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Global Challenges
Issue no. 19 | May 2026
The End of Development?
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Articles for this issue
Global Challenges
Issue no. 19 | May 2026
The End of Development?

In 1970, the United Nations General Assembly set a target for countries to allocate 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) to official development assistance (ODA). Today, against a backdrop of an unprecedented decline in international development funding, this goal seems further away than ever. Is the framework established after World War II — which shaped North-South relations for decades — collapsing? The elimination or drastic reduction of many public budgets reveals donor fatigue, calling for strategic changes in both the North and the South regarding the future of the very concept of development.

Are countries in the South facing a dangerous vacuum or an opportunity to forge new, less asymmetrical partnerships? This crisis may pave the way for a new paradigm, based on a reinvented solidarity, with the risk of a return to geopolitical competition and conditionalities for access to resources.

Articles for this issue

The End of Development?

This issue of Global Challenges has been jointly produced by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Research Office and the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Executive Education department, especially the Development Policies and Practices (DPP) team. 

Other Issues
Issue no. 17 | May 2025
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Diplomacy Today
Global Challenges
Issue no. 17 | May 2025
Diplomacy Today
Post–Cold War diplomacy has been a diplomacy of globalisation, building on multilateralism and cooperation. The recent questioning of globalisation has led to the questioning of diplomacy, which seems to have been dealt the final blow by Trump’s second election as President of the United States. His vision of a hyper–diplomatic realism — transactional, disruptive, based on force and serving the sole interests of America — clashes with the project of a new diplomacy that many actors in the international community are calling for. But what is this new diplomacy? What are its strengths and challenges? In this dossier, professors and researchers from the Institute provide contrasting analyses of the opportunities that a new diplomacy could bring to trade, inclusiveness, the United Nations and International Geneva, not forgetting the impact of new media and AI.
Issue no. 5 | April 2019
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New Grammars of War:
Conflict and Violence in the 21st Century
Global Challenges
Issue no. 5 | April 2019
New Grammars of War: Conflict and Violence in the 21st Century

The Dossier aims to explore new trends and expressions of violence in armed conflict in the 21st century. Taking as a starting point the changing paradigm of armed conflict – from conventional wars with clear contours towards more non-linear, fragmented and protracted types of civil and international conflict — it adopts a broad approach to portray changing forms of violence across different types of armed conflicts (including terrorism, international/civil wars or urban warfare). In the context of a fragmenting international order, with increasingly blurred lines between state and non-state, combatant and civilian, domestic and international, the number of actors involved in conflicts and concurrent strategies of violence have multiplied. In face of the ubiquity of violent conflict — despite an overall decline in interstate conflict and global number of casualties — the Dossier aims to shed light on new or changing forms of violence, their contexts, actors and victims. It explores the novelty, heterogeneity, scales and vectors of violent practices in contemporary conflicts by investigating the impact of a series of factors such as new military technologies (drones, robots), new communication tools (social media), gender, migration, or the subcontracting of security to private actors.

Issue no. 16 | November 2024
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Elections – What For?
Global Challenges
Issue no. 16 | November 2024
Elections – What For?

In 2024, nearly half the world’s population, including citizens of the eight most populous nations, voted or will vote in elections. While this signals democratic engagement, many elections are run by autocratic or illiberal regimes pursuing self-serving agendas. Paradoxically thus, as elections are generalising as a practice, democracy is met with growing defiance. On closer scrutiny, however, it appears that it is not only the indicators of democracy but also those of elections that have been declining over the past decade. This dossier, produced with the Albert Hirschman Centre for Democracy, examines the essential role of elections in the construction of democracy today.