SIPRI Policy Papers

This SIPRI Research Policy Paper examines the interconnectedness of food insecurity, climate and environmental pressures, and violent conflict, proposing strategies to enhance peacebuilding within integrated climate-resilient food security interventions. It asserts that collaborative, multisectoral programming among humanitarian, development and peacebuilding stakeholders is essential to disrupt vicious circles of food insecurity, climate challenges and conflict.

Space systems are essential for nuclear and non-nuclear missions for China, Russia and the United States, with the space domain central in their national security strategies. Amid the strategic competition and rivalry between the three states, their threat perceptions exhibit unprecedented levels of worst-case scenario thinking, signalling a preparedness to respond with force in case of attacks or incidents involving space systems.

The United Nations Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA) was established in 1991 as a transparency mechanism with the main goal of preventing potentially destabilizing build-ups of armaments. UNROCA reporting is particularly relevant to South East Asian states, and they are willing to participate. However, after high reporting rates in UNROCA’s first two decades, these states’ reporting rates have been low in recent years. When they report, they give all the required information on their arms imports and much additional, and useful, detail.

This SIPRI Research Policy Paper explores the role of civil society in environmental polit­ics in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. In recent years, the Gulf region has seen a shift in official discourses and policies towards sustainability and the energy transition. This has opened up new opportun­ities for civil society actors to engage with policymakers and the public on issues such as climate change and environ­mental preservation.

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.