Dr Georgios Kostakos is Co-founder and Executive Director of the Brussels-based Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability (FOGGS). He has been a UN staff member, including with the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General, the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and field missions for political affairs and human rights. He has also worked with think tanks, academic institutions and as a consultant on global governance and sustainability, peace and resilience.
20 January 2025 is not just any inauguration day for just any new US President. All initial signs are that Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th US President will go down in history as a moment of major change, a point of departure and discontinuity, a quantum leap, perhaps a reason to reset the calendar…
On 27 January 2025 the world observed Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Nazi concentration and extermination camps near Krakow, Poland, in 1945. It was the 20th such observance, following the UN General Assembly resolution that established the “International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims…
Friday, 13 December 2024 was celebrated as Victory Day by Syrians in Damascus and other parts of the war-torn country. After fourteen years of bloody civil war, this was a surprising new turn – surprising both in terms of the speed at which it happened and its overall peaceful character. Bashar al-Assad’s government imploded and…
The news just broke today, 28 September 2024, that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed in a massive Israeli strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut the previous evening. Apparently, the strike took place at about the same time as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was addressing the UN General Assembly in New York…
In a few days’ time, high up in the Swiss mountains, where the glaciers are melting faster than ever before, there will be a “peace conference” of the most ambitious kind. It won’t be about climate change in the literal sense of the term but drastic climate change it is supposed to achieve. A conflict…
Those of us worried about the state of the world and the explosive convergence of crises of military and non-military nature, cannot but be increasingly concerned by the expediency and brinkmanship demonstrated on a daily basis by countries and individual leaders, instead of advancing real solutions to the crises at hand. One such example is…
The modern notion of “citizenship” is connected to the nation state and has emerged to a large extent from the struggle for civic rights in Western societies. In recent years the term “citizenship” or “citizen” is occasionally used in a broader sense, informally as in “citizen of the world”, or even formally, as in “citizen…
It is broadly accepted that business as usual is not enough to effectively address the urgent global crises confronting humanity today, which range from wars of the traditional, geopolitical kind in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan and many other places to non-military threats like climate change, pandemics, food insecurity, inequalities and a self-serving global financial system….
Armistice Day is approaching, 11 November, the day that guns fell silent marking the end of the First World War in 1918. As we know, that was not the end of all wars, as much as the millions who suffered from it might have hoped. Wars did not even end after World War II and…
