Archives

Our archives are a repository of original thinking that chronicles two decades of research, analysis, and policy innovation. This collection brings together articles written by SFG’s founders and research analysts between 2005 and 2025, preserving the ideas, and insights that shaped our intellectual journey. These writings reflect the evolution of our thinking as we engaged with some of the world’s most pressing challenges and opportunities.

The archive offers a rich body of material for researchers, policymakers, students, journalists, and anyone interested in understanding complex global issues through a long-term strategic lens. The articles explore a wide spectrum of subjects, including peace and conflict, water diplomacy, international relations, technology, environmental sustainability, governance, security, and the changing dynamics of regional and global cooperation. They also place regional developments within broader international and geopolitical contexts.

Many of these articles anticipated trends and policy challenges that later became central to international discourse. Others document the development of concepts and frameworks that informed SFG’s subsequent research, dialogues, and publications. Together, they provide not only historical context but also enduring perspectives that continue to resonate in a rapidly changing world.

Beyond serving as a research resource, this archive offers a window into the intellectual history of SFG. It traces how our ideas evolved over time, how new policy concepts emerged through sustained inquiry, and how our engagement expanded from regional concerns to global challenges. Readers can follow the progression of our work across changing geopolitical landscapes and appreciate our evidence-based approaches to peace, security, and international cooperation.

Whether you are revisiting landmark analyses, exploring the origins of key policy ideas, or discovering our work for the first time, we hope these archives provide valuable insights, stimulate informed debate, and inspire fresh thinking about the future.

Rise of Intolerance

  • By Rami Desai
We are living in an increasingly globalized world today. The world has become smaller due to the miracles of communications. Barriers of distances, languages, and cultures have all been overcome by science and technology. This bridge building for a better World essentially means that we should have today become more accustomed to the other other religions and other races from across our own national borders. Unfortunately there are indicators that prove otherwise. What explains the 9/11, the Iraq War, and the cartoon controversy in the barrier-less globalized world?
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An Imperative for Peace in Sri Lanka

  • By Devika Mistry
As it stands, the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have so far agreed to meet in Geneva, Switzerland later this month. This is the first, of any high level talks to take place between the two, since the stalling of the peace process in 2003 and is indeed a very positive development.
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Loretta Napoleoni, Insurgent Iraq – Al Zarqawi and the New Generation

  • By Semu Bhatt
That the Bush administration mentioned the name of Abu Mos ab Al Zarqawi as a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda while presenting its case to the United Nations for attacking Iraq, probably shocked no one more than Zarqawi himself.
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The 88 Million Hidden Truths of Cartoons

  • By Sundeep Waslekar
At a recent lunch with a distinguished group of Qatari leaders of thought, someone asked me the obvious question. What can one make of the cartoon controversy? I told them that it reminded me of a fight between a husband and wife over coffee. The couple was so upset about the kind of coffee they should have in the afternoon that they got into a verbal brawl and that ended in fisticuffs. Of course, the aroma of the coffee could not generate such heat. The coffee was just an excuse. The real reason for tension between the two was much deeper. The cartoons are like the coffee. To understand why they have generated such anger, it is necessary to look much beneath the surface.
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Acting on a Different Theatre

  • By Semu Bhatt
When I suggested the title of this article, given my tryst with theatre performances before I joined SFG, my colleagues joked, Are you planning to write your autobiography? Well, no, not yet. But then, as I perceive it, the current world is a theatre in itself, where multitude of complex issues unfold forces of modernisation and extremism; crosscurrents of transnational economics and nationalism; inequality of power and skewed development patterns; identity subjugation and relative economic deprivation; and social, political, cultural prejudices and manipulation. All, and more such factors, lead to conflicts within and/or between states.
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The Future of Europe: Conversation with Prof. Bronislaw Geremek

  • By Ilmas Futehally
Strategic Foresight Group mourns the recent death of Prof Bronislaw Geremek, former Foreign Minister of Poland, with whom we had interacted several times. Ilmas Futehally recalls her conversation with him, which is as relevant today as it was when she first met him.
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