Mapping Challenges and Response Capacity
These activities are designed to draw on ‘state of the art’ analysis about evolving challenges to human and international security, in order to assess capacities and gaps in institutional response.
Working Paper Series: Evolving Challenges to Human and International Security
The Working Paper Series includes over 20 papers authored by leading experts on critical issues affecting human and international security and international response capacities, with a special subset of papers looking at these issues from the perspective of different regions. The working papers are designed to capture and reflect in accessible form the most current state of knowledge relevant to debate about policy options.
Topics include:
- Coping with Organized Violence : armed-conflict trends, small arms and light weapons, organized crime, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, peacemaking and mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding;
- Managing Natural Systems : poverty and inequality, food security, resource scarcity, demographic trends, global public health and biosecurity, energy security, and climate change;
- Regional Prespectives : Africa, Asia, Caucasus/Central Asia, Europe, Latin America and Caribbean, and the Middle East.
“Problem Definition” Workshops
IPI, together with the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, convened a series of ‘problem definition’ workshops in 2006, which focused on specific crises in order to assess the health of international mechanisms for prevention and response. The workshops provide space for selected guests to examine understandings of specific crises and devise innovative research and policy options, are framed around three sets of questions:
- How have international ‘definitions’ of the ‘problem’ at hand shaped, enabled or limited international responses?
- Have efforts to build knowledge and capacities been best oriented to the origins and evolution of a crisis? Are they fit for the purpose?
- What are the implications for how we understand and respond to this crisis or other crises in the future? How do we optimize multilateral institutions’ responses?