Dr Georgios Kostakos is 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 Initiative for 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.
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….
The news about the United States spying on United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and his deputy, Amina Mohammed, revealed dissatisfaction in leaked US intelligence documents over Guterres’s perceived lack of toughness regarding the Russians and their invasion of Ukraine in 2022. One would expect the Russians, undoubtedly also spying on Guterres, to have different views, annoyed by…
When in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama evangelized “the end of history,” he did it in the context of a widely held belief that the collapse of Communism and the victory of Liberal Democracy was a major milestone in human evolution. Beyond the end of the Cold War, this was supposed to…
September 2023 is forecast to be heavy in summiteering, as already two summits and a ministerial meeting are scheduled to take place in the space of a few days, around the high-level “UN Week”, namely: an SDG Summit, another Climate Summit, and a Ministerial Meeting in preparation of the September 2024 Summit of the Future….
