Insights

Demilitarised zones (DMZs) serve as buffers in post-war peace processes by separating opposing forces to reduce aggression risks. Monitoring them is difficult due to their size and challenging terrain, typically relying on passive, active, or combined approaches. Advances in uncrewed and AI systems offer promising solutions to enhance monitoring, as seen in South Korea's efforts in the 240 km-long Korean DMZ. However, implementing these technologies raises five interconnected dilemmas—legal, moral, technological, practical, and security—that must be carefully managed to support peace and avoid unintended conflict. Lessons from the Korean DMZ provide valuable guidance for applying such technologies in other post-conflict zones.
Monitoring Demilitarised Zones in the Age of Uncrewed and AI Systems: Lessons from the Korean DMZ
AI health chatbots show strong medical knowledge in tests but fail to help users accurately diagnose themselves or determine proper care in real-world interactions. Users often miss or misunderstand chatbot guidance, highlighting communication breakdowns rather than knowledge gaps. Medicine involves nuanced judgment, empathy, and complex patient interaction that current AI cannot replicate. Instead of acting as frontline diagnosticians, AI chatbots are better suited to supportive roles like organizing information, summarizing records, and drafting clinical notes. Their promise lies in assistance rather than replacing human medical decision-making.
Why AI health chatbots won’t make you better at diagnosing yourself – new research
Feedback tools like surveys, 360-degree assessments, and speak-up channels intended to promote fairness and accountability can instead reinforce existing power structures and discourage scrutiny. In complex, matrixed organizations—especially with global capability centers—ambiguous authority leads to political risks in sharing honest data. Small exceptions and poor performance often become normalized to avoid conflict. Accountability concerns are frequently reframed as issues of interpersonal style rather than performance, with anonymous feedback used to discredit those raising problems. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where low scrutiny leads to popularity and political insulation for certain managers, further reducing accountability. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for leaders to restore genuine transparency and accountability.
When feedback becomes a weapon – how organisational incentives silence accountability
Ocean peacebuilding uses marine scientific cooperation, sustainable resource management, and conservation to prevent conflict and build trust among nations. Examples include collaborative efforts among the US, Cuba, and Mexico to protect marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, which helped ease diplomatic tensions. Inclusive standards set by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy promote sustainable ocean plans incorporating science and Indigenous knowledge. Post-tsunami recovery in Indonesia's Aceh region led to regional collaboration on tsunami warning systems, rebuilding trust in public institutions. Even amid geopolitical tensions, ocean science fosters dialogue and shared stewardship, serving as a vital diplomatic tool.
How ‘ocean peacebuilding’ can help calm global conflicts
Geostrategic shifts, rapid technological advancements, and increasing environmental pressures are straining global materials systems critical for industrial transformation. Over 90% of business leaders emphasize the importance of international cooperation on materials to ensure resilience, productivity, and sustainability. However, a weakening multilateral framework and a fragmented multipolar economy with competing regional blocs complicate such collaboration. Effective materials cooperation in this context requires addressing governance gaps and focusing on three key priorities for action to maintain global materials system effectiveness.
ICT, Health, Financial services, Education
The Future of Materials Systems: Cooperation Opportunities in a Multipolar World
Geostrategic shifts, technological advances, and environmental pressures are straining global materials systems critical to industrial transformation. Over 90% of business leaders emphasize international cooperation on materials as vital for long-term success. However, a fragmented multipolar economy and weakening multilateralism hinder collaboration and governance. To maintain resilient, productive, and sustainable materials systems, priorities include agile, results-driven collaborations; adopting circular economy principles through a lifecycle approach; and enhancing data transparency, standards interoperability, and trade systems to support resilient, circular value chains.
Financial services, Health
The Future of Materials Systems: Cooperation Opportunities in a Multipolar World
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is crucial for reducing global emissions, with key technologies including direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering. A report by the World Economic Forum, Oliver Wyman, and ClimeFi provides a data-driven analysis of the CDR market, assessing technology maturity, scalability, financing, and offtake trends. It highlights current deployment, investment patterns, and market barriers such as fragmented standards, unclear accounting, and limited capital access. The report aims to guide buyers, developers, investors, and policymakers on risk, cost, and bankability to support the growth of scalable carbon removal solutions.
Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies: Market Overview and Offtake
Intergenerational foresight emphasizes making decisions today with careful consideration of long-term impacts. It advocates for responsible leadership that prioritizes future generations, moving beyond viewing the future as distant or abstract. The approach offers practical principles, tools, and examples to help leaders identify risks, opportunities, and trade-offs across generations. By integrating long-term thinking into policy, strategy, and governance, decision-makers can better navigate increasing uncertainty and irreversible decisions.
Intergenerational Foresight: An Approach for Long-Term Responsibility in Governance
Competition policy often overlooks gender disparities, focusing on prices and efficiency while missing how market dynamics disproportionately affect women. Women face sectoral concentration in low-wage jobs, barriers to finance and entrepreneurship, and exclusion from government procurement, limiting their economic opportunities. Employer concentration reduces women’s wages more than men’s, and financial markets often neglect women-owned businesses. Addressing these gaps through gender-aware competition policy—using sex-disaggregated data, scrutinizing labor market concentration, and fostering open digital ecosystems—can enhance both market fairness and efficiency. Inclusive competition ensures markets work equitably for all, not just neutrally on paper.
Markets Aren’t Neutral-Why Competition Policy Needs to Pay Attention to Women
Decarbonizing road transport in the CAREC region is crucial due to rising emissions from increasing vehicle ownership and fossil fuel reliance. Electric vehicles (EVs) offer a key solution but face barriers including import dependence, lack of charging infrastructure, carbon-intensive electricity grids, and inconsistent policies. The People's Republic of China leads in EV adoption through subsidies and incentives, while other CAREC countries lag. A holistic approach combining EV adoption with urban planning, public transport enhancement, and grid decarbonization is needed. Strategic recommendations include implementing purchase subsidies, import duty waivers, tax incentives, regional collaboration, and infrastructure investments to accelerate EV uptake and reduce emissions region-wide.
Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine
Powering the Road Ahead: Decarbonizing Transport in CAREC
The roadmap outlines how Asia and the Pacific can achieve net zero emissions by 2050 through trade, green technologies, and international cooperation. Despite challenges, the economic costs of this transition are manageable. Strengthening trade relations and promoting green investment are key to unlocking decarbonization opportunities. Trade plays a vital role by spreading green technologies, supporting emerging industries, and enhancing cooperation across the region.
The Economics of the Net-Zero Transition: Policy Scenarios and the Role of Trade and Cooperation
The Prosocial AI Index offers a comprehensive framework for evaluating AI systems beyond typical metrics like efficiency and profit. It assesses AI through two axes: the "4Ts" (Tailored, Trained, Tested, Targeted) focusing on how AI is built and deployed, and the "4Ps" (Purpose, People, Profit, Planet) addressing the AI’s intended impact. This 16-cell matrix encourages accountability across ethical, social, financial, and environmental dimensions. With rising AI adoption and increased regulatory scrutiny, the Index helps organizations measure what truly matters, bridging trust gaps, guiding ethical AI governance, and supporting talent retention by demonstrating commitment to responsible AI. It can be used for assessing new AI deployments and monitoring existing systems continuously.
Is Your AI System Ethical? Try This Assessment
Data sharing and reuse are fundamental to scientific discovery, AI, and public decision-making, shifting data governance challenges from technical issues to institutional design. Various governance models—such as data trusts, commons, cooperatives, intermediaries, unions, sandboxes, and spaces—address distinct structural challenges within data ecosystems. A purpose-driven typology identifies seven governance archetypes targeting problems like transaction costs, power imbalances, legitimacy gaps, and scaling complexity. The focus should be on selecting governance models fit for specific institutional contexts rather than seeking a universally superior model. Effective data collaboration requires institutional orchestration, where multiple governance arrangements coexist and evolve to support responsible, sustainable data reuse.
Health
Orchestrating and Designing Data Collaboratives: What Governance Model is Fit for Purpose?
Intelligence is defined as the ability to choose between options, inherently linked to specific purposes and environments rather than mere processing speed. Real-world intelligence is diverse and often a hybrid of multiple elements adapted to ecological niches, exemplified by autonomous vehicles using various tools for sensing and decision-making. Future human experiences may be increasingly hybrid, integrated with prosthetics and networks, blurring distinctions between human and machine. AI should be understood biologically, as part of a complex ecosystem with dynamic interactions, rather than mechanistically. Conventional categories such as consciousness or rights may be inadequate for understanding super-intelligent machines, and intelligence cannot be reduced to simple calculations or values.
Education
AI, AGI and the future
Tropical deforestation significantly increases local temperatures by reducing the cooling effect of trees through shade and evapotranspiration. This warming exposes over 300 million people across Central and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia to higher heat levels, contributing to an estimated 28,000 heat-related deaths annually in the tropics. Heat stress from this warming exacerbates health risks and reduces productivity, revealing a hidden public health crisis alongside the well-known climate impacts of carbon emissions. New tools and initiatives aim to provide localized data and financial incentives to support forest conservation and mitigate these health hazards.
Antarctica, Nigeria | Health
Chopping down areas of tropical rainforest is causing rising temperatures linked to thousands of deaths
Brexit has significantly reduced London’s influence over European financial markets. Previously a net transmitter of financial shocks shaping investment decisions across Europe, the UK now absorbs more market volatility from the continent than it sends. This shift is reflected in London’s drop from a +11.8 to a –5.5 net volatility spillover score. Meanwhile, Germany and Italy have increased their financial clout. The relocation of £900 billion in banking assets to multiple EU cities, including Frankfurt and Paris, has reshaped Europe’s financial network, weakening London’s cross-border ties. This realignment appears permanent, diminishing the City’s role in setting European financial conditions, with broad implications for UK borrowing costs, investment, and economic influence.
United Kingdom | Financial services
How Brexit reduced the City of London’s financial clout – new research
Human knowledge—central to human dominance—has always been spread through transformative communication tools, from language to the internet. While knowledge is a non-rivalrous public good that ideally should be freely accessible at near-zero dissemination cost, creating accurate information is costly, leading to a market failure. This imbalance favors the spread of falsehoods over reliable truth, turning the public good of knowledge into a “public bad” marked by misinformation and societal harm. Free speech alone cannot ensure truth, as the rapid diffusion of deception can overwhelm costly, truthful information, threatening the health of democratic societies.
ICT, Education
What to do when the ‘public good’ of information goes bad
Artificial intelligence is profoundly transforming the peace and security sector, demanding new leadership competencies to harness its benefits and mitigate risks amid escalating geopolitical tensions. Effective leaders must maintain cognitive autonomy by critically evaluating AI outputs rather than deferring to them, preserving independent thinking despite automation’s challenges. Prioritizing human connection is crucial, as AI cannot replicate the trust, emotional intelligence, and cultural awareness essential in diplomacy and team cohesion. Leaders need to foster psychological safety and address human relational needs in hybrid AI-human environments to prevent isolation and communication breakdowns. The 2027 AI Summit in Geneva aims to advance understanding of these leadership demands in an AI-accelerated world.
Education
Are Peace and Security Leaders Ready for AI?
AI-driven corporate redundancies yield efficiency gains and cost savings for shareholders but impose significant social costs on the state, including unemployment benefits and community decline. Beyond income loss, affected workers face a profound loss of meaning and social role, which income replacement alone cannot resolve. Historical evidence from deindustrialized regions like South Wales, Sheffield, and the American Rust Belt reveals enduring negative impacts on mental health, community stability, and identity when major industries disappear. These challenges represent a crisis of purpose that current policies fail to address, transferring the true social costs of automation and restructuring to the broader society.
Education
When firms announce redundancies, who pays for the loss of meaning?
Turkey's designation of 2025 as the "Year of the Family" and 2026–2035 as the "Decade of Family and Population" signals an authoritarian strategy to address demographic decline amid economic difficulties. Declining fertility is framed as a threat to national resilience, prompting policies that emphasize traditional family structures and childbearing as civic duties. Anti-gender politics are central to this agenda, linking demographic goals with conservative social governance and excluding LGBTQ+ communities through institutional stigma and repression. Economic factors like job insecurity and housing costs contribute to low fertility, but these are largely unaddressed in favor of promoting heteronormative family models. This demographic governance shift has broad implications for Turkey's social policy and democratic governance.
Latin America
Turkey’s “Year of the Family” 2025

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