Insights

In November 2021, over 135 countries signed up to the OECD / G20 ‘Inclusive Framework’ to reform international taxation rules. The two-pillar plan aims to ensure that multinationals pay their fair share of tax wherever they operate, regardless of where they are headquartered. The agreement looked like a triumph for multilateralism. But 18 months on, the two supposedly…

Welcome back to the Global Month Ahead, Global Counsel's briefing on the events and stories that will define the month to come. This month, Health and Life Sciences Senior Associate Rosie Hill will hear from different members of the GC team to preview the month's stories before they are in the headlines.

From Brussels to Beijing, diplomats are increasingly focused on winning the battle to establish the standards and norms governing emerging technologies. New structures for Whitehall departments may be a step in the right direction for the UK. 

This week saw the third meeting of the Trade and Technology Council (TTC) take place in the United States. What was discussed by the negotiators, and how significant is what was announced? 

Following several leader-level summits in Asia, including ASEAN in Cambodia; G20 in Bali, and APEC in Thailand, Asian countries continue to take an increasingly active role in dealing with global challenges and brokering a pathway between US-China competition. What does the future of Summit diplomacy look like from Asia and what did we learn after the first set of in…

In the latest in our geopolitics series, practice director Jon Garvie is joined by Paola Subacchi, Professor of International Economics and Chair Advisory Board at the Global Policy Institute at Queen Mary, University of London. Paola co-chaired the T7 think-tank task force on economic recovery, which fed academic and think-tank perspectives into the G7 and G20…

Welcome back to 'The Geopolitics of", our miniseries exploring the geopolitical questions that will define the future of international relations.

When the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) was created following a summit in June 2021, both sides viewed it primarily as a means of reinvigorating a badly damaged relationship, following the failure of the TTIP negotiations, the tantrums of the Trump years and the fall-out over AUKUS. 

The UN General Assembly’s High-Level General Debate (i.e leaders' speeches) starts on Tuesday, 20 September, facing a hot war in Europe, a dialogue of the deaf between the world’s two superpowers and an accelerating global decline in democratic norms. Some of the lesser-known commitments set out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights – for example, “the right to a standard…

Welcome to the Global Month Ahead, a new Global Counsel podcast highlighting the key events in the month to come. In each episode, Global Macro Associate Director Isabelle Trick will hear from different members of the GC team to preview the month's stories before they are in the headlines.

For many living in the US and the UK, encountering crumbling and inadequate infrastructure is a daily part of life. Yet, the tide may be turning. Last month's G20 Summit saw a large commitment to international infrastructure investment, and the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a rare bipartisan victory for US President Joe Biden. Why is…

Welcome back to ''The geopolitics of'', our new podcast mini-series exploring geopolitics in the modern age.

In a speech in London in late April, the British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, declared that “faced with appalling barbarism and war crimes, which we’d hoped had been consigned to history, the free world has united behind Ukraine in its brave fight for freedom and self-determination”. Revealed positions do not support the rhetoric. In the UN General Assembly Vote which…

In his speech to Davos last week, President Zelensky proposed that frozen Russian assets “should be allocated to a special fund to compensate all the victims of the war”, adding that this would set a useful global precedent in deterring future aggressors. Voices in favour of the proposal are gaining force, particularly in the US, on both moral and practical grounds. 

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there’s been a lot of talk about the return of history. post-1989 assumptions that liberal democracy and open markets were the single models on which most countries would converge now look naïve at best.

Russia is now the most sanctioned country in history. Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24th February, 4,860 new measures have been applied to 519 entities, 4,309 individuals, 30 vessels and 3 aircraft. The 7,614 sanctions applied in total is more than double the number applied to the next most sanctioned country, Iran. No matter how the war ends, many of these…

Jon Garvie, Miranda Lutz, Stephen Adams and Jens Presthus take a deep-dive into the growing prominence of infrastructure spending, exploring how and why it is becoming a geopolitical fault-line between the West and China.

G7 foreign and development ministers will meet this weekend in Liverpool, alongside their ASEAN counterparts. It may be the UK presidency’s final opportunity to draw together the many initiatives which have sprouted under the banner of “build back better”.  The foreign secretary Liz Truss framed the meeting in characteristically ambitious terms, declaring that “I…