Speaker: Mats Karlsson, Former Director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and Visiting Professor at SIPA. After decades of global progress, we now see disintegration, within societies and in international relations, increasingly driving insecurity. Inequalities and corruption are underlying factors. Populism and challenged freedoms follow in its wake, sometimes pursued shamelessly by a new breed of strongmen leaders. Negative spirals are in play, threatening norms and institutions of democracy and freedoms. What can be done? Development cooperation has delivered in the fight against poverty over decades. Simultaneously, it has been a midwife to much global progress. Today, the world is different, with many aid dependent countries now much more free and able to manage finances and budgets. It seems the unfreedom of today stem from oligarchs and algorithms. So, if development should be understood as freedom, what would be the new role of development cooperation in a world of disintegration and insecurity? Can it again contribute to global progress? Event is sponsored by the Economic and Political Development Concentration at SIPA, the Center for Development Economics and Policy, and The Nordic Society at Columbia University.
