Date: 20–21 September 2012

Venue: Shangri-La Hotel

Organised by: RSIS

This year’s Singapore Global Dialogue (SGD) saw Head of the RSIS Centre for NTS Studies, Assoc. Prof. Mely Caballero-Anthony, speaking at the session on ‘Contemporary Global Challenges’.

She noted that even as the need to address non-traditional security threats become more salient, international negotiations have been hamstrung by parochial interests and differences in norms and values.

She suggests that, in the face of the international impasse, regional-level initiatives have gained in importance. Multi-stakeholder arrangements such as the UN Global Compact and the World Economic Forum also offer hope for progress in resolving the many interconnected challenges facing the world today.

The annual SGD, organised by RSIS, brings together a distinguished group of key policy practitioners, business leaders, professionals and public-opinion makers from around the world to examine current challenges to the global order in an effort to find solutions to both the traditional and non-traditional security issues confronting the Asia Pacific and the rest of the world.

Fellow panellists included Muthiah Alagappa, Tun Hussein Onn Chair in International Studies at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), Malaysia, and concurrently Non-Resident Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C.; and Efraim Inbar, Director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

The panel addressed some of the most profound and urgent challenges to the world’s security today, including: Will the build-up to crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions bring unprecedented upheaval or can it be averted? How will the turbulence in Afghanistan play out as the US begins to withdraw its forces? What are the lessons that could be gleaned from the popular uprisings associated with the Arab Spring? In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, what is to become of the promise of a nuclear renaissance?

Click here for more information on the event.