But because the proposal to move away from unanimity itself requires unanimity, it is unlikely to go anywhere.

threatening to kibosh Europe’s participation in a global corporate-tax deal.

This includes anything relating to defence and foreign policy, enlargement, taxation and policing.

But in several policy areas unanimity among member states is still needed

Most eu business now is agreed by a qualified majority of countries.

the notion of limited sovereignty, the conception of just war, the obligation of states to exercise self-restraint in the use of force, states’ obligation to protect human dignity and human rights, the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention, and the role and responsibility of the dominant states in the maintenance of international peace

to formulate a minimalist morality

it must at once acknowledge the plurality of moral ideals that are defining of the world’s cultures,

it is in clarifying the next phase of the discussion.

Relationality is ontologically more basic than individuality.

While new technologies and artificial intelligence can contribute to the emergence of a new geopolitical order, the human predicament today is fundamentally an ethical issue.

now need to “de-colonize” themselves from the forms of knowledge imposed upon them by the West

it also exerted a form of epistemic violence by imposing divisive ideas, particularly its ideas concerning nations, races, and gender.

mechanism of transformational harmony.

Zhao argues that the key to the Tianxia system lies in how, via its methods of “relational rationality” and “Confucian improvement,”14 it constitutes a world with no outsiders.

Today’s China is a sovereign state and not Tianxia

A looming Pax Sinica rivaling the Pax Americana, China is projecting its soft power and brandishing its culture around the world

China does not seek to forcefully impose its worldview onto others

It believes that each ethnic group and nation can have its own history, but just as in the end all streams return to the sea, ultimately all groups will submit willingly to a higher-order culture and its institutions

It advocates ‘transformation’ and thus works by winning over the hearts of others instead of subduing them by force.

First, Tianxia means the Earth under the sky, ‘all under heaven.’ Second, it refers to the general will of all peoples in the world, entailing a universal agreement. It involves the heart more than the mind, because the heart has feelings. And third, Tianxia is a universal system that is responsible for world order.

This strategic shift towards coexistence is rational because it continues to produce positive payoffs when copied by other players.

The ancient Chinese concept of Tianxia translates roughly as “all under heaven existing harmoniously.”

Tianxia begins from an ecological understanding of international relations that acknowledges the mutuality and interdependence of all economic and political activity.

The idea of Tianxia (天下) — conventionally translated as “all under heaven” — is a familiar term in everyday Chinese parlance that simply means “the world.” But Tianxiais also a geopolitical term found throughout canonical Chinese literature that has deeper philosophical and historical significance.

for rethinking global governance and rebuilding trust in humanity’s shared future.

a global consciousness — an awareness of our interdependence in addressing issues on a planetary scale

inadequacy of our modern state system to respond effectively to a global crisis.

Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa.

“move fast and break things” approach

to place reasonable multilateral constraints

International treaties have long recognised that nations must have equitable access to the orbits and frequencies around Earth.

“carrying capacity” can help us assess how to best use the resource to benefit all.

LEO is a shared natural resource

the environmental footprint of each LEO constellation.

total mass of the LEO mega-constellations has been increasing at an alarming rate.

the light pollution caused by countless satellites may soon outnumber visible stars, interfering with optical and radio astronomy.

crisis of debris in space

a cascade of collisions,

the over-exploitation of limited space resources

Mega-constellations incorporating thousands, and soon tens of thousands, of satellites are crowding into low-Earth orbit, or LEO, and claiming the right to occupy it

Space is a shared resource which must remain available to all nations.

We need to be sure that the capacity to innovate — to be fully engaged in making the future — isn’t constrained by class, ethnicity or gender. That really would be disruptive.

We need innovation that is accessible and organic — that is owned by the communities to which it matters and that’s adapted to local cultures, rather than being the whim of iconoclasts

rather than recognize the dogged and meticulous hard work that makes for real innovation.

The marketization of expertise over the past few decades has also created a climate in which expertise is taken to be something that can be treated like just another commodity.

have had enough of experts,

experts — at least the visible ones — are easily dismissed as being in hock to special interests, too, even by other elites.

an image of expertise that we’ve inherited from the Victorians

Innovation really is the work of multitudes, not singularities.

Tesla failed

that successful innovation requires collective effort.

Russell’s Earthlings were Kuhnians to the aliens’ disruptive Popperians, we might say, and their example offers an antidote to our persistent habit of succumbing to Tesla Syndrome.

“Legwork” might be fiction, but I think there’s something very human about the way the humans’ triumph over the disruptive aliens is portrayed as the ultimate application of teamwork.

“Legwork” by the British writer Eric Frank Russell, a brilliant piece of post-war science fiction published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1956, serves as an exploration of the collective against the disruptive in fictional form.

cryptocurrencies

Popper’s problem, though — and the problem of tech disruptors, too — is that the experience of political disruptors shows us disruption generates chaos, not innovation.

Normal science was boring, and not really science at all, he argued.

Karl Popper,

Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” with its emphasis on the routines of consensual normal science, was very much a product of this post-war view of technoscientific innovation as a collective activity. Kuhn’s argument was that successful science depended on rule-following. Innovation was generated by going by the book. This was a philosophy of science that mirrored post-war consensus about progress and its requirements.

Much of this was driven by the spectre of the Cold War. During the 1980s and 1990s, Reaganism, Thatcherism and the end of the Cold War broke those connections.

The decades immediately following the Second World War were the decades of big government. They were also the decades of big science and big corporations.

Political institutions are seen as being there to serve their own interests rather than those of citizens. It’s that perception that makes the strident calls to “drain the swamp” that have become prevalent in USA politics since the 1980s appear so seductive.

The roots of disruption’s attraction in politicians lie in the long, slow decline of trust in post-war political institutions.

that disruption has gained a foothold outside of tech culture.

Why has it — and the notion of disruption it captures — acquired so much resonance now?

untrammelled by compromise

There he is held up as the epitome of the otherworldly maker of the future, an iconoclastic breaker of rules interested only in innovation for its own sake and doomed to failure because of his single-minded focus on invention.

in this ability to break with established routine.

The 19th-century inventors of the idea of progress imagined that the future would be produced through accumulation. Innovation would build on innovation. Built into the idea of disruption is the sense that successful innovation means abandoning the old entirely for the new.

the erosion of trust in institutions.

Why has the idea that the best innovators are disruptive gained such traction over the past decade or so, to the extent that it is now, paradoxically, orthodox to be heterodox?

why do we see disruption as a virtue?

It’s all about the individual, and particular sorts of individuals at that.

whom society rewards precisely because they refuse to follow convention.

as climate change and digitalisation.

the green and digital transition.

“Our boys will die fighting this scum,”

La Suisse est fière d’avoir créé dans cet esprit la Fondation GESDA,le Geneva Science Diplomacy Anticipator. GESDAa pour but d’anticiper les défis posés par les nouvelles technologiques, de manière à en maximiser les bénéfices et en minimiser les risques pour l’homme, et à garantir un avenir durable sur notre planète.

Theeffortstowardsaso-calledDigitalGenevaConventionarejustifiedandneeded

And crises like the lack of guardrails around promising new technologiesto healdisease, connect people and expand opportunity.

the Programme for Infrastructure Development of the SCO Member States was adopted.

the SCO Digital Literacy Programme.

digital learning

to build cooperation in the digitalization of health and consider the potential of telemedicine

to cooperate in digital economy and support the development of digital technologies

strengthening the potential of technoparks, joining efforts to develop the innovation ecosystem, conducting joint research and development, launching new digital projects in the SCO region

comprehensive international convention on combating the use of ICTs for criminal purposes

he key role of the United Nations in countering threats in the information space

against the militarization of the ICT sphere,

They consider it important to ensure the equal rights of all countries to regulate the Internet and the sovereign right of States to manage it in their national segment.

Member States emphasize the key role of the UN in countering threats in the information space, creating a safe, fair and open information space built on the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

to promote digital literacy

n the field of international information security

to enhance connectivity between Central Asia and South Asia

approved the Comprehensive Plan for its implementation for 2023-2027

the non-targeting of SCO against other states and international organizations

a more representative, democratic, just and multipolar world order

new approaches are required to promote more equitable and effective international cooperation and sustainable economic development.

stronger multipolarity, increased interconnectedness, accelerated pace of informatization and digitalization.

on development of Artificial Intelligence.

on Digital Literacy Development.

1.7.1 – Static Site Compatibility

witzerland is well positioned to make a credible contribution towards the specification of the applicable rules in the digital space. This includes seeking to work more closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the protection of civilians in the digital space during armed conflicts

The technological competition was a sort of proxy war.

we are in an age of quite radical uncertainty, one in which the ability to learn and adapt nimbly to unexpected events is far more valuable than either predictions or overly specific preparations.

For new or reinforced global institutions are critically dependent on agreement between superpowers.

whether what we like to call the “rules-based order” can now be rescued, resurrected or newly built.

we do not know whether China will seek to conquer Taiwan by force and bring what it sees as the final victory in China’s unfinished civil war

whether, in this era of great-power competition, the US and China are destined to collaborate, to compete or even to fight.

whether China will choose to reinforce or make its relationship with Russia operational, or leave it loose and non-military as it is today.

a sustained assault on globalisation—by re-building high walls against economic and intellectual interchange.

do not know whether nuclear weapons will be used in

We also know that the factors that globalisation depends upon are overwhelmingly political.

China keeps stressing that it is a partnership, not an alliance.   

The world is complicated, not simple and binary.   

he world is not dividing into two rival blocs—the west, or democracies, versus autocracies—as many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are avoiding getting involved.

new “cold war” will be partial, for most countries in the world will not be joining in.

the range of possible futures for humanity is wider than we thought.     

we need is to create an ability to learn, and build adaptability into our systems.

In such conditions of radical uncertainty it makes little sense to make plans for all sorts of unknowable potential events.

True uncertainty is something we cannot calculate at all.

Risks are things we can calculate.

to distinguish between risk and true uncertainty.

The size, complexity and connectedness of our contemporary global system means that such events can have far bigger impacts than might have been the case in the past.

But they were completely unpredictable, in the sense that we had no way of knowing whether they would actually happen, and certainly no idea of when they would happen.

What we do know is that the range of possible outcomes is sadly quite wide.

The response has been careful, to reduce the chance of triggering a Third World War by entering into direct military conflict with a nuclear superpower. It has been unified, because all these rich allies share the view that this is a conflict not of local but more global and fundamental importance. And it has been sustained so far because of the realisation that only well-maintained economic and military pressure can prevent Putin from achieving his aims.

that Russian failure, or simply weakness, in Ukraine could lead Putin to use a nuclear weapon as a desperate display of power, to force Ukraine to surrender.

the question of nuclear weapons

The Russian invasion, if it were to be successful, would open up the possibility of a new era of imperialism and of using control over territory as a strategic weapon.

They claim that they want to increase the role of multilateral institutions in global governance.

the world’s democracies look in better post-Covid shape than China does, and in much better shape than Russia, which was hit hard by the pandemic and failed to produce a vaccine that convinced its own people, let alone export markets.

As a result of their lower efficacy and western firms’ success in overcoming production difficulties, western vaccines have become dominant everywhere except China (albeit by purchase, not donation).

I have now been vaccinated in four inoculations using three of these vaccines—AstraZeneca, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. So I am a walking example of bioscience globalisation.

they have noted that the west cannot be relied upon in such an emergency.

Although the WHO did well in terms of providing information to the world, it has been unable to play much of an operational role during this crisis. Any proposals for new operational roles to prevent future pandemics are therefore doomed to fail, under current conditions.

the US and China have moved further apart, not closer together.

introduced in part to stop intellectual property theft, but also extended into more direct efforts to disable or obstruct Chinese technological development.

semiconductors, 5G and 6G telecoms, artificial intelligence—and space

such technological fears centred on space

a far more important measure was technological competition, along with a growing fear that China might soon take the lead.

the intensification of US-China competition.

a strong backlash against trade and globalisation.

by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, as grievances about inequality and other social ills culminated in the surprise election of Trump as president in 2016

countries would never again use tariffs and other trade barriers as weapons of economic or political competition.

it signalled not the embrace, but the rejection by the US of the use of global institutions to manage great-power competition.

Technology lies at the heart of the process of globalisation, but its development is also accelerated by that same globalisation.

he globalisation of trade, technology and ideas that facilitated this rise of new powers and spread of wealth would continue, and would help to discourage conflict and equalise progress.

we nevertheless assumed that democracies would prove more resilient than autocracies, thanks to superior accountability and free information.

the United States’s acceptance of and support for global institutions would rise as its hegemonic power weakened, at the same time as it came to recognise the need for a wider set of partners to achieve its goals.

from being western-led, and China would inevitably play a major role in their future development.

inclusive global institutions would be crucial to managing that rise of distributed power.

power would be distributed broadly during the 21st century, rather than concentrated in a small number of countries.

the great taboo on the use of nuclear weapons,

there is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

the global coronavirus pandemic

the trade war that began in 2018

how that will happen, or where the changes might lead

Platforms such as the Humanitarian Data and Trust Initiative and DigitHarium should be explored as avenues for stakeholders to meet and discuss local and global solutions to these tools’ weaknesses.

Innovative technology won’t solve these issues unless there are corresponding policies that safeguard migrants.

In South Africa, Operation Dudula, which started as an online campaign against foreigners, has been used for xenophobic attacks and racial discrimination against migrants.

Biometrics collected for humanitarian purposes can be used by governments in law enforcement, border management and counter-terrorism without the affected person’s knowledge.

The GSMA Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation programme uses mobile technologies to address humanitarian problems in several African countries.

After the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West and Central Africa, the World Health Organization used new technology such as mHealth and eHealth to collect and share timely data and geolocate local outbreaks.

The Digital Vault allows migrants to upload and store important documents such as identity cards, passports and birth certificates in a cloud-type service.

Biometric data – such as fingerprints and face recognition – is widely used in voucher assistance programmes.

Digital humanitarianism, which refers to interventions conducted online, usually without in-person presence, is a product of information and technological advancement.

the UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 gave every person the right to a legal identity, including birth registration, by 2030.

as biometrics, spatial mapping and social media platforms in humanitarian programming.

there are multiple high-level events planned in 2023, including the SDG Summit, the High Level meeting on Universal Health Coverage, Global stocktake, and the High Level Dialogue on Financing for Development. Within the High Level Week itself, we have several High Level Meetings, for which we would also have preparatory meetings and negotiations.

7. Second, the Group is also concerned regarding stakeholders consultations convened by the co-facilitators for the modalities resolution. This is quite unusual and do not have past precedence for any UN meeting. Negotiations on modalities resolutions have been solely under the domain of member states.

This could include connecting those not yet connected; equitable use of digital public goods; avoiding fragmentation of the internet; providing people with options for how their data is used; safeguarding human rights in digital spaces; introducing accountability for disinformation and misleading content; and aligning the regulation of artificial intelligence with our universally shared values.

This could include a commitment to negotiate an international instrument on the prevention of an arms race in outer space; common principles for the governance of outer space activities; and measures to accelerate agreement on the removal of space debris, and to coordinate space traffic.

a New Agenda for Peace.

We see these two meetings as twin summits, with the same overall objective: to create conditions for a sustainable, equitable and inclusive future.

The SDG Summit

a Global Digital Compact will be meaningless without the input of technology companies and scientists.

Human rights and gender equality will be cross-cutting themes of the Summit of the Future

These include a general commitment to integrity in public information; a commitment to ensuring meaningful youth engagement at the United Nations; and a commitment to metrics that go beyond Gross Domestic Product and take vulnerability into account.  

more effective multilateral arrangements.

the Emergency Platform.

outer space

a Declaration on Future Generations.

a Global Digital Compact,

the Pact for the Future.

The Pact for the Future must demonstrate to the world that while we face daunting challenges, we can overcome them with co-operation, compromise and global solidarity.

The Permanent Representatives of the Netherlands and Fiji are developing an elements paper for a Declaration for Future Generations –a major step towards the proposed Summit of the Future. The Permanent Representatives of New Zealand and Oman are leading negotiations on the modalities resolution that would enable that the Summit of the Future to take place.

Futures Lab.

UN Behavioural Science Week

the potential of data for people, planet and the SDGs.

a new culture and new capabilities in data, digital, innovation, behavioural science, and strategic foresight.

the Scientific Advisory Mechanism.