Where is this event taking place?

This event is scheduled to take place in Auckland, NZL.

What is the primary focus of the discussions?

The discussions will primarily focus on the lessons learned from the UKR conflict and their implications for the international order.

When is the event scheduled?

The event is scheduled for late June.

The Battle for the International Order: Lessons from Ukraine and beyond

Name: The Battle for the International Order: Lessons from Ukraine and beyond
Start: 2026-06-23T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-06-23T00:00:00Z
Location: Auckland

Jun 23, 2026Auckland, New ZealandIn-person

Registration open

The event, "The Battle for the International Order: Lessons from Ukraine and beyond," convenes in Auckland, NZL, to critically examine the ongoing conflict in UKR and its broader implications for the global international order. This gathering will explore how the conflict challenges established norms, institutions, and power dynamics, extending the analysis beyond the immediate theater of war to consider its worldwide repercussions. Participants will engage in discussions aimed at understanding the evolving nature of international relations in an era marked by significant geopolitical shifts. The event seeks to draw lessons from the UKR conflict that can inform future approaches to maintaining peace, stability, and adherence to international law.

Committees & topics

Topics
Revisiting the 1948 Genocide Convention in the 21st Century · BRICS and Global Leadership · Stochastic Terrorism and Incitement in the Digital Public Square · Climate Change and the Rise of Resource Conflict · Attacks on Energy Grids and Critical Infrastructure · Regulating Armed and Civilian Drones · State-Sponsored Terrorism · Regulating Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets

Why it matters

The international order, a framework of rules, norms, and institutions that has largely governed global interactions since the mid-twentieth century, is currently under considerable strain. The conflict in UKR represents a direct challenge to core tenets of this order, including national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Understanding the ramifications of this challenge is crucial for policymakers, academics, and the public alike, as it shapes the future of international cooperation and conflict resolution.

Beyond the immediate crisis, the event's focus on "lessons from Ukraine and beyond" highlights the interconnectedness of global security. The conflict has exposed vulnerabilities and prompted re-evaluations of alliances, defense strategies, and economic dependencies across continents. Analyzing these broader impacts is essential for anticipating future geopolitical trends and developing effective responses to emerging threats.

The discussions will likely delve into the roles of various state and non-state actors in either upholding or undermining the international order. This includes examining the responses of major powers, regional organizations, and international bodies, as well as the influence of emerging economies and civil society. Such an examination is vital for comprehending the complex web of interests and ideologies that define contemporary international relations.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the discussions at this event, participants should undertake a thorough review of the historical context leading to the current conflict in UKR, including the geopolitical interests of RUS and the broader European security architecture. Understanding the evolution of the international order since the post-World War II era, particularly the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter, will provide a foundational understanding for the event's themes.

Familiarity with various theoretical perspectives on international relations, such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism, will be beneficial for analyzing the motivations and actions of different state actors. Consider how these theories explain the current challenges to the international order and what they predict for its future trajectory. Resources like the Model Diplomat lesson on "dynamic-analysis" can provide a framework for this.

Participants should also prepare by researching the economic, social, and political impacts of the UKR conflict on countries beyond the immediate region. This includes understanding shifts in global energy markets, supply chains, and humanitarian crises. Examining the responses of key international organizations and regional blocs, as well as the varying stances of countries like USA, CHN, IND, and ZAF, will enrich the discussions. The "power-interest-grid" and "hidden-stakeholders" lessons offer valuable tools for mapping these complex relationships.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

New Zealand

Upholds the international rules-based order and condemns violations of sovereignty.

Role in topic

As the host nation in Auckland, NZL provides a platform for discussing global security issues from an Oceania perspective, emphasizing multilateralism and international law.

Ukraine

Directly affected by the conflict, advocating for sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Role in topic

The central subject of the discussion, representing a nation whose sovereignty and territorial integrity have been directly challenged, highlighting the fragility of the international order.

Russia

Challenges the existing international order, particularly Western-led institutions.

Role in topic

A primary actor whose actions in UKR are seen as a direct challenge to the established international order, prompting a re-evaluation of global security frameworks.

United States

Advocates for the preservation of the liberal international order and supports UKR.

Role in topic

A key proponent and defender of the existing international order, actively involved in supporting UKR and coordinating international responses to the conflict.

China

Navigates a complex position, emphasizing national sovereignty while seeking to reshape aspects of the international order.

Role in topic

A major global power whose stance on the conflict and its broader geopolitical ambitions significantly influence the future direction of the international order.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Revisiting the 1948 Genocide Convention in the 21st Century

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and largely shaped by the advocacy of Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the term 'genocide' in 1944. Its Article II definition — acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group — has remained legally unchanged for over seven decades, even as the International Court of Justice and ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda built a substantial jurisprudence around it. Critics have long noted that the Convention excludes political and social groups, sets an exceptionally high bar for proving specific intent (dolus specialis), and contains weak enforcement mechanisms beyond state referrals to the ICJ. The 21st century has stress-tested the Convention repeatedly. ICJ cases have addressed Bosnia, The Gambia's case against Myanmar over the Rohingya, South Africa's 2023 case against Israel concerning Gaza, and Ukraine's case against Russia over the alleged abuse of genocide claims to justify invasion. Parallel debates surround the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Yazidi genocide by ISIL, and atrocities in Darfur and Tigray. These cases have exposed disagreement over whether cultural destruction, mass starvation, forced child transfers, and online incitement fit comfortably within the 1948 text. Today, member states are weighing whether to clarify the Convention through an additional protocol, a General Assembly interpretive resolution, or expanded use of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The debate sits at the intersection of international criminal law, state sovereignty, and the credibility of the post-1945 order itself.

Key players

BRICS and Global Leadership

The BRICS grouping originated as an investment-banking acronym coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill in 2001, was institutionalized as a political bloc at the 2009 Yekaterinburg summit, and added South Africa in 2010. For its first decade, BRICS focused on incremental economic coordination: the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, both established in 2014, were pitched as alternatives to the World Bank and IMF without openly challenging them. Member states often disagreed sharply — China and India over their disputed border, Brazil and South Africa over governance norms — limiting the bloc's geopolitical coherence. The war in Ukraine accelerated a shift. Western sanctions on Russia, the weaponization of the dollar-clearing system, and frustration with stalled IMF and UN Security Council reform pushed BRICS toward a more explicitly revisionist posture. At the 2023 Johannesburg summit the bloc invited Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to join in 2024, with Indonesia following in 2025. Debates over local-currency trade settlement, a possible common payments infrastructure, and coordinated positions at the G20 and COP have intensified. The central question is whether BRICS is becoming a coherent alternative pole in a multipolar order or a loose coalition of states hedging against US primacy. Internal divisions — democratic India's strategic alignment with the West, Brazil's preference for non-alignment, and the autocratic core of China, Russia and Iran — make the bloc's trajectory uncertain even as its share of global GDP and population grows.

Key players

Stochastic Terrorism and Incitement in the Digital Public Square

Stochastic terrorism refers to the use of mass public communication to demonize a person or group in ways that make violence against them statistically probable, even though no specific attack is ordered. The term entered wider use in the 2010s as analysts sought to describe a pattern in which lone-actor attackers — often radicalized online — targeted groups that had been the subject of sustained, dehumanizing rhetoric by political figures, media personalities, or viral content networks. Attacks at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (2018), the El Paso Walmart (2019), the Christchurch mosques (2019), and the Buffalo Tops supermarket (2022) all featured manifestos echoing widely circulated extremist narratives, particularly the 'great replacement' theory. Legally, stochastic incitement sits awkwardly between protected speech and the narrower category of direct incitement criminalized under instruments such as ICCPR Article 20 and the Rabat Plan of Action. Platform design — algorithmic amplification, recommendation systems, and livestreaming — has made the problem more acute, while the Christchurch Call (2019) and the EU's Digital Services Act represent early multilateral and regional responses. States diverge sharply on where to draw the line: the United States privileges First Amendment protections, European democracies criminalize a broader range of hateful speech, and several authoritarian governments invoke 'incitement' to suppress dissent. The contemporary debate centers on whether international law can develop a workable standard for indirect incitement, what duties platforms owe under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and how to address transnational radicalization without legitimizing censorship.

Key players

Climate Change and the Rise of Resource Conflict

The link between climate change and conflict has moved from academic hypothesis to security-policy mainstream over the past two decades. The IPCC's Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports identified climate change as a 'threat multiplier' that interacts with poverty, weak governance, and pre-existing tensions to raise the risk of violence. Documented cases include drought-driven displacement preceding the Syrian civil war, farmer-herder violence across the Sahel as Lake Chad shrinks, water-sharing disputes on the Nile around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and Himalayan glacier melt affecting transboundary rivers shared by China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. At the multilateral level, the UN Security Council has debated climate security since 2007 but failed to pass a thematic resolution in 2021 after a Russian veto, leaving climate-conflict integration largely to the General Assembly, UNEP, and regional bodies such as the African Union. The 2022 establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund at COP27 and its operationalization at COP28 created a partial financial mechanism, but it is not designed to address conflict prevention directly. Meanwhile the Arctic, opening as ice retreats, has become a new arena of strategic competition over shipping lanes and seabed resources. Key questions concern whether climate-displaced persons deserve protected legal status, how to fund adaptation in fragile states, and whether the Security Council should treat climate change as a matter of international peace and security. The Ukraine war has further complicated matters by tightening energy and food markets and diverting fiscal space away from climate finance.

Key players

Attacks on Energy Grids and Critical Infrastructure

Energy infrastructure has long been a target in war, but the past decade has seen a marked escalation in both kinetic and cyber attacks on electricity grids, pipelines and nuclear facilities. The 2015 and 2016 BlackEnergy and Industroyer attacks on Ukrainian power utilities — widely attributed to Russian state-linked actors — were among the first publicly known cyberattacks to cause sustained blackouts. The 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident in the United States demonstrated how criminal actors could disrupt fuel supplies on a national scale, while the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines underscored the vulnerability of subsea energy infrastructure. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought systematic missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian generation, transmission and district-heating systems, alongside the military seizure of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant — a scenario the IAEA has repeatedly warned could lead to a radiological disaster. In the Middle East, Houthi strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities in 2019, attacks on tankers in the Red Sea, and exchanges between Israel and Iran have all targeted energy assets. Cyber intrusions attributed to actors including Volt Typhoon have raised concerns about pre-positioning inside Western utilities. International law treats civilian infrastructure as protected under the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, and the IAEA's 'Seven Pillars' aim to safeguard nuclear sites in conflict, yet enforcement is weak. The debate now concerns whether new norms — including red lines on attacks against nuclear plants and a possible treaty on cyber operations against critical infrastructure — can be agreed amid deepening great-power rivalry.

Key players

Regulating Armed and Civilian Drones

Unmanned aerial vehicles have shifted from a niche US counterterrorism tool in the 2000s to a ubiquitous feature of modern conflict and civilian life. Early American Predator and Reaper strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia provoked debates over targeted killing, sovereignty, and civilian casualties, but the technology remained the preserve of a few states. The proliferation of Turkish Bayraktar TB2s — used decisively in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, and Ukraine — and the mass deployment of cheap loitering munitions such as the Iranian Shahed-136 in Russia's war on Ukraine have democratized aerial strike capability. Simultaneously, small commercial drones have transformed reconnaissance and improvised strike capacity for non-state actors from ISIL to the Houthis to Mexican cartels, while raising civil-aviation and privacy concerns in peacetime. Existing frameworks — the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement, ICAO standards for civil unmanned aviation, and ad hoc export controls — were not designed for systems costing a few thousand dollars and assembled from commercial components. A 2023 UN Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems remains deadlocked over whether to negotiate a binding instrument. The core regulatory questions concern transfers and end-use controls, the legality of cross-border strikes outside armed conflict, the threshold for meaningful human control over autonomous targeting, and how to harmonize civil-aviation rules across jurisdictions as drone traffic scales.

Key players

State-Sponsored Terrorism

State sponsorship of terrorism — the financing, training, sheltering, or directing of non-state armed actors that conduct violence against civilians or foreign states — has been a recurring feature of the international system since the Cold War. The 1979 US designation list, UN Security Council Resolution 1373 adopted after the 11 September attacks, and the work of the Financial Action Task Force created a layered regime aimed at cutting off funding and safe haven. Designations have historically included states such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Libya and Cuba at various points, though the criteria vary across jurisdictions and are politically contested. Contemporary cases highlight the difficulty of clean attribution. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps backs Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iraqi militias; Russia has been accused of using the Wagner Group and successor formations as deniable instruments in Africa, Syria and Ukraine; Pakistan has faced long-standing allegations regarding Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani network; and several Gulf states have at different times been accused of financing extremist groups in Syria and Libya. The boundary between state sponsorship, tolerated activity, and intelligence cooperation is often blurred. Debate now centers on modernizing the legal regime for hybrid actors such as private military companies, strengthening the FATF mutual-evaluation process, reconciling counterterrorism sanctions with humanitarian access, and preventing the label 'terrorism' from being weaponized against political opponents or minorities.

Key players

Regulating Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets

Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 and the proliferation of thousands of subsequent tokens, cryptocurrencies have evolved from a cypherpunk experiment into a multi-trillion-dollar asset class touching payments, capital markets, sanctions enforcement, and monetary policy. Early regulatory attention focused on anti-money-laundering: the Financial Action Task Force's 2019 'travel rule' guidance extended customer-identification obligations to virtual asset service providers, and most major jurisdictions have since required exchange registration. High-profile collapses — Mt. Gox in 2014, Terra/Luna and FTX in 2022 — exposed gaps in consumer protection and prudential oversight. Geopolitical use cases have sharpened the stakes. North Korea's Lazarus Group has stolen billions in crypto to fund weapons programs; Russian entities have explored crypto rails to mitigate Western sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine; and crypto donations have featured on multiple sides of recent conflicts. At the same time, El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation entering into force in 2024, and the rapid development of central bank digital currencies — most prominently China's e-CNY — illustrate divergent national strategies. The regulatory debate now spans how to apply securities and banking law to stablecoins and DeFi, how to align sanctions and AML regimes across jurisdictions, the climate footprint of proof-of-work mining, and whether CBDCs will complement or displace private digital assets.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for The Battle for the International Order: Lessons from Ukraine and beyond.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Ken Martin's DNC Autopsy Reveals Party Strugg

Akpabio vs Oshiomhole: 2027 Power Struggle

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Ukraine Drone Strikes Crimea Power Grid

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Crisis Management

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

New Zealand June 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

The Battle for the International Order: Lessons from Ukraine and beyond

Jun 23, 2026Auckland, New ZealandIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Revisiting the 1948 Genocide Convention in the 21st Century · BRICS and Global Leadership · Stochastic Terrorism and Incitement in the Digital Public Square · Climate Change and the Rise of Resource Conflict · Attacks on Energy Grids and Critical Infrastructure · Regulating Armed and Civilian Drones · State-Sponsored Terrorism · Regulating Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

New Zealand

Upholds the international rules-based order and condemns violations of sovereignty.

Role in topic

As the host nation in Auckland, NZL provides a platform for discussing global security issues from an Oceania perspective, emphasizing multilateralism and international law.

Ukraine

Directly affected by the conflict, advocating for sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Role in topic

The central subject of the discussion, representing a nation whose sovereignty and territorial integrity have been directly challenged, highlighting the fragility of the international order.

Russia

Challenges the existing international order, particularly Western-led institutions.

Role in topic

A primary actor whose actions in UKR are seen as a direct challenge to the established international order, prompting a re-evaluation of global security frameworks.

United States

Advocates for the preservation of the liberal international order and supports UKR.

Role in topic

A key proponent and defender of the existing international order, actively involved in supporting UKR and coordinating international responses to the conflict.

China

Navigates a complex position, emphasizing national sovereignty while seeking to reshape aspects of the international order.

Role in topic

A major global power whose stance on the conflict and its broader geopolitical ambitions significantly influence the future direction of the international order.