Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

This report examines the dyadic relationships between the big three in BRICS - China, India and Russia. Russia will chair the next BRICS summit in Kazan from October 22 to 24, 2024. Probably the most important issue on the agenda is a decision about possible new members. Some 40 countries have expressed an interest. What does this mean for the future of BRICS? Will BRICS become the new voice of the Global South? Or will it remain a loose grouping, a “negating coalition”, that has consensus about what to reject but that lacks a vision? This report argues that rivalries and conflicts among China, India and Russia prevent a homogenous global governance approach, although the international influence of BRICS is likely to keep growing.

The report addresses what has worked and what is the way forward for the disarmament machinery, when faced with the grim reality that it has been and continues to be undermined by geo-political and economic agendas. For the diplomat or advocate wanting to see progress on disarmament and arms control at this moment, what can be done? Are there routes around the rule of consensus? How can we refocus on protecting civilians and ensure that work in multilateral fora does not replicate a debating society, but instead has an impact on the ground?

This Policy Brief is a reflection on the origins, progress, setbacks, and current status of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the international community’s organising principle for responding to the threat or outbreak of mass atrocity crimes inside sovereign jurisdictions. While the articulation, refinement, institutionalisation, and consolidation of such a norm is one thing, the question remains: has R2P made a difference in practice? This question is addressed by Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, and a Commissioner and one of the principal authors of R2P.

This Policy Brief examines nuclear war-fighting preparations and asks whether tensions can be ameliorated by risk reduction and confidence-building measures. Arms control used to be based on an assumption of stabilization of big power relations in order to avoid a war that nobody wants. Today revisionist powers in Europe and East Asia defy stability, and in the US and Russia war-fighting preparations include nuclear as well as conventional and other means, especially at theatre level. China may be moving in the same direction, but there is not enough evidence to say so with certainty. US–China relations are facing the Thucydides trap, and the triangular politics of the three leading nuclear powers is inherently unstable. Except for the Cuban Missile Crisis and the critical state of US–Soviet relations around 1980, the present world is more dangerous than it has ever been in the nuclear age.

This Policy Brief examines the rarely-discussed topic of how nuclear war might impact non-combatant countries that are far from likely conflict zones, in particular the likely impacts of nuclear war on New Zealand. Rather than the catastrophic, immediate consequences of exploding warheads, distant non-combatants would face a cascade of economic social, and environmental disruptions which would be pervasive, complex, long-term, highly disruptive and would test the very fabric of their existence. Some of the identified vulnerabilities could be reduced beforehand and such actions could also make it easier for the country to recover from more likely global disruptions. Identifying and reducing key vulnerabilities increases resilience and would help recovery from global shocks including nuclear war.