International Cooperation

The Climate-Care Nexus Policy Workshop, organized within the framework of the IDRC-funded project “Climate-Care Nexus: Adapting Care Systems to Climate and Migration Pressures in North and West Africa”, is a policy and research dialogue bringing together public decision-makers, international organizations, and leading experts to examine the evolving relationship between climate change, migration, and care systems. The workshop positioned the climate-care nexus as a critical pol ...

This policy note was published as part of the T20 U.S. 2026 Workstreams, under the workstream “Fostering Trade and People-Centered Economic Growth,” which brings together policy experts to develop recommendations for G20 policymakers. The Group of Twenty (G20) accounts for most of the world’s output, yet its decisions shape the prospects of 174 United Nations Member States without G20 membership, among them the great majority of least developed countries and small states. Many ...

Wars are decided by those who hold military power, but their costs are increasingly borne by those who have little or no voice in the decisions that start them. The US–Iran war shows this imbalance very clearly. Its economic consequences have gone far beyond the battlefield and have disrupted energy markets, trade routes, food supplies, public finances and investment in the Gulf, Europe, Africa and Asia. The most striking feature of the conflict, however, is not only the size of the ...

Strategic hedging is rational when it preserves a worthwhile choice at a tolerable cost while respecting existing commitments. Drawing on the literature on hedging and Latin American autonomy, this Policy Brief examines contrasting illustrations of that proposition. It distinguishes ambiguity about future alignment from uncertainty about existing obligations and explains how clearly bounded commitments can reconcile autonomy with credibility. The cases reveal different vulnerabiliti ...

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”President Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 This paper examines the economic and human impacts of the first six months of the Iran war—from February to the end of August 2026—on Iran’s Arab neighbors and compares these impacts with those on the three countries directly involved—Iran, Israel and t ...

Cet article soutient que le Chief Geopolitical Officer (CGO) doit être repensé à partir de l’expérience des entreprises africaines. Dans un environnement multipolaire et fragmenté, leur principal défi n’est pas seulement la gestion des risques, mais la préservation de plusieurs options stratégiques simultanément selon une logique de hedging. Trois modèles de CGO sont à distinguer : l’intermédiation (Office chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), Tanger Med), l’intégration régionale (Ethiopi ...

In the first seven Policy Briefs of this ongoing series of analysis on Pan-Atlanticism: The Atlantic Basin in a Multipolar-Transnational World, we developed the argument that the strategic significance of the Atlantic Basin is on the rise for a range of international actors (states, regions and non-state agents) and from distinct political or ideological perspectives. In addition, in the most recently published Policy Brief -- “The U.S. and the Current International Reconfiguration: ...

This paper was originaly published on Higher Education Policy Journal This article critically assesses the alignment between Morocco’s public guidance schemes for international students and its national development goals. Specifically, it investigates the capacity of these mechanisms to transform student mobility from a potential ‘brain drain’ into a tangible ‘brain gain’. Employing a qualitative case study approach, we conducted a systematic content analysis of 204 mobili ...

The author of this opinion, Marie-Noelle Nwokolo, is a 2024 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.In September 1978, delegations from 138 countries gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, around a powerful idea: developing countries had knowledge, experience and capabilities worth sharing with one another. The Buenos Aires Plan of Action gave institutional form to what we now call South-South Cooperation, part of a wider post-colonial effort by developing ...

On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Défense Agreement, a collective-defense pact widely compared to NATO’s Article 5. This essay argues that the comparison is misleading. Mecca borrows NATO’s language of solidarity without yet possessing NATO’s institutional machinery, and the Houthi offensive against Saudi Arabia in September 2026 provided an early and revealing test of what the agreement actually means in practice. Neither Pakistan nor Turk ...

This paper was initially published in French on the website of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès. There was a historic decline in Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2025. Foreign aid to developing countries from members of the OECD-DAC fell by some 23%, the largest decline on record and the second consecutive annual decline. Aid to Africa fell by more than 25%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) described this decline in ODA to Africa as “a shock like no other.” It differ ...

The author of this opinion, Marianna Albuquerque, is a 2022 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.As world leaders gather in New York for the 81st United Nations General Assembly, climate change returns to the center of multilateral diplomacy under markedly different circumstances. The debate is no longer confined to whether the world must decarbonize, but increasingly centers on how the transition will happen, who will bear its costs, who will capture ...

Since around 2010, it has been known that the Eastern Mediterranean is a new gas province. Gas resources have indeed been discovered offshore four countries or territories: Egypt, Israel, Cyprus and Gaza. Two of them have become producers and exporters of natural gas, Egypt and Israel. Off the coast of Gaza, the Gaza Marine gas field has never been developed, and it is highly unlikely to be developed anytime soon given the very high tensions between the State of Israel and Hamas. By ...

Depuis 2010, environ, on sait que la Méditerranée orientale est une nouvelle province gazière. Des ressources gazières ont en effet été découvertes au large de quatre pays ou territoires, l’Égypte, Israël, Chypre et Gaza. Deux d’entre eux sont devenus producteurs et exportateurs de gaz naturel, l’Égypte et Israël. Au large de Gaza, le champ gazier de Gaza Marine n’a jamais été développé et il est très peu probable qu’il le soit prochainement en raison des très fortes tensions entre ...

The African Union Summit of February 2026 instructed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Council of Ministers to negotiate a Protocol on Industrial Policy and Development. This work, handled without adequate preparation, is likely to reproduce the weaknesses it is meant to remedy. This paper is a conceptual mapping exercise, written to raise the preparatory questions before drafting begins, rather than to prescribe outcomes.It proceeds in five sections:1. It works towar ...

Various competing cross-border payment networks have become vehicles for geopolitical competition. As tensions have risen, many countries want to secure access to cross-border payment systems by joining with like-minded countries to form interoperable networks, either via tokenization or Instant Payment Systems (IPSs). Three major projects are under development, serving the strategic interests of the US, China and the Rest of the World—corresponding to the three trading spheres taki ...

Much of Western debate was revealingly silent on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, which took place on August 31 and September 1 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. That relative silence reflects how poorly the organization’s growing significance is still understood. The meeting has not gone unreported. Any gathering of Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Vladimir Putin inevitably attracts&nbs ...

The author of this opinion, Joana Ama Osei-Tutu, is a 2017 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.South-South cooperation (SSC) is often presented as an alternative to the hierarchical relationships that have historically characterized international development. In principle, SSC means Global South countries learn from one another, share expertise and resources, and develop solutions grounded in their own experiences, rather than importing models designe ...

La conférence de lancement du projet POMIRE Sud-Sud, tenue au Policy Center for the New South à Rabat les 11 et 12 février 2026, a constitué un moment fondateur. Pour la première fois, l'ensemble des acteurs institutionnels de cinq des six pays partenaires du projet — Côte d'Ivoire, Guinée, Mali, Maroc et Sénégal — se sont réunis pour poser les piliers d’une vision commune et identifier les priorités qui guideront les phases opérationnelles du projet. Quatre focus groupes thématique ...

This Paper was originally published on cgdev.org. Escalatory attacks on multilateral rules and institutions in this era of raw power politics have plunged international politics into uncharted territory. Traditional alliances have been fractured and new partnerships between unlikely bedfellows are emerging. No longer in transition, the post-World War II world order is in rupture. This paper examines international cooperation under these conditions and argues that a new "flexi-l ...