Policy Briefs and Reports

This policy brief analyses the accelerating trend of human rights regression observed in early 2025 and its implications for global peace and security. Drawing on Human Rights Watch's April 2025 report, "100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days”, it identifies three interlinked threats: the erosion of democratic institutions, discriminatory policies targeting vulnerable populations, and the deliberate retreat from multilateral frameworks. These developments directly contradict the commitments of the 2024 UN Pact for the Future, which reaffirmed the centrality of human rights to sustainable peace. The brief concludes with strategic imperatives for governments, international organisations, civil society, and funders to reverse current backsliding and restore rights-based approaches to conflict prevention, bridging the growing gap between multilateral aspirations and national realities.

This report examines the current rivalries between the USA and China—two entangled but differently structured empires—which are triggering mental confusions, public anxieties and political misunderstandings and fears. Getting the measure of these world-shaping dynamics should be a priority for every thinking person, but the task is hampered by much bluff and bluster, propaganda and disinformation on both sides. Confronted by Russian-style despotisms, a rising Chinese empire and an angry America bearishly in retreat and decline, democrats everywhere might realise that this is a moment of opportunity not to be wasted, a tipping point in which the future of democracy no longer depends on the approval and support of the United States. Post-imperial democracy will instead depend upon the solidarity of the shaken.