The Paris Agreement’s inherent tension between ambition and compliance
Parties to the Paris Agreement face mounting social pressure to raise their ambition, thereby reducing the gap between individual pledges and collective temperature goals. Although crucial for inciting positive change, especially given that the Paris Agreement lacks an enforcement mechanism, it is also important to consider social pressure’s potential negative unintended consequences. First, it might undermine the Paris Agreement’s celebrated flexibility, which allows countries to design their Nationally Determined Contributions according to domestic conditions and capabilities. Second, it might result in widespread noncompliance by inciting pledges that the countries concerned prove unwilling or even unable to fulfill. Should that happen, confidence in the Paris Agreement and its institutions might falter. Further research is therefore needed to identify the scope conditions for social pressure to work effectively in the domain of international climate policy.
Mobilizing private sector financing for climate and green growth in Africa
NUPI has, in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the pleasure of inviting you to a seminar with the Chief Economist and Vice President of the African Development Bank, Prof. Kevin Chika Urama.
Polish elections – what’s left of the liberal order?
Poles head for the ballot boxes, amidst concerns about the health of democracy.
ANALYSIS: BRICS and the West: Don’t Believe the Cold War Hype
Anarchy is a Bridge: Russia and China are Pushing NATO and Japan Together
After nearly 70 years of distant relations, security ties between NATO and Japan are flourishing. A number of important initiatives have recently been adopted, including high-level political dialogues, joint military training, and cooperation in science, technology, and cyber security. This article considers recent developments in NATO-Japan relations and in particular their origins, drivers and implications.
Digital Supply Chain Dependency and Resilience
While a growing body of literature addresses how states increasingly aim to secure their digital domains and mitigate dependencies, less attention has been paid to how infrastructural and architectural configurations shape their ability to do so. This paper provides a novel approach to studying cyber security and digital dependencies, paying attention to how the everyday business decisions by private companies affect states’ ability to ensure security. Every mobile application relies on a multitude of microservices, many of which are provided by independent vendors and service providers operating through various infrastructural configurations across borders in an a-territorial global network. In this paper, we unpack such digital supply chains to examine the technical cross-border services, infrastructural configurations, and locations of various microservices on which popular mobile applications depend. We argue that these dependencies have differing effects on the resilience of digital technologies at the national level but that addressing these dependencies requires different and sometimes contradictory interventions. To study this phenomenon, we develop a methodology for exploring this phenomenon empirically by tracing and examining the dispersed and frequently implicit dependencies in some of the most widely used mobile applications. To analyse these dependencies, we record raw traffic streams at a point in time seen across various mobile applications. Subsequently locating these microservices geographically and to privately owned networks, our study maps dependencies in the case studies of Oslo, Barcelona, Paris, Zagreb, Mexico City, and Dublin.
Norway: Between engagement and caution
The chapter covers Norway’s political maneuvering of its relations to China, and is part of a larger report in which many European countries and the EU’s China-policies are mapped. Norway seeks to combine engagement and caution in its approach to China, seeking collaboration on issues of mutual interest, while also protecting national security interests and the status of liberal norms internationally. Lacking an updated, comprehensive China strategy, Norwegian authorities have taken several steps to strengthen the coordination around China-related issues, It is, however, difficult to assess the effects of this or get a full picture of what Norway is aiming to achieve in its relations to China.
WEBINAR: The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans left
How stable is the current Taliban regime in Afghanistan?