The Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflicts at Oxford University (CRIC) hosted its annual conference using a digital platform with a focus on challenges to multilateralism, chaired by The Rt. Hon. Lord Alderdice, John, director of CRIC. About 60 scholars from different parts of the world participated including UK, the United States, Canada, Colombia, Belgium, Australia, India, Turkey, Singapore, Finland, and Japan. SFG President Sundeep Waslekar and Executive Director Ilmas Futehally were among the participants.

In his opening remarks, Sundeep Waslekar outlined key challenges to multilateralism in health, environment, economy, and global security. He said that the world leaders had failed to collaborate despite several warnings of a fast moving respiratory infectious disease, capable of causing millions of deaths, issued in the second half of 2019 and finally the declaration of global health emergency by WHO on January 30, 2020. He lamented the failure to collaborate to counter climate change despite global warming and forest fires in all continents. He also pointed out that powerful nations were busy testing hypersonic missiles while the COVID-19 pandemic was in its early phase, instead of collaborating to address a crucial problem of humanity. The rise of such lethal weapons, along with the dismantling of the arms control regime reflect a dangerous erosion of the multilateral order. He said that it was necessary to go beyond institutional and administrative reforms of the United Nations and conceive a global mechanism for cooperative efforts to counter civilizational threats that represented and served humankind and not individual nation states.

Several speakers explained with their research on the ground on how multilateralism had weakened on account of competitive extremism, polarising social media, and the tendency of many combatants to dissolve their own identity and merge it with groups fighting for causes.

Lord Alderdice, CRIC Director, and Scott Atran, eminent social scientist, conducted a dialogue in the concluding session. This conversation identified many issues deeply affecting the social fabric. People live for subsistence, security, and sense. Over the years the importance of subsistence and security is declining, and the importance of sense or meaningful life is growing. People do not aspire for a comfortable lifestyle. They want to devote to values and ideas that can give them meaning and purpose for life. They are ready to offer blood, toil, tears and sweat (as Churchill famously demanded of the British people when he became a war-time premier) for the causes dear to them. The dialogue between Alderdice and Atran also revealed that rationality is relative. What might appear irrational to some people may be rational to another group. With growing inequalities in many parts of the world, the spread of social media deliberately promoting sharp polarisation, and the lack of statesmanship among political leaders, the growth of people looking for sense out of emotional matters and abstract values can only lead to fragmentation of the global society. There is currently no force and no idea which can galvanise world opinion against fragmentation. Climate change has failed to attract the imagination of population other than young people who agitate but do not provide solutions. Black Lives Matter is a relatively new movement and substantially dominant only in one country. The world is desperately short of a uniting idea which can bind people in their minds and as well as hearts.