Southern middle powers and the liberal international order: The options for Brazil and South Africa

The current challenges facing the liberal international order suggest there is greater need for reassessing the roles that different categories of states may perform in support of this order. Middle powers appear as leading candidates for a supportive role to the liberal order due to their historical commitment to internationalism, coalition building with like-minded democracies and activism within multilateral institutions. Such orientation, however, is questionable for Southern middle powers that often appear ambivalent in their foreign policies, restricted in their collaboration with other democracies and selective in their multilateral initiatives. This article discusses the cases of Brazil and South Africa to examine the current options for Southern middle powers and concludes that despite certain limitations, South Africa is, overall, closer to assuming a supportive stance towards the liberal international order and its institutions.

Foreign, Security, and Defence Policy

This chapter explores the roots of Irish foreign, security, and defence policy, placing them in the context of a deeply pragmatic approach to public policy. Those roots are defined in terms of nationalism, solidarity, and global justice, which are themselves deep markers within Irish political culture. Ireland’s pragmatic approach is then grounded in a meticulously crafted rhetoric surrounding key foreign policy priorities but an associated reluctance to devote substantial resources towards these foreign policy and defence goals. Together, this gives rise to an assessment that the interests of smaller and less powerful states such as Ireland are best defended within legitimate, strong, and effective multilateral institutions such as the UN—even as the state continues to face adaptation challenges arising from a deepening foreign, security, and defence policy engagement within the EU.

Part VIII Compliance, Implementation, and Effectiveness, Ch.54 Financial Assistance

This chapter studies the important role of financial assistance in furthering environmental protection. Financial assistance is composed of a complex mosaic of financial mechanisms and sources, which are linked to and affected by global conventions, multilateral institutions, bilateral aid, and private sector investment. Moreover, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities has provided a specific rationale for the provision of financial assistance within multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and through various financial mechanisms. Through the provision of financial assistance, developed countries contribute to covering the incremental costs of protecting the global environment incurred by developing countries. The functions of financial assistance include, inter alia, capacity-building, disaster relief, financing of pollution control equipment, and compliance assistance. Among these various targets, capacity-building has received an important political emphasis. The chapter then outlines the different types and sources of financial assistance, as well as its aim and nature, before analysing the legal structure of financial mechanisms.

Military AI Cooperation Toolbox: Modernizing Defense Science and Technology Partnerships for the Digital Age

The Department of Defense can already begin applying its existing international science and technology agreements, global scientific networks, and role in multilateral institutions to stimulate digital defense cooperation. This issue brief frames this collection of options as a military AI cooperation toolbox, finding that the available tools offer valuable pathways to align policies, advance research, development, and testing, and to connect personnel–albeit in more structured ways in the Euro-Atlantic than in the Indo-Pacific.

Reimagining the World Bank: Global Public Goods in an Age of Crisis

For some time now, there has been a push for the World Bank to shift its focus toward global public goods (GPGs). These are goods that, once delivered, can be unrestrictedly consumed by most—if not all—countries on the planet. Nor are their benefits rivalrous. Moreover, the production of GPGs cannot be left to markets or individual countries, as these have suboptimal incentives to act. In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the concept of GPGs has seen a revival of sorts, with the pandemic not only striking just as multilateralism was at its lowest ebb, but also serving as irrefutable proof that the world needs international collaboration now more than ever. Multilateral institutions, and in particular the World Bank—a leading global institution with global membership—can rightfully be regarded as a possible solution to many global challenges. Based on interviews conducted with World Bank senior staff, as well as numerous experts, this article discusses arguments in favor of such a strategic shift. While there are legitimate claims for the Bank becoming a full-fledged provider of GPGs, the institution’s historical roots and operational constraints make this an unlikely prospect.

New USAID head will strengthen its foreign policy role

Significance The choice of Power, a former ambassador to the UN, indicates that the Biden administration intends a robust approach to international assistance that will incorporate her background in human rights. The appointment has largely been welcomed in foreign policy circles. Impacts The Biden administration will use aid programmes in its efforts to re-establish ties with partners and multilateral institutions. Congressional control of appropriations for the agency will limit any major increase in levels of foreign assistance. The breadth of issues within its remit means USAID risks spreading its resources too thinly to achieve the desired impact.

India's multi-alignment management and the Russia–India–China (RIC) triangle

In its Eurasian diplomacy toward Russia and China, India has preferred to engage these states bilaterally and through the Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa (BRICS) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) multilateral alignments. By contrast, India views the Russia–India–China (RIC) triangle as a less effective mechanism. However, despite its ongoing militarized crisis with China in the spring/summer of 2020, India surprisingly agreed to participate in a meeting of RIC foreign ministers and initiate RIC defence ministers' engagements. India also initiated the revival of RIC summits in 2018. This article analyzes the drivers for India's recent shift toward enhancing RIC. Drawing upon Indian policy statements and alignment documents, the article firstly argues that India generates policy agenda overlaps across RIC, BRICS and SCO, which facilitate forum-shopping. Introducing the case-study of Indian counterterrorism diplomacy across the three alignments, the article secondly argues that Indian dissatisfaction with its progress in advancing a security policy agenda within one grouping leads it to refocus on building this agenda in alternative alignments. This article contributes to conceptualizing multi-alignment management, while providing new insights into Indian relations with Russia and China within multilateral institutions and diplomacy in the era of regime complexity.

Humanitarian need drives multilateral disaster aid

As the climate changes, human livelihoods will increasingly be threatened by extreme weather events. To provide adequate disaster relief, states extensively rely on multilateral institutions, in particular the United Nations (UN). However, the determinants of this multilateral disaster aid channeled through the UN are poorly understood. To fill this gap, we examine the determinants of UN disaster aid using a dataset on UN aid covering almost 2,000 climate-related disasters occurring between 2006 and 2017. We make two principal contributions. First, we add to research on disaster impacts by linking existing disaster data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) to a meteorological reanalysis. We generate a uniquely global hazard severity measure that is comparable across different climate-related disaster types, and assess and bolster measurement validity of EM-DAT climate-related disasters. Second, by combining these data with social data on aid and its correlates, we contribute to the literature on aid disbursements. We show that UN disaster aid is primarily shaped by humanitarian considerations, rather than by strategic donor interests. These results are supported by a series of regression and out-of-sample prediction analyses and appear consistent with the view that multilateral institutions are able to shield aid allocation decisions from particular state interests to ensure that aid is motivated by need.

Ideology and International Institutions

Today's liberal international institutional order is being challenged by the rising power of illiberal states and by domestic political changes inside liberal states. Against such a backdrop, this book offers a broader understanding of international institutions by arguing that the politics of multilateralism has always been based on ideology and ideological divisions. The book develops new theories and measures to make sense of past and current challenges to multilateral institutions. It presents a straightforward theoretical framework that analyzes multilateral institutions as attempts by states to shift the policies of others toward their preferred ideological positions. It then measures how states have positioned themselves in global ideological conflicts during the past seventy-five years. Empirical chapters illustrate how ideological struggles shape the design of international institutions, membership in international institutions, and the critical role of multilateral institutions in militarized conflicts. The book also examines populism's rise and other ideological threats to the liberal international order. It explores the essential ways in which ideological contestation has influenced world politics.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's argument that much, though not all, distributive conflict over multilateral institutions takes place in a low-dimensional ideological space. Even if distributive conflict over institutions is not always about ideology, the geopolitical implications often are. The point of this book is not just to argue that ideological contestation matters but also to offer measures, a modeling framework, and empirical illustrations. The theoretical framework helps in better understanding how institutional commitments hang together and may unravel together as challenges to the liberal institutional order mount. If multilateralism is distinct because it advances general principles, then one must understand challenges to the multilateral order in terms of domestic and international challenges to those principles. The chapter then presents a brief illustration of the World Trade Organization.