International Norms

State of the Order: Assessing September 2020

The State of the Order breaks down the month's most important events impacting the democratic world order.

Topic overview | Space: The next frontier for innovation, economics, accessibility, and infrastructure

By Borja Prado

Space is quickly becoming the new frontier to be explored by national governments and private sector actors. In the process, the different parties prepare themselves for an environment that will bring to space the competition and collaboration behaviors that are typical on Earth, that will require new or updated regulations and international norms, and that will unleash new opportunities for multiple industries and technologies – spanning from transportation and satellite communication to data sharing, artificial intelligence or national security.

Solving the Eastern Mediterranean crisis requires compromise

By Matthew Bryza

France, Greece, and the entire EU should embrace this de-escalatory approach, recognizing that the entire transatlantic community will be strategically better off with a strong Greece-Turkey relationship that ensures a fair system for sharing Eastern Mediterranean energy resources.

UAE, Bahrain deals with Israel offer the Mideast a historic chance for positive change—if the region will build upon it

By Frederick Kempe

These deals present the region its best opportunity perhaps ever to bury its bloody, self-defeating past and embrace moderation and modernity. Yet that will only be true if the parties can work with international partners to protect the so-called Abraham Accords Peace Agreement from extremist assault and from Israeli hardliners bent on territorial expansion.

Open societies must create a grand strategy framework for data, sensemaking, and trust

By James Schmeling (Guest Author) and David Bray, PhD

Open societies are at a series of crossroads requiring intentional choices for the decade ahead. These choices are forced by new technologies, improvements in data capabilities, and changes in geopolitics globally. While human nature has not changed, the number of people on Earth has changed–up from 1.6 billion people on the planet in 1900, to 2.5 billion in the 1950s, to 7.8 billion in 2020.

State of the Order: Assessing August 2020

The State of the Order breaks down the month's most important events impacting the democratic world order.

Why data governance matters: Use, trade, intellectual property, and diplomacy

By Pari Esfandiari, PhD, Gregory F. Treverton, PhD

Global data and internet governance represents a scattered, multi-stakeholder, bottom-up, and driven by loose coordination among various players. Data governance can be thought of as incorporating a triangle of individuals and their privacy, nation-states and their interests, and the private sector and its profits. Its current status and prospects might be thought of along several lines of activity, which are interrelated but, for the sake of clarity and with some danger of oversimplification, are discussed in the following different sections: privacy and data use; regulating to police content; using antitrust to dilute data monopolies; self-regulation and digital trade; intellectual property rights; and digital diplomacy.