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This article was originally published by the Oxford Research Group in February 2019.
Despite organised crime being recognised as a serious threat to international peace and security, UN missions still lack clear mandates to tackle the problem.
Several studies and UN reports over the past two decades have demonstrated how armed groups — including extremist movements — resort to illicit trafficking to finance their activities and detailed how organised crime can be an important driver of conflict and instability, particularly when it penetrates and/or co-opts States institutions at the local and national levels. Organised crime, then, is recognised as a serious threat to international peace and security.
This article was originally published by the NATO Defense College (NDC) in February 2019.
The unprecedented pace of technological change brought about by the fourth Industrial Revolution offers enormous opportunities but also entails some risks. This is evident when looking at discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and big data (BD). Many analysts, scholars and policymakers are in fact worried that, beside efficiency and new economic opportunities, these technologies may also promote international instability: for instance, by leading to a swift redistribution of wealth around the world; a rapid diffusion of military capabilities or by heightening the risks of military escalation and conflict. Such concerns are understandable. Throughout history, technological change has at times exerted similar effects. Additionally, human beings seem to have an innate fear that autonomous machines might, at some point, revolt and threaten humanity – as illustrated in popular culture, from Hebrew tradition’s Golem to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, from Karel Čapek’s Robot to Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and the movie Terminator.
This article was originally published by ETH News on 8 March 2019.
Many small, local steps may lead more sustainably to peace than big dreams of the perfect state. This principle lies at the heart of an innovative approach to conflict mediation developed by a Kenyan mediator and an ETH researcher.
This graphic charts global emissions scenarios based on existing trends and increasingly ambitious climate targets. For more on how the Paris Agreement fundamentally realigned the structures of international climate policy, read Severin Fischer’s CSS Analyses in Security Policy here. For more CSS charts and graphics, click here.
