Strategic Dialogues

A conversation with the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Pretoria, Andreas Peschke, on the pivotal themes of German foreign policy in transition.

I spoke to Milton Nyamadzawo, Director for Southern Africa at the Institute for Economics and Peace on their programme of work and flagship reports such as the Positive Peace report & The Global Peace Index. We discussed how the IEP is advancing a  paradigm shift in the way the world thinks about peace by embracing concepts such as systems thinking in their data analysis and research. We also spoke about impact of the positive peace framework on policymaking and praxis.

Complex and protracted conflicts in various regions of the world such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, DRC, Central African Republic as well as worsening humanitarian crises such as Ethiopia, and Yemen highlight the imperative of adaptive and dynamic international humanitarian responses that are attuned to the challenges of armed conflicts and vulnerabilities of civilian populations.  I speak to Mamadou Sow, Head of The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries, on the state of international humanitarian action and the enduring relevance of IHL in the contemporary conflict landscape.

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the African Union (AU), officially launched in 2002, as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). With guest Carien du Plessis, we take stock of wins and stumbles in the AU’s twenty-year history, we gauge what is likely to dominate the agenda (high-wire transitions in Chad, Sudan; more than a dozen elections on the calendar...), and perhaps what is likely to be kept on the back burner, or at least where we will see slow progress. 

Defence diplomacy is a key tool of statecraft that embodies a combination of hard and soft power tools in furthering a state’s foreign policy agenda. In spite of this inherent value, defence diplomacy has remained a relatively understudied concept, primarily due to conceptual ambiguity and imprecisions that have often undermined analytical depth and comprehensive studies of its contours in practice. In this episode, we focus on defence diplomacy, unravelling its meaning(s), its positioning in relation to other tools of statecraft. More specifically, we examine South Africa’s defence diplomacy in service of delivering strategic imperatives and foreign and security policy objectives

As scholars and practitioners continue to study major case studies such as Pearl Harbor, the Tet offensive, the Yom Kippur War, Argentina’s seizure of the Falklands/Malvinas, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and 9/11 as notable intelligence failures, it is important to have a big picture perspective of intelligence as an important tool of foreign policy and national security. This episode focuses on the interface between intelligence and foreign policy and the implications for policy making.

15 years after the institutionalization of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) at 2005 World Summit, it is an apt moment to take stock of R2P’s development from its endorsement at the World Summit to its status as present in a global context marked by a mix of political and normative currents and developments. The principle of R2P stipulates that the international community has a responsibility to protect people from crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It’s endorsement was a watershed moment for the collective will to address mass atrocities and to operationalize the mantra of ‘never again’ with reference to conscience-shocking events in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Cambodia, among other cases.

Every 25th of May we  mark Africa Day to commemorate the founding of the Organisation for African Unity, which later became the African Union as the continental organisation moved to put the scourge of colonialism behind and embrace a vision of vision of a united and strong Africa, socio-economic development and the promotion of peace, security and stability. 21 years since the establishment of the AU (following the adoption of the Constitutive Act in Lome, Togo), pressing issues and questions remain about the effectiveness of the AU in fulfilling its mandate for Africans

 Lauren Johnston provides us with much-needed context and nuance to understand the diplomatic tussle between China and Australia, broader geopolitical  implications for the Asia-Pacific and the markings of an arguably Sinocentric world order.

We host Prof Mary Kaldor and Prof Saskia Sassen to talk about the Urbanisation of Warfare, and the complexity and unpredictability of urban armed conflict as an emerging policy and research agenda. See also their 2020  book Cities at War Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance