About the event 

As the centre of gravity of world affairs shifts to the Asia-Pacific with China’s dramatic climb up the ladder of great power status, many uncomfortable questions arise about the capacity and willingness of Western powers to adapt to a Sinocentric order. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year, the question of the European security, political and economic architecture has re-emerged as a frontline topic of discussion. The return of the Russia question as a geopolitical priority has also been accompanied by the crumbling of almost all the main pillars of the global arms control complex of treaties, agreements, understandings and practices that had underpinned stability and brought predictability to major power relations in the nuclear age. The AUKUS security pact with the planned development of nuclear-powered attack submarines is both a reflection of changed geopolitical realities and, some argue, itself a threat to the global nonproliferation regime and a stimulus to fresh tensions in relations with China.

Regional and global governance institutions can never be quarantined from the underlying structure of international geopolitical and economic orders. Nor have they proven themselves to be fully fit for purpose to manage pressing global challenges and crises like wars, and potentially existential threats from nuclear weapons, climate-related disasters and pandemics. The rising and revisionist powers wish to redesign the international governance institutions to inject their own interests, governing philosophies and preferences. They also wish to relocate the control mechanisms from the major Western to some of their own capitals.

About Ramesh Thakur

Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow, the Toda Peace Institute, and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His last post was Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the ANU. He was formerly Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University (and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations). Educated in India (BA Honours, University of Calcutta) and Canada (MA, PhD Queen’s University), he has held fulltime academic appointments in Fiji, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia and been a consultant to the Australian, New Zealand and Norwegian governments on arms control, disarmament and international security issues. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Governance (2013–18).

Professor Thakur was a Commissioner and one of the principal authors of The Responsibility to Protect and Principal Writer of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s second reform report; a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Foundation Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario; and Co-Convenor of the Asia–Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. His books include Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Indiana University Press); The Group of Twenty (G20) (Routledge); The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford University Press); Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play 2015 (CNND); Nuclear Weapons and International Security: Selected Essays (Routledge); The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect, 2^nd Ed. (Cambridge University Press); Reviewing the Responsibility to Protect: Origins, Implementation and Controversies (London: Routledge, 2019); and The Nuclear Ban Treaty: A Transformational Reframing of the Global Nuclear Order (Routledge). He is also a regular media commentator.