CIRSD

“The Unbearable Lightness of Global Governance” — Horizons Issue No. 35 was launched in Vienna.

Hosted by CIRSD in cooperation with Global Neighbours, the event brought together diplomats, representatives of international organizations, business leaders, academics, and policy experts to discuss the future of global governance.

The discussion was opened and moderated by Vuk Jeremić, President of CIRSD and Editor-in-Chief of Horizons, alongside Jovanka Porsche, Siddharth Chatterjee, and former Prime Minister of Montenegro Igor Lukšić.

The conversation focused on the future of multilateral institutions, the Sustainable Development Goals, the role of private actors, Europe-China relations, and the challenges of international cooperation in an increasingly fragmented world.

At a time when only 18% of the Sustainable Development Goals are on track and global conflicts are at their highest level since 1945, the discussion explored what new forms of cooperation and institutional innovation are needed for the decade ahead.

The third edition of the Hili Forum 2026 in Abu Dhabi was the first major international gathering in the Gulf since the outbreak of the war, bringing together over 1,000 senior policymakers, diplomats, experts and thought leaders at a moment of exceptional regional and global uncertainty.

The Forum opened with remarks by Dr. Anwar Gargash, Diplomatic Adviser to the President of the United Arab Emirates, who set the tone for the discussions by addressing the urgent need for de-escalation, regional stability and a sustainable diplomatic framework for the period ahead.

Vuk Jeremić, President of CIRSD, former President of the UN General Assembly and former Foreign Minister of Serbia, participated in the Forum’s closing plenary, “Role of Middle Powers in a Ruptured Global Order,” alongside Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden and Co-Chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Zhandos Shaimardanov of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies.

Jeremić stressed that strategic autonomy requires countries to diversify trusted partnerships, maintain good relations with their neighbours, avoid being drawn into other countries’ conflicts, and strengthen resilience at home.

He also highlighted the growing importance of technological and strategic partnerships as traditional security guarantees become less certain, arguing that middle powers are likely to play an increasingly important role in shaping the emerging international order.

The Hili Forum brings together policymakers, experts and researchers to discuss the geopolitical, economic and technological transformations shaping the Gulf and the wider international order.

Sixty-five years after the first Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade, the idea of strategic autonomy is once again gaining relevance. In his new essay, Vuk Jeremić reflects on Yugoslavia’s diplomatic rise, Serbia’s return to the non-aligned world, and the lessons Belgrade 1961 still holds for an increasingly multipolar age.

Read the full article on our website.

Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the UN and former Foreign Minister, is a leading candidate for the next UN Secretary-General.

In her vision statement, she calls for a more effective and proactive United Nations, firmly grounded in the UN Charter and multilateralism. Her priorities include stronger conflict prevention and mediation, faster progress on sustainable development, protection of human rights, reform of the UN system and deeper cooperation with Member States and regional organizations.

Rodrigues-Birkett argues that the next Secretary-General must combine principled leadership with pragmatism and ensure that the UN delivers tangible results for people around the world.

Read the full article on our website.

CEBRI brought together an exceptional group of thinkers and practitioners from around the world for the inaugural Paraty Dialogues.

Among the distinguished participants was Vuk Jeremić, President of CIRSD and Editor-in-Chief of Horizons, who took part in discussions on the profound geopolitical shifts shaping the international landscape.

At a moment of significant global change, the quality, candor, and diversity of the exchanges made the Paraty Dialogues a genuinely meaningful discussion on global affairs—and a powerful reminder of the importance of dialogue across regions and perspectives.

The gathering also reflected the vision of its Brazilian hosts, whose extraordinary hospitality and generosity contributed to the success of the event in beautiful Paraty. The inaugural edition laid a strong foundation for the Paraty Dialogues to grow into an important platform for international exchange in the years ahead.

Gramsci’s line about the time of monsters no longer reads as a warning.

Pascal Lamy, Vice President of the Paris Peace Forum. He is also Founder and Vice President of the Jacques Delors Friends of Europe Foundation takes it as a diagnosis. The triangle of Ricardo, Schumpeter, and Beveridge has come apart, and no welfare state compensates for years of imported overcapacity in steel, chemicals, batteries, and solar panels.

His fifth and most decisive driver is compute nationalism: the moment chips, frontier models, and data centers become sovereign resources, while a few private firms acquire quasi-sovereign power without accountability.

Europe was built by herbivores. It must now learn to survive among carnivores without becoming one.

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A history written in the wrong register, Anatoly Torkunov and Vladimir Degoev argue, is not merely dull. It is disarmed.

Marking their new volume on the Russian state from its tribal unions to the Romanovs in 1613, they take Levitan’s “Above Eternal Peace” as emblem and Collingwood’s historical imagination as method.

Their quarrel is with the frameworks forced onto that past—imported feudalism, the Asiatic mode of production, the Eurasianists’ Mongol “matrix”—and with a Russophobic narrative they trace to N**i racial theory. There is no single key to Russian history, only a bundle.

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The Alabama Claims arbitration of 1872 converted a diplomatic quarrel into legal procedure; the Hague conferences then gave the practice a building.

With the WTO’s Appellate Body paralyzed, the USMCA left unrenewed after its 2026 review, and investment disputes recast as security concerns, Teresa Cheng argues the urgent task is managing conflict rather than resolving it.

The International Organization for Mediation—45 signatory states, 16 ratifications, seated in Hong Kong—is the first intergovernmental body devoted only to mediation. It asks not who is legally right, but what arrangement can actually be sustained.

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When Washington fell behind on its UN dues in the 1990s, it was a private citizen who pledged $1 billion and founded the UN Foundation.

Jovanka Porsche and Siddharth Chatterjee argue that the model must now be extended and sharpened: Track 2 and Track 1.2 diplomacy, permanent technical safe harbors, research capacity built outside the wealthy capitals, an independent scorecard measuring what institutions actually deliver against what they promise.

Drawing on three decades inside the system, from Somalia to Beijing, they insist the quiet rooms matter. Oslo was not born in a ministry.

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The Beijing summit produced the calmest U.S.-China relationship in years, and both sides are dismantling what holds it up.

Total goods trade is down 28 percent since 2016; direct U.S. imports from China have fallen from 21 percent to 9. Cliff Kupchan argues that “constructive strategic stability”—a Board of Trade, a Board of Investment, an AI working group with no lead agencies named—rests on an interdependence both governments are deliberately unwinding.

His analogue is the Soviet Union, stable only where it was walled off: the U.S. mined Haiphong harbor two weeks before signing SALT I.

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