A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmental organizations, but some are semi-autonomous agencies within government, and some are associated with particular political parties, businesses or the military. Think tanks are often funded by individual donations, with many also accepting government grants.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a Eurasian political, economic, international security and defence organization established by China and Russia in 2001. It is the world's largest regional organization in terms of geographic scope and population, covering approximately 80% of the area of Eurasia and 40% of the world population. As of 2021, its combined GDP was around 20% of global GDP.
National security, or national defence, is the security and defence of a sovereign state, including its citizens, economy, and institutions, which is regarded as a duty of government. Originally conceived as protection against military attack, national security is widely understood to include also non-military dimensions, such as the security from terrorism, minimization of crime, economic security, energy security, environmental security, food security, and cyber-security. Similarly, national security risks include, in addition to the actions of other nation states, action by violent non-state actors, by narcotic cartels, organized crime, by multinational corporations, and also the effects of natural disasters.
A great power is a sovereign state that is recognized as having the ability and expertise to exert its influence on a global scale. Great powers characteristically possess military and economic strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence, which may cause middle or small powers to consider the great powers' opinions before taking actions of their own. International relations theorists have posited that great power status can be characterized into power capabilities, spatial aspects, and status dimensions.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is an international institute based in Stockholm. It was founded in 1966 and provides data, analysis and recommendations for armed conflict, military expenditure and arms trade as well as disarmament and arms control. The research is based on open sources and is directed to decision-makers, researchers, media and the interested public.
Jyotindra Nath Dixit was an Indian diplomat, who served as Foreign Secretary (1991–1994), the top bureaucrat in the Ministry of External Affairs. At the time of his death, he was the National Security Adviser (India) to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and is mostly remembered for his role as a negotiator in disputes with Pakistan and China.
Global governance refers to institutions that coordinate the behavior of transnational actors, facilitate cooperation, resolve disputes, and alleviate collective action problems. Global governance broadly entails making, monitoring, and enforcing rules. Within global governance, a variety of types of actors – not just states – exercise power. Governance is thus broader than government.
The School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) is the international affairs and public policy school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university located in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. SIPA offers Master of International Affairs (MIA) and Master of Public Administration (MPA) degrees in a range of fields, as well as the Executive MPA and PhD program in Sustainable Development.
The European Centre for Development Policy Management, more commonly known as ECDPM, is a think tank founded in 1986. It is headquartered in Maastricht, Netherlands and has a second office in Brussels, Belgium.
Strategic Foresight Group (SFG) is a think tank based in India that works on global issues. It was established in 2002.
The East Asian Community (EAC) is a proposed trade bloc for the East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) countries that may arise out of either ASEAN Plus Three or the East Asia Summit (EAS).
Water politics in the Middle East deals with control of the water resources of the Middle East, an arid region where issues of the use, supply, control, and allocation of water are of central economic importance. Politically contested watersheds include the Tigris–Euphrates river system which drains to the south-east through Iraq into the Persian Gulf, the Nile basin which drains northward through Egypt into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and the Jordan River basin which flows into the Dead Sea, a land-locked and highly saline sea bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel to the west.
The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) is one of the five United Nations Research and Training Institutes. The institute was founded in 1968 to assist the international community in formulating and implementing improved policies in the field of crime prevention and criminal justice. Its work currently focuses on Goal 16 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, that is centred on promoting peaceful, just and inclusive societies, free from crime and violence.
Cost of Conflict is a tool which attempts to calculate the price of conflict to the human race. The idea is to examine this cost, not only in terms of the deaths and casualties and the economic costs borne by the people involved, but also the social, developmental, environmental and strategic costs of conflict. In most cases organizations measure and analyze the economic and broader development costs of conflict. While this conventional method of assessing the impact of conflict is fairly in-depth, it does not provide a comprehensive overview of a country or region embroiled in conflict. One of the earliest studies assessing the true cost of conflict on a variety of parameters was commissioned by Saferworld and compiled by Michael Cranna. Strategic Foresight Group has taken this science to a new level by developing a multi-disciplinary methodology, that has been applied to most parts of the world. A key benefit of using this tool is to encourage people to look at conflict in new ways and to widen public discussion of the subject, and to bring new insights to the debate on global security.
The Group of Two is a hypothetical and an informal grouping made up of the United States of America and People's Republic of China that was first proposed by C. Fred Bergsten. While the original concept had a strong economic focus, more recent iterations have a more all-encompassing focus. This is the result of the concept gaining more traction with members of the Obama Administration and foreign policy establishment who came to recognize the increasing importance of America's relationship with China. Prominent advocates of the grouping include former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, historian Niall Ferguson, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick and former chief economist Justin Yifu Lin.
The capitalist peace, or capitalist peace theory, or commercial peace, posits that market openness contributes to more peaceful behavior among states, and that developed market-oriented economies are less likely to engage in conflict with one another. Along with the democratic peace theory and institutionalist arguments for peace, the commercial peace forms part of the Kantian tripod for peace. Prominent mechanisms for the commercial peace revolve around how capitalism, trade interdependence, and capital interdependence raise the costs of warfare, incentivize groups to lobby against war, make it harder for leaders to go to war, and reduce the economic benefits of conquest.
Multistakeholder governance is a practice of governance that employs bringing multiple stakeholders together to participate in dialogue, decision making, and implementation of responses to jointly perceived problems. The principle behind such a structure is that if enough input is provided by multiple types of actors involved in a question, the eventual consensual decision gains more legitimacy, and can be more effectively implemented than a traditional state-based response. While the evolution of multistakeholder governance is occurring principally at the international level, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are domestic analogues.
The Brazzaville Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation based in London. Its goal is to develop initiatives, primarily in Africa, in the fields of conflict prevention and resolution, development, the environment and conservation and to bring countries together in peaceful cooperation. It was first registered in the United Kingdom with the Charity Commission in 2015 and granted special consultative status by the UN Economic and Social Council in 2018.
Janaina Tewaney Mencomo is a Panamanian politician. She has served as foreign minister of Panama since October 2022. She previously served as Minister of Government of Panama from March 2020 through October 2022.
