Month: February 2020

Does the Trump Administration’s Israeli-Palestinian Plan Offer a Path to Peace?

Image courtesy of The White House/Flickr.

This article was originally published by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) on 29 January 2020.

Without a basis for negotiation around which both sides feel they can come to the table, peace will remain elusive.

Yesterday, at an East Room gathering, President Trump, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unveiled his administration’s plan to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As promised at the outset of his remarks, the approach represents a vision “fundamentally different from past proposals.” The event itself—with the plan unveiled by U.S. and Israeli leadership—presented a visual that underscored this difference, and the challenge this plan faces if it is to chart a course to peace.

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Four Factors that Could Shape Southeast Asia in the Coming Decade

Image courtesy of nali_wike/Pixabay

This article was originally published by the East-West Center (EWC) in January 2020.

Southeast Asia is witnessing major changes to its political, strategic and economic fabric. Some of these, such as the rise of China, have been anticipated for some time, while others, such as the US-China trade dispute, the growing prominence of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic concept, and the Trump administration’s retreat from liberal internationalism, have unfolded rapidly and disruptively during the past few years.

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Mediation Perspectives: Artificial Intelligence in Conflict Resolution

Image courtesy of ev/Unsplash

Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors.

How is artificial intelligence (AI) affecting conflict and its resolution? Peace practitioners and scholars cannot afford to disregard ongoing developments related to AI-based technologies – both from an ethical and a pragmatic perspective. In this blog, I explore AI as an evolving field of information management technologies that is changing both the nature of armed conflict and the way we can respond to it. AI encompasses the use of computer programmes to analyse big amounts of data (such as online communication and transactions) in order to learn from patterns and predict human behaviour on a massive scale. This is potentially useful for managing corporations and shaping markets, but also for gaining political influence, conducting psychological warfare and controlling populations.

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Assessment of Switzerland’s Future

Subjective Assessment of Switzerland’s Future – ‘Sicherheit 2019’

This graphic illustrates the subjective assessment of Swiss respondents about Switzerland’s near future from 1993 to 2019. To find out more, read the ‘Sicherheit 2019’ here. The ‘Sicherheit’ study is an annual survey conducted by the Center for Security Studies and the Military Academy at ETH Zurich.

PESCO: Two Years Later

Image courtesy of European Parliament/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This article was originally published by the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) on 23 January 2020.

Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), launched by the EU in December 2017, has grown quickly. Yet, its role in developing European defence capacity may turn out to be marginal if a compromise is not found on the issue of the participation of non-EU states in PESCO projects and on the size of the European Defence Fund (EDF). PESCO’s importance may be diminished by advances by big, European defence initiatives led outside the EU’s legal framework.

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