Organized violence, be it politically or criminally motivated, poses the most prominent risk to the socio-economic development of a country. Some 1.5 billion people worldwide are affected by violence, a disturbing number, revealed by the World Bank in “The World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development”. The Report contains a major shift in focus…
ESG
Conflict Resolution (II): A Risk Evaluation Tool for Mediators
The second part of the article on conflict resolution draws the conclusions from the previously developed argument, that mitigating the risks of peace negotiations, as perceived by the conflict parties, is the key to ending protracted conflict (see Conflict Resolution (I): Peace-Making and Risk-Taking). The risk evaluation tool introduced below, aims to identify and assess…
Conflict Resolution (I): Peace-making and Risk-taking
Parties who are involved in a protracted conflict must take risks in order to be able to settle their dispute. This argument may seem counter-intuitive at first, but consider the Middle East conflict as the perhaps most notorious case. For many years of on-and-off peace talks, both the Israeli government and the representation of the…
The Political Risk Analyst (II)
Political Risk Analysis is the child of two parents: political economy and area studies. Both academic fields are, per se, interdisciplinary and multifold in their approaches to studying the interrelations between political, economic, social and cultural developments in specific countries and regions, and are therefore a perfect match. As outlined in the first part of…
Food Security within the Global Risk Matrix
The rules of political survival call for the governments meeting at the G20 summit in Paris on February 18 to improve food security. While the scandal of almost one billion people worldwide affected by chronic hunger persists, it is the political risk of food riots that might give the matter a new priority. Various factors…
Regime Change by the People
The popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt pose the fundamental question of how best to analyze regime change driven by the power of the people. This article explores dynamic patterns of behavior both on part of civil protest movements and targeted autocratic regimes. These patterns of interaction rule the confrontation and its ultimate outcome, and…
WEF’s Global Risks 2011: New Risk Clusters in Focus
In the lead-up to its annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum (WEF) issued the report Global Risks 2011. The report is set in the context of the WEF’s new platform, the Risk Response Network. The organization’s proclaimed objective to translate analysis into the development of practical solutions for the planet’s future, gives…
The Corrosion of Democracy
What has happened to the idea and practice of democracy? What many vigilant observers of countries and political systems might have concluded from their daily analysis of political events and processes, has now been confirmed as a global pattern. Democratization has not only come to a halt but has been in decline across the world…
The Shift in Climate Policy
The UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, which was concluded on 10 December 2010, ended on a positive note. All parties, including industrialized and developing countries, agreed on the general objective of low-emissions policies in order to keep global temperature rise below two degree Celsius. Mitigation of global warming remains an important risk strategy.…
