User blogs

COVID-19 has posed tremendous challenges to diplomacy. Practices have had to be adapted, while diplomats have had to address the immediate crisis situation and work towards coordinated responses. In WebDebate #47 (4 May 2021), we took a closer look at  the COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) Facility and the debates and resolution of the Human Rights Council (HRC) that took place during its 46th session. COVAX is a global initiative that aims at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Diplomacy is often thought of as a practice centering on language. Yet, the visual image of diplomatic practice is increasingly important in a world in which images proliferate and videoconferencing has replaced face-to-face meetings. Diplomats need to be aware of the power of images, and need to have a sense of best practices and potential pitfalls when it comes to visual storytelling. Our 45th WebDebate 'Visual storytelling for diplomatic practice' took a closer look at this important topic. 

This year has posed a tremendous challenge to diplomats. The impact of COVID-19 is felt in almost all areas of international relations. At the same time, there are various challenges to the conduct of diplomacy and how diplomats work. Particularly, in light of lockdowns and social distancing, diplomats had to change the way they worked. For example, how can negotiations be pursued and furthered in times of social distancing? For diplomats from small and developing countries, some of these challenges were exasperated, and additional challenges arose. 

Internet governance (IG) is about the rules, policies, standards, and practices that determine how cyberspace is governed. It goes beyond technical and infrastructural considerations, and addresses the legal, economic, developmental, sociocultural, and human rights implications of cyberspace. 

Formed in 2006, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multistakeholder forum for discussing these issues. Multistakeholderism – the participation of all relevant stakeholders – is really the core value and a core practice of the IGF. 

The artificial intelligence (AI) Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) can write texts on any topic. OpenAI, the organisation that developed and released it as a beta version in June 2020, describes it as a general-purpose application for creating text, ‘allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task’. GPT-3 is a scaling up, by two orders of magnitude, of the previous model released by OpenAI, making it ‘the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) application available today’. 

We organised our September WebDebate, ‘The UN at 75: Evolution or revolution?’, to mark the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. By looking back at the past 75 years of the world organisation, we zoomed in on two key questions. 

On June 11, UN Secretary General António Guterres launched the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation based on the report of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation. The launch was accompanied by a series of discussions on the Roadmap’s key recommendations.

In May we ran our new online course, ‘Artificial Intelligence: Technology, Governance, and Policy Frameworks’ for the first time. It was a fantastic experience to develop and deliver a course around such a timely topic. In this blog post, we want to share some of our experiences and lessons-learned.