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Global Governance Initiative
Governments of the world have achieved universal consensus on the need to
confront global challenges collaboratively. Yet while documents such as the
United Nations Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
have set goals and targets, the world's inter-related problems of security,
poverty and environment have received little coordinated attention. Instead,
there has been a wide array of competing, overlapping, variably effective, and
often wasteful efforts.
It is clear, however, that where progress is achieved towards the goals, the
process involves a range of actors acting in pre-determined concert with
assigned roles, responsibilities, lines of authority and accountability. Such
mechanisms represent the de facto practice of diplomacy for many of the most
vital issues the international community faces today. Yet there is no law, code
or framework to encompass this reality.
The New America Foundation's Global Governance Initiative moves beyond the
narrow conception of global problem-solving as an inter-state diplomatic
enterprise by exploring the existing modes of successful cooperation among an
array of diverse actors such as governments, international organizations, NGOs,
corporations, philanthropists, and universities. Which models are most effective
and scaleable? Which actors are contributing the most resources? What
international legal frameworks can be created to capture this new diplomatic
context? How is American foreign policy affected by such a diverse array of
domestic actors playing these diplomatic roles?
Through issue-oriented seminars, policy papers, public events, and eventually
a book it will both re-frame discussions of global governance and produce
concrete recommendations towards more flexible and effective structures
appropriate to the 21st century context of diffusing power and legitimacy. The
Global Governance Initiative is directed by Parag
Khanna, who is also a Senior Research Fellow at New America.
The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in
Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing
tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched
uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the
longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking
its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and
economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately
disconnected -- despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a
600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.
In the future, globalization will further weaken the
nation-state. A long transition process toward global government will be, like
the Middle Ages, a time of great insecurity. But Europe's governance structure
will prevail, even in the United
States. It will buy its way to peace and its
model will be copied across the globe.
The conventional wisdom in Washington --
and the core of U.S. President Barack Obama's "Af-Pak" policy, which
he announced in March -- is that Afghanistan is now the central
front in the conflict formerly known as the war on terror. Pakistan is essential too, of course, and
indeed, the thinking goes, you can't have a successful Afghanistan policy without a successful Pakistan
policy. The problem with this conventional wisdom is that it gets the situation
entirely backward: The real fight is in Pakistan,
not Afghanistan,
With a recount announced for the Iranian election, and opposition candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi demanding a fresh election, the political situation in Iran remains on a knife's edge.
We're witnessing the mobilizing power of anti-incumbent forces, particularly youth, who are fed up, and the role of technology in getting voters to the ballot boxes and out on the street.
The final stretch on the road to Yarkand, about 125 miles from China’s border with Pakistan, feels like the middle east. Each village is a collage of single-storey mud-brick homes with turquoise door-gates. People travel by donkey cart or scooter-rickshaw. Men greet each other the Muslim way (palm to the chest and a slight bow); women wear headscarves. In small villages many signs are still in Uighur, the local language. But for how much longer?
Grand explanations of how to understand the complex twenty-first century world have all fallen short-until now. In The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Parag Khanna shows how America's dominant moment has quickly been replaced by a geopolitical marketplace where the European Union and China compete with the U.S. to shape world order on their own terms.The primary battlefield is the Second World, regions lying between the three leading empires and the third world:… more
Grand explanations of how to understand the complex twenty-first century world have all fallen short-until now. In The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Parag Khanna shows how America's dominant moment has quickly been replaced by a geopolitical marketplace where the European Union and China compete with the U.S. to shape world order on their own terms.The primary battlefield is the Second World, regions lying between the three leading empires and the third world:… more
Given the challenging situation in Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the transatlantic partners share the belief that only a regional approach will be successful in creating a sustainable peace. Americans and Europeans, however, pursue different strategies towards the common goal.Should the Americans engage in a bilateral dialogue with states like Syria and Iran or should Europeans facilitate a new “trialogue”? Are there strategies that have worked in the past in other regions and… more
