Insights

A fragile calm has returned to Lebanon following a US-imposed ceasefire on April 17, initiated after intense Israeli strikes against Hezbollah targets in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley. The United States unexpectedly re-engaged diplomatically, spurred by Tehran’s condition linking ceasefire in Lebanon to Iran-US peace talks and a timely call from President Macron to President Trump. Dialogue began between Israeli and Lebanese officials, with Lebanon seeking sovereignty and border demarcation, while Israel focuses on neutralizing Hezbollah, possibly extending its security zone in southern Lebanon. The prospects for lasting peace remain uncertain amid rising ceasefire violations and contrasting national aims.
Lebanon: What Prospects for Peace?
China maintains a cautious and strategically neutral stance amid conflicts involving its allies Russia and Iran, seeking to balance diplomatic relations without fully committing to either side. Recent Chinese calls for restoring normal navigation in the Strait of Hormuz signal pressure on Iran to moderate its actions amid U.S. naval blockades threatening energy supplies to China. While publicly supporting humanitarian aid to Iran, China remains ambiguous about military or dual-use assistance. Unlike its more overt backing of Russia in Ukraine, China’s approach to Iran reflects a "biased neutrality" shaped by economic vulnerabilities and geopolitical calculations, aiming to benefit from prolonged conflicts while avoiding destabilizing consequences.
From Russia to Iran: China and the Dilemmas of a Biased Neutrality
Rumen Radev’s transition from Bulgarian President to leader of the Progressive Bulgaria party, which won a decisive majority in the 2026 elections, highlights how direct presidential elections can destabilize party systems. Despite the presidency being designed as weak and non-partisan, Radev exercised significant political influence, leveraging his anti-corruption stance to build popularity and undermine established parties. Research shows that direct presidential elections promote party fragmentation, higher turnover, and unstable coalitions, contributing to prolonged electoral volatility as seen in Bulgaria’s multiple elections since 2021. This pattern mirrors experiences in other democracies where presidentialism increases party system instability.
Bulgaria is the latest example of the perils of presidentialism
Asia and the Pacific's heavy reliance on Middle Eastern oil imports amid the Middle East conflict exposes its vulnerability to energy shocks, underscoring the urgent need to accelerate the shift to renewables and smart grids. While the region leads globally in renewable energy adoption, rising energy demand driven by economic growth and urbanization requires comprehensive energy system restructuring. Expanding interconnected smart grids, such as the Lao-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project, can optimize renewable energy use across diverse climates. Financial and institutional reforms including ease of renewable energy financing, corporate power purchase agreements, and separation of power utilities are critical to overcoming barriers. Implementing carbon pricing would further enhance renewables’ competitiveness, ensuring economic resilience and climate sustainability.
Pakistan, Philippines | Financial services
Another Asian Power Crisis-It’s Time to Energize Renewables
Developing countries can transform climate adaptation goals into investment-ready programs by using the five-step Climate Adaptation Investment Planning (CAIP) framework piloted in Armenia, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Nepal. Early results indicate these programs provide strong economic returns and development benefits by focusing on system-level risk management, iterative planning, and enhancing human and institutional capacity to address current and future climate impacts. This approach integrates public and private financing to mobilize effective climate adaptation investments.
Climate Adaptation Investment Planning: Lessons Learned
In Asia, unhealthy diets contribute significantly to noncommunicable diseases, driven by food environments shaped by cross-border trade, multinational companies, and urbanization. National policies alone are insufficient due to transnational influences like widespread ultra-processed food availability and marketing. Regional cooperation is essential to harmonize regulations, influence food supply and pricing, and share knowledge and capacity. Initiatives such as ASEAN nutrition guidelines and SHAPE-Asia demonstrate the benefits of coordinated, evidence-based regional action. Priorities include regulatory harmonization, stronger regional governance, and investment in regional public goods to improve food environments and promote healthier diets across Asia.
Africa, Latin America | Health
Why Regional Action Is Essential to Improve Food Environments in Asia
Control over digital interfaces such as search engines, social media, and AI agents has become a central element in geopolitical power struggles. Corporate multinationals like Google, Facebook, TikTok, and DeepSeek use interface design to consolidate authority, while governments intervene to challenge or harness this control for national interests. This dynamic reshapes relationships between information, people, and machines, marking a contested phase in the evolution of global communication power and the internet’s future.
Financial services, Education, ICT
From search engines to AI agents: Interface control and the restructuring of communication power
Energy insecurity is worsening due to the combined impact of geopolitical tensions, such as the Iran crisis, and increasing extreme weather events affecting energy supply and demand. Household energy costs remain elevated, disproportionately affecting lower-income groups and businesses, while global electricity demand continues to grow. Current energy systems struggle with aging infrastructure, limited grid capacity, and insufficient storage to integrate expanding renewable energy sources, leading to mismatches in supply and demand. Climate-related disruptions—heatwaves, droughts, and storms—exacerbate these vulnerabilities. A more integrated approach is needed to treat energy security and decarbonization jointly, emphasizing reduced fossil fuel dependence, improved efficiency, and enhanced grid flexibility to ensure reliable, affordable energy.
Africa | Financial services, Health
How freak weather and an old‑fashioned grid exacerbate energy insecurity
Manon Revel and Théophile Pénigaud analyze AI-enhanced frameworks for identifying common ground in collective preferences, highlighting their design choices and future technical and normative impacts. They contextualize AI-assisted preference elicitation within the history of opinion polls, noting that preferences are influenced by decision-making contexts and rarely captured objectively. The authors explore AI’s potential to aid discovery, representation of collective will, sense-making, and agreement-seeking, while warning against misuse that could lead to disempowerment or unjust political outcomes.
Education
AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of the Collective Will
Digital statecraft is evolving beyond digitizing services or regulating platforms to fundamentally rethinking the state's role in an AI-mediated world. At an inaugural gathering of Digital Statecraft Fellows at Cambridge University, diverse experts addressed governance challenges posed by AI, focusing on institutional design that integrates geopolitical, technical, and governance realities. This emerging field positions the state as a coordinator amid complex AI systems, data infrastructures, and global platforms that shape social, economic, and political life. The discussion highlighted urgent, forward-looking approaches to governance in the age of AI.
Education, ICT
Signals from the Frontier of Digital Statecraft: Rethinking governance in the age of AI
Healthy life expectancy in the UK has declined by over two years in the past decade, with women experiencing a sharper drop than men. The UK ranks 20th out of 21 high-income countries, ahead of only the US. Significant disparities exist, with women in deprived areas living about 20 years fewer in good health than those in affluent areas. Contributing factors for women include unpaid caregiving burdens, precarious employment in low-wage sectors, and delayed or inadequate healthcare, particularly in reproductive health. The recent women's health strategy pledges modest investment that experts say falls far short of addressing these deep-rooted issues. Closing this gap requires sustained funding, prioritizing women's health services, and addressing broader social determinants beyond healthcare.
Health
Healthy life expectancy falls in the UK – and the decline is worse among women
The climate crisis demands more than individual actions like net-zero pledges or green shopping; systemic changes are essential. Despite global agreements, corporate commitments, and the rise of renewable technologies, emissions remain near record highs. The burden of sustainability often falls unfairly on individuals who face constant challenges against convenience and wasteful systems. Meaningful progress requires addressing these larger structural issues rather than expecting isolated consumer choices to solve the problem.
Financial services, Health
Podcast: The Climate Crisis Is Here. Will We Ever Fix It?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming evidence-informed health policy-making by enabling faster analysis and integration of diverse data throughout the policy cycle. AI supports problem identification, policy design, and implementation via predictive modeling, scenario simulation, and adaptive feedback, enhancing responsiveness and iteration in complex health contexts. While AI augments human judgment, challenges such as bias, opacity, equity, data governance, and regulatory gaps must be addressed. Responsible AI integration requires human oversight, multidisciplinary collaboration, living evidence approaches, and risk-based regulation to strengthen policy processes, improve health outcomes, and maintain public trust.
Education, Health
Artificial intelligence and evidence-informed policy: emerging challenges and opportunities
This open access volume edited by Petra Ahrweiler and Nigel Gilbert presents agent-based simulation models addressing national policy challenges related to AI, welfare assessment, and value diversity. Drawing on case studies from nine countries with diverse value systems, it explores how AI can be context-specific, adaptive, and responsive in public social services. The work emphasizes participatory methodologies to develop responsible, value-sensitive AI and policies, reflecting societal pluralism and political, economic, and social pressures. It advocates for co-designed AI innovations to better meet societal needs in the public sector.
Education
Participatory Modelling and Simulation to Improve AI-based Public Social Services
Sustaining knowledge infrastructures (KIs) requires ongoing engagement from diverse stakeholders as new challenges and values emerge. Drawing on literature, practical experience, and a 2024 workshop, five key questions are proposed for KI project managers: considering sustainability throughout the KI lifecycle, communicating evolving visions, engaging communities, appropriately scaling the infrastructure, and adopting iterative decision-making processes. These strategies help KIs adapt to community needs and values without necessarily growing in size. Effective sustainability depends on context, including funding, discipline, governance, and community, but aligning maintenance efforts with institutional goals is essential for all KIs.
Education
Sustaining Knowledge Infrastructures: Asking the Right Questions and Listening for Answers
Mirror is a fully automated journal dedicated to AI interpretability research, with original studies composed, conducted, and written entirely by large language models (LLMs) analyzing other LLMs. It mainly publishes mechanistic interpretability work that breaks down model behaviors into internal operations but welcomes all rigorous research enhancing understanding of LLMs, including behavioral and theoretical approaches. By automating interpretability research, Mirror aims to keep pace with rapidly advancing AI capabilities and contribute to safer, more aligned AI systems. Its open-access publications serve as valuable training data for future AI interpretability, safety, and alignment research.
Mirror: An Automated Journal of AI Interpretability
The E6 group, formed by the EU's six largest economies—Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain—aims to revitalize EU decision-making amid geopolitical pressures. Representing 70% of the EU's population and economy, this heterogeneous group transcends regional alliances, balancing diverse political stances. It seeks to enhance cooperation by either building consensus among members to influence broader EU policies or by acting as a vanguard through enhanced cooperation with willing states, though this requires more participants. Differentiated integration through such formats is critical for EU resilience and swift action in areas like defense, finance, and infrastructure, offering flexibility beyond traditional EU procedures to address crises more effectively.
Poland, South Africa | Financial services
The new E6 format: The EU between unity and fragmentation
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) enables autonomous execution of complex, multi-step workflows, offering transformative potential for government operations and citizen services. Successful adoption requires a strategic, evidence-based approach to identify where agentic AI can deliver high public value while managing complexity and risks. The report presents a department-agnostic readiness framework to assess optimal AI use cases and deployment risks, supported by a global analysis and real-world examples of public sector initiatives. It provides a practical toolkit to help governments prioritize high-impact opportunities and scale agentic AI effectively.
Making Agentic AI Work for Government: A Readiness Framework
The escalating conflict between the U.S. and Iran, marked by strategic control over the Strait of Hormuz, is reshaping global logistics and economics. The strait, vital for 20% of the world's oil and gas, faces ongoing risks that will increase transportation costs and prompt alternative export routes. Spain's economy is impacted through rising inflation and reduced competitiveness, exacerbated by the U.S. shift toward self-sufficiency and protectionism. Business leaders are urged to adopt agile planning, secure alternative logistics, manage persistent inflation, and monitor currency exposure to navigate the heightened geopolitical and economic uncertainties.
Latin America | Financial services
4 steps to face uncertainty: Reassess your strategy in light of the conflict in the Middle East
Frontier AI, exemplified by Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview, has demonstrated unprecedented autonomy in planning and executing complex cyber operations rapidly. In controlled tests, Claude Mythos uncovered thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities across major systems, achieving an end-to-end automated cyber-attack chain completion. This breakthrough presents a dual-use dilemma: it can vastly improve cybersecurity by enabling rapid vulnerability detection and patching but could also lower the barriers for sophisticated cyber-attacks if misused. Currently restricted to select tech firms and critical infrastructure, Claude Mythos signals a shift towards AI as autonomous operators with broad implications for cybersecurity and other industries.
Financial services, Education
AI has crossed a threshold – what Claude Mythos means for the future of cybersecurity

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