Highlight 5/2022 – 5 issues that will shape the international agenda

Tobden Chopel, 31 January 2022

The International Agenda for the 21st Century describes the vision and aspirations of subnational governments, and the contribution we can make to ensuring sustainable development in a rapidly changing world. To ensure peace and prosperity, science, technologies, and innovation must serve everyone, for sustainable development on a human scale. The International Agenda builds actions around five pillars: people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership.

Nevertheless, there is this concept called Uncertainty. A term used to describe the future which acts as a barrier to the international agendas progress. For instance, the pandemic of 2019 has caused a strong feeling of vulnerability across the globe. In recent years, it has changed our daily lives at a pace and intensity that has reminded us of the fragility of what we thought strong, and the malleability of what we thought immutable. 2021 and 2020 were years of destruction, but 2022 seems like a year of construction. Several lives and jobs have been lost as a result of the Wuhan virus, and various institutions have been distrusted, posing a challenge for the vision of the international agenda.

Some of the issues that shapes the international agenda are:

• International system: Cooperation or conflict?

Global governance has been exposed by the pandemic, contested international bodies, tensions caused by China trying to assert itself, and the eroding liberal order by those who created it. A clear example can be found in the United Nations Security Council. It took until July 1st to agree on Resolution 2532 on COVID-19, which is one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Following three months of deliberation and obstruction, ten million cases accumulated in healthcare systems.

• Recovery: Global or partial?

Data on the immediate economic impact of COVID-19 were published in the first months of 2021. Now that the markets have recovered a significant share of their losses, it is time to review the damage. Following successive good news stories about vaccines and treatments, the return to pre-pandemic levels of activity will take much longer and will be uneven. Negative health developments, such as a failure of the vaccination process or a virus mutation, could shatter the hopes that began to build in late 2020. 

• Fears 

The fear of a pandemic has not gone away, but it must share the stage with other fears. Scarcity and disruptions in the supply chain are temporary. There are others with a more permanent nature, such as the consequences of climate change, social discontent, and the obsolescence of some types of training and employment. 39% of employees believe that their job will be obsolete in five years, according to a study conducted by PWC. This is the fear of not being able to adapt personally and collectively to a series of irreversible changes. Meanwhile, some actors and interests fuel and stoke fear, instrumentalise it politically, and monetize it economically.

• Economies in Recession : A Record High Number

The immensely colossal issue of 2021 was the distribution of affluence and income. Inequalities at international level and within individual societies are nothing incipient. But the widespread has starkly uncovered the shifting capacities inside and between nations both to battle the infection and to resist the measures required to handle it. All pre-existing imbalances have extended. Indeed the advance made on sexual orientation correspondence in later a long time has been compromised since ladies have tended to bear a more prominent care burden, and numerous have seen their careers cut brief. An especially uncovering reality is that whereas they account for 39% of the workforce, 54% of the employment misplaced in 2020 were held by ladies. Instruction holes have moreover broadened between children in families prepared for separate learning and those who are not, significantly raising the hazard of higher rates of school dropout. Similarly disturbing is the World Bank estimate that 150 million individuals can be pushed into extreme poverty in 2021, in clear inconsistency with the primary Economic Advancement Goal.

• Way of life: Back to normal or new normal? 

Of the changes brought by COVID-19, the fastest were in the ways we work, travel, consume, relate and even conduct international relations. Will these also be the deepest and longest-lasting changes? To what extent might a new normality condition the international agenda? 

Discretion may be among the primary ranges to return to typicality, given the tremendous restrictions of “zoom diplomacy”, the security helplessness of virtual gatherings, and the memory of the dismal 75th commemoration of the Joined together Countries. Different get-togethers were delayed in 2020, among them the G7 summit within the United States and the bi-continental summit between the nations of the European Union and the African Union. When wellbeing conditions allow, we are going to see universal plans rapidly stuffed with summits, official trips and pending visits. In spite of the fact that, at a more specialised level, components for further data trade and discourse are likely to be standardised.

Tobden Chopel, 5/2022 – 5 issues that will shape the international agenda, 31 January 2022, available at www.meig.ch

The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the author and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva.