assembly on 3 October 1960. “It is very easy to bow to the wish of a big Power. It is another matter to resist.”

Earlier in the same statement he had explained whom the United Nations was for.

“It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big Powers who need the United Nations for their protection,” he said. “It is all the others.”

That remains the strongest argument for an independent Secretary-General.

The major powers possess other instruments. Smaller and middle powers have fewer. When the Security Council works, the Secretary-General is one actor among several. When it does not, the office may still provide a channel for mediation, bring neglected crises into international view and give political weight to countries that cannot command attention through military or economic power.

That is why Hammarskjöld’s example matters now. He answered Khrushchev in public, and he could do so because of what he had already done in Suez, in Lebanon and in the Congo. His authority came from judgement, discretion and a willingness to keep working when powerful governments wanted him to stop.

Nor should prevention depend on finding another exceptional individual.

Sixty-five years after Ndola, the better tribute is to finish some of the work Hammarskjöld left behind: choose a Secretary-General prepared to exercise the office’s independence while prevention still has a chance to work, and give that office the political and institutional support to do so.

The great powers can still look after themselves.

The United Nations still matters most to “all the others.”

The author at Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave in Uppsala.

Related articles:

A Hundred Dollars for War, One for Peace
Governing the Ungovernable
When Destruction Becomes Policy: What the Munich Security Report Reveals About the Future of Global Governance

Jordan Ryan is a Senior Consultant to the Folke Bernadotte Academy and Senior Counsel (Social Impact) for Hamilton Advisors. He is also a former Vice President for Peace Programs at The Carter Center, where he led strategic planning and implementation of peacebuilding initiatives worldwide from 2015-2018.

This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished from the original with their permission.

IPS UN Bureau

UN staff members at the SDG Action Zone outside UN Headquarters in New York, 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

By Samuel King and Inés M. Pousadela
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 9 2026 (IPS)

When the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) ended in New York in July, it took two recorded votes for states to pass a ministerial declaration that, until recently, would have been adopted without controversy. Uruguay, speaking for the Group of 77 developing countries plus China, pushed through the deletion of a reference to the agreement reached at the COP28 climate summit. Israel forced a vote on a paragraph about self-determination for people under occupation. Russia dissociated itself from the passage on peace and security. The wrangling revealed the extent to which the consensus that in 2015 saw all 193 UN states agree the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a common blueprint to end poverty, tackle climate change and build accountable institutions by 2030 – has been eroded.

The problem goes beyond this latest session. Progress is tracked through Voluntary National Reviews, the self-assessments states present at the Forum. Thirty-six countries did so this year. But the process asks nothing of states beyond showing up. There’s no independent verification of data, and governments aren’t required to consult civil society. States that restrict civic space at home face no consequences. Seventeen of the 36 states that presented reviews this year are rated by the CIVICUS Monitor as having repressed or closed civic space.

A forum built to hold states accountable has become a stage on which the least accountable governments may perform compliance, while the civil society groups meant to keep them honest are locked out of the room.

In the room but not at the table

Where civil society can act, it supports delivery of the SDGs. Sustained advocacy delivered Colombia’s ban on child marriage in 2025 and continues to drive the campaign against female genital mutilation in The Gambia. In Nepal, local organisations have made monitoring the goals more inclusive by supplying data on excluded communities that official statistics miss.

Yet the HLPF gives civil society little formal standing. Civil society was in the building all week — CIVICUS co-organised sessions on civic space and the SDGs, supported a global forum on the future of multilateralism and ran a workshop on the post-2030 agenda — but it didn’t get a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Showing up can also be dangerous. In 2025, most civil society representatives from El Salvador withdrew over fears of reprisals. Activists elsewhere describe reprisals for exposing gaps between official reporting and reality on the ground, often with little practical support from the UN despite guidelines that are supposed to protect them.

SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions is meant to be the foundation for the other 16 goals, and its Target 16.10 commits states to protecting fundamental freedoms. But it’s routinely ignored. The CIVICUS Monitor has tracked year-on-year regression in civic space conditions since the SDGs came into effect. Where civil society can’t operate freely, it’s no surprise if the goals it should help implement and monitor aren’t being met.

Falling short

The UN Secretary-General’s 2026 report on the SDGs made clear how delivery is falling short. It found that out of 139 targets with reliable trend data, only 15 per cent are on track, while a further 15 per cent have regressed below their 2015 baselines.

But rather than take responsibility for their failures, powerful states are using the lack of progress as a pretext to demand less ambition. The USA has dismissed the SDGs as an infringement on national sovereignty. Speaking at an event during the Forum, Russia’s representative said that the goals’ ambitions had proven ‘quite far away from reality’, blaming the design of the goals rather than states’ failure to deliver. For many states, an ambitious rights-based agenda is no longer a promise to keep, but a commitment to be backed away from.

Yet evidence suggests that when political will exists, change can come. The UN’s Asia-Pacific review presented at the HLPF showed that the number of children in child labour fell from 49 to 28 million between 2020 and 2025. What holds back achievement of the SDGs is not flawed design, but political choices.

As negotiations begin on what comes after the goals’ 2030 deadline, some states and UN officials favour extending the current goals, on the reasonable logic that reopening them in today’s political climate risks producing something weaker. But the framework agreed in 2015 wasn’t built for a world of growing authoritarianism, accelerating climate breakdown, coordinated backlash against gender equality, increasing militarisation, collapsing multilateral cooperation and rapid technological development. A post-2030 agenda will have to take account of all this, along with the financial strain on the multilateral system.

Forus, a network of national civil society platforms, has mapped three scenarios for the post-2030 process – continuity, reset or fragmentation – and insists that whichever prevails, accountability, civic space and financing reform must sit at the centre. Several upcoming moments will reveal the direction of travel. Next year’s Commission on the Status of Women and Economic and Social Council’s Youth Forum, along with the SDG Summit and the 2028 Pact for the Future review, all offer opportunities that must be seized to bring civil society into the process, identify where implementation is failing and match ambition with achievement.

Samuel King is a researcher with the Horizon Europe-funded research project ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Observing some of the changes over the last year and a half in the Government of the USA, one question that comes to mind is whether the greatest democracy in the world turning into a dictatorship? And, if so, how is this possible in a country with one of the most articulate and thoughtful constitutions ever written –a constitution which clearly sets out checks and balances precisely to avoid undue concentration of power.

Daud Khan

First an amusing anecdote from the past on the topic on the US Constitution.

Kurt Friedrich Gödel – mathematician, cosmologist, and philosopher – was one of the greatest minds of the last century. After the takeover of Austria by Hitler, Gödel, who was an Austrian national, was targeted by the Nazis. In 1939 he moved to the USA and ended up at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton where his good friend, Einstein, was based.

After the war, in 1947, Gödel decided to apply for US citizenship. This involved, inter alia, an examination on the Constitution of the USA. As could be expected of someone of his intellect, Gödel did not study the document as others would – trying to memorize the main points and maybe reading some commentaries. He made a careful and thorough review and found what he called an “inner contradiction”. He told Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern, another friend at the Institute, about this flaw. A flaw that would allow the U.S.A. to legally become a fascist state!

At the citizenship exam, presided over by a Federal judge, and with Morgenstern and Einstein as witnesses, everything went smoothly until Gödel was asked by the judge where he was from. Gödel explained that he was from Austria, a country that had been a republic, but had a constitution that allowed it to become a dictatorship.

The judge commented that thankfully this could not happen in the USA. due to its constitution. Gödel response was basically that it could happen and that he could “prove it”. Luckily, the judge was perceptive enough to understand what was going on – that this clearly brilliant man was going to take him into a discussion that would prove complex and complicated. He did not pursue the matter of the Constitution any further, moved on to other routine questions, came up with positive response to the application for citizenship.

Gödel never wrote up his findings on the “inner contradiction”; neither did Morgenstern or Einstein. Most likely, the inner contradiction had to with Article V of the Constitution that sets out the procedures for changing the constitution – but without setting any substantive limits. So progressive change in Article V could change the constitution to make the USA a dictatorship.

But coming to the present.

I have just finished the book “Regime Change” by Haberman and Swan. According to the authors, President Trump has managed to bend the entire Government of the USA, and its institutions, to implementing his wishes. The House of Representatives and the Senate no longer act as a separate pillar of Government, providing checks and balances on the executive power of the President; likewise, the courts, which have progressively been filled with Trump nominees, may hem and haw, but have largely not provided a firm barrier to him. The top universities in the world, such as Columbia, have caved in to his demands. Law firms have forked out millions to stay onside and media companies have taken off the air the shows that criticized or made fun of President Trump. Even iconic cultural institution such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Kennedy Center have had to make changes at his behest.

Needless to say, there has been pushback. The Supreme Court struck down several initiatives, such as those on tariffs. However, the administration has been creative to work around these, using laws and regulations designed for other times and other situations. Others have also resisted. Harvard University lead a spirited fight against the bullying by the President’s henchmen; several famous artists refused to perform at the Kennedy Center after it was renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center; and many journalists, despite repeated insults and demeaning comments from President at press conferences, continue to write articles and OpEds that criticize the President’s actions and decisions

But despite the opposition, it is difficult to ignore how easily authoritarianism has taken root in such an open and liberal society as the USA. And, it has been done not by changing the constitutions, not by overthrowing institutions, and not by a coup d’état. Rather it has been done by browbeating, insulting and bullying people who run the very institution that should set limits on Presidential action.

And this leads to the next question: How was it possible that people who are among richest, the most powerful, the best informed, and the most qualified, not only allowed themselves to be subject to such harassment but actually went on to do what was asked of them? Was it that they wanted to accumulate more wealth and power? Was it the fear of being excluded from the “power circles” that matter?

Whatever, the reason, surely they are aware of what they are doing? Surely they understand that their actions ware undermining democracy, liberalism and the rule of law – values that underpinned the domestic and international order that led to an unprecedented period of growth and peace. Surely they know that silence and not speaking is tantamount to complicity?

Daud Khan is a retired UN staff based in Rome. He has degrees in economics from LSE and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from Imperial College London.

IPS UN Bureau