This SIPRI Insights paper explores a series of nuclear transparency and confidence-building measures (CBMs) proposed by military, nuclear, political and regional experts from China, India, Pakistan, Russia and the United States to address nuclear challenges in South Asia. It categorizes these bilateral, trilateral and multilateral measures into doctrinal dialogues and joint threat assessment exercises; communication lines, pre-notification and de-alerting; and development and employment of strategic technologies.
This SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security paper examines security challenges arising from the Arctic activities of three actors with a substantial ‘footprint’—China, Russia and the United States—and how they might be addressed in existing and new frameworks.
This SIPRI Insights paper examines how climate-related security risks (CRSRs) are framed and responded to within different bodies of the European Union (EU). The paper finds that CRSRs are framed differently across the EU and that the kinds of actions proposed vary. Although this is not necessarily a problem, a key challenge is that across the EU the prescriptions for addressing CRSRs largely focus on long-term prevention in the form of climate mitigation, on the one hand, and reactive crisis responses, on the other.
Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are the central instrument for states to communicate their contribution to the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change and reflect their wider approach to climate mitigation and adaptation.
Even though the volumes of arms exported by emerging suppliers are lower than those of the established exporters, they can nonetheless have a direct impact on international and regional security. The diversification in global arms transfers caused by the emergence of new suppliers therefore deserves scrutiny. Brazil, South Korea, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are examples of emerging suppliers.
Arms companies have a presence that reaches far beyond the countries in which they are headquartered. This is the result of the internationalization of the arms industry. This paper uses a new data set to examine the results of this internationalization in terms of the international presence of major arms companies. It presents a mapping comprising 400 foreign entities linked to the world’s largest arms companies.
Assessing the prospects for Zero Hunger—Sustainable Development Goal 2—requires an understanding of food security that goes beyond developmental or humanitarian issues, to include linkages with geopolitics. Geopolitical challenges cut across areas such as natural resources, trade, armed conflict and climate change where unilateralism and zero-sum approaches to security directly hamper efforts to eradicate hunger and undermine the frameworks that govern those efforts.
With the aim of confidence building, states have agreed to share information on their arms procurement and military expenditure in several multilateral transparency instruments. However, this paper shows that, in recent years, participation in these instruments has declined to a very low level. Furthermore, only a few of the states that continue to participate in the instruments provide comprehensive and detailed information. This means that the information contained in the instruments is insufficient to fully assess global or regional armament developments.
Climate change and the associated climate-related security risks increase instability and have significant adverse effects on peacebuilding. Within the United Nations, there is a lack of consensus on which organs are most appropriate to respond to climate-related security risks. The Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) has demonstrated a growing role as a forum for member state discussions on this issue.
Official development assistance (ODA) plays an important and complementary role in promoting development in low- and middle-income states. Previous research in the literature has shown that ODA can have unintended consequences by enabling recipient states to shift ‘freed-up’ resources away from activities now funded by ODA to other spending categories. This literature has argued that the ‘freed-up’ resources could be funding military spending.
