Mission

In the years since the Suez Crisis, the United Kingdom has largely struggled to understand its mission and sense of purpose in the world. At its inception, however, the United Kingdom was created to bring different, and usually opposing, regions together to project their values and secure their interests abroad. At the time, this meant empire. Today, it can mean something more than conquest.

This project was developed with the awareness that Britain’s up-and-coming professionals and young leaders have only ever known a politics that has shown signs of atrophy. To be born at the turn of the millennium is to have witnessed a United Kingdom that has invaded Iraq, undergone a recession, taken itself through austerity, damaged itself with poorly-designed referendums, suffered corruption and incompetent leadership, weathered COVID, and now faces indecision on how to respond to conflict in Europe and the Mediterranean. Yet, these symptoms of atrophy are the result of negligence, not foreordained comeuppance.

With an appreciation of Britain’s history and values as well as all of the tensions, disagreements, and arguments that come with them, the British Institute of Global Affairs sets out to revitalise the United Kingdom’s sense of purpose in a changing world. We aim to reflect on old ideas, share creative new ideas, innovatively bring the two together, and ultimately regenerate our political and civic conversations.

A key pillar of the Institute’s thinking is that while our actions abroad inform how we see ourselves domestically, foreign policy is ultimately built at home. This is to say that the British Institute of Global Affairs does not discriminate between politics and economics, domestic issues and foreign affairs, cultural creations and governmental structures. All of these intersect in ways that defy easy compartmentalisation. To think to the future of the UK requires us all to think BIGA.