Dr Georgios Kostakosis Executive Director of the Brussels-based Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability (FOGGS). He has been extensively involved in global governance, sustainability and climate-related activities with the United Nations and beyond. The starting point for the work of FOGGS is the need for a new Grand Narrative for a fair, human-centred and inclusive globalization. One of its projects is the UN2100 Initiativefor UN reform, which includes the proposal to establish a Global Resilience Council to effectively address non-military threats to human security like climate change and pandemics.
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…
The carnage in Israel and the Gaza Strip seems to have no end, with hundreds if not thousands of fatalities on both sides and a region ready to explode. Who is to blame and how can this end? Peace or justice first, under whose interpretation and on what terms? For people like me who have…
It has been a hot, unbearable summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Wherever the temperatures are not breaking new records and the forest fires are not filling the air with suffocating smoke and other pollutants it is the floods that are hitting the high mark, including in places where water is becoming worryingly scarce over time….
