Evolving Governance & Security Challenges

Today we face a broader and more complex set of security challenges than ever before in our history. At the same time, our forms of global governance and regulation emerged from the challenges of the previous century, not the present or future ones.  Security challenges range from conventional military threats to less overt but equally serious threats, such as transnational and/or state-sponsored terrorism, corruption, arms trafficking and proliferation, cross-border crime and drug trade, and systemic threats such as climate change, competition for natural resources and growing economic inequality.  These problems greatly exceed the governing capacities of existing state based, international and transnational systems to manage and respond to these challenges; hence the need to develop new approaches to governance and security.

To meet these challenges the Institute is researching the ways in which local, regional, national and transnational actors diversely relate to each other, pursue goals and resolve conflicts. It will seek to document how solutions for global problems – such as corruption, terrorism, crime, war, poverty, violations  of human rights and the rule of law, injustice, public health and environmental degradation – can be devised and implemented in a parallel and synergistic, rather than fragmented and uncoordinated, fashion. The Institute will aim at the establishment of consensual and policy-useful knowledge through the integration of research, policy, education, executive and professional training, and cooperative education (i.e., off-campus occupational) activities.

The major areas of inquiry include corruption, security, terrorism and conflict, international and transnational crime, international criminal law and standards, proliferation, targeted sanctions, arms control, intelligence, human trafficking and development issues, the environment, public health and energy issues. Central to the Institute are collaborations with a network of partner institutions around the world. The research findings, experiences, and proposed solutions will be disseminated through special workshops and conferences, reports and publications, working papers, open lectures, seminars, certificate programs and exchange programs through a network of university and other international partners.

The intent is to contribute to a shift from a university with international presence towards a global university. We wish to enable new and support existing programs or projects, which draw on scholarly and policy partners overseas to offer courses, degrees, seminars, training on-campus but also (and increasingly) in other countries. We wish to foster a genuine two-way exchange of thoughts, ideas, theories and policies between the global North and the global South.

The synergies and benefits for our students/teaching, coop placements, employment facilitation, theoretical and scholarly advances, which can be converted to policy-useful knowledge and concrete projects and recommendations will be invaluable and conducive to a new model of a ‘global university.’