SIPRI Policy Papers

Space-enabled services are critical for various civilian and military purposes. Current military uses of space—for example, in the Russia–Ukraine War—indicate several avenues for unpredictability and ambiguity, which can increase potential for escalation, both in space and on earth. Yet, there is no common understanding of escalation risks in the international community.

This SIPRI Research Policy Paper identifies four parameters to assess escalation risks in the space domain: the target, the capability used, the effect and the consequences. These parameters can help establish a standardized approach to assess whether an attack is escalatory.

Based on current trends that undermine predictability and transparency in space activities, these parameters inform recommendations to minimize escalation risks. These recommendations include proposals to limit attacks on high-value strategically significant space systems; undertake exchanges on critical infrastructure; characterize acts that are especially escalatory; to enhance resilience of space-based services for civilians; and to build a typology that identifies potential harms. The recommendations also demand further action from states to implement and enforce international law governing space activities and to engage with commercial actors to raise awareness and clearly establish their accountability.

Among the key tools that states that export arms and military equipment can adopt to help to prevent and mitigate the diversion of military materiel are post-shipment on-site inspections. These inspections involve the exporting state requiring and conducting physical checks on previously authorized and transferred military materiel on the territory of the importing state. In the past decade a growing number of states have adopted and implemented this policy tool.

This paper provides a timely analysis of the evolution of China’s foreign aid policy in the past seven decades with a particular focus on the developments since 2000.

The 2019 protests in Iraq and Lebanon revealed a widespread dissatisfaction with political systems based on sectarian and ethnosectarian power-sharing, which many saw as being responsible for a host of governance failures. This has given rise to demands for a wholesale change of the political systems in both countries. However, the dismantlement of identity-based power-sharing systems is a remote prospect—they are deeply entrenched, and change would depend on action from the very political elites that benefit from them.

Climate-related security risks are changing the security landscape in which multilateral peacebuilding efforts are taking place. Following a similar assessment of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia in 2019, this policy paper offers another glimpse into the future of peacebuilding in the context of climate change, this time by providing an in-depth assessment of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).

The long-standing relationship between China and the European Union (EU) is being subsumed into a broader geopolitical competition between major power centres. This report examines EU–China cooperation and assesses its prospects. 

Conflict dynamics in the Sahel are complex. The region faces a multidimensional crisis that includes the proliferation of terrorist groups, criminal networks, environmental pressures, state weaknesses and severe governance problems. In addition to this internal context, the Sahel crisis has been affected by external factors, such as the fall of Muammar Gaddafi and the civil war in Libya. Its deeper causes can be found in the structural factors of fragility in the sociopolitical dynamics of internal divisions, serial uprisings and weak states.

The inadequate response to the use of chemical weapons by a state against its own population was an important catalyst leading to the creation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). A great deal has been achieved under the CWC, which is an important example of how multilateral cooperation can succeed.

This paper takes a regional approach to understanding the state of the social contract in MENA countries. It describes, country-by-country, the impact of protest movements, or their absence, on relations between society and the state, and the likely effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on those relations.

The ever-increasing dependence on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in all aspects of society raises many challenges for national crisis management agencies. These agencies need to prepare not only for new cyberthreats and cyber vulnerabilities, but also for the fact that the aftermath of a cyber incident affecting critical infrastructure has its own challenges.