Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a more contested and volatile world
The Integrated Review Refresh 2023 updates the government’s security, defence, development and foreign policy priorities to reflect changes in the global context since Integrated Review 2021.
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The 2021 Integrated Review (IR2021) provided a comprehensive articulation of the UK’s national security and international policy in the context of a world moving towards greater competition and multipolarity. In the two years since its publication, that transition has happened more quickly and definitively than anticipated. The 2023 Integrated Review Refresh (IR2023) responds to a more contested and volatile world.
The broad direction set by IR2021 remains right, and IR2023 maintains significant continuity across most policy. But in a few areas, the UK’s policy has evolved in the last two years, or needs to be updated to reflect key changes in the global context, including but not limited to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In this context, IR2023 sets out the four ways in which the UK will protect its core national interests – the sovereignty, security and prosperity of the British people – as well as its higher interest in an open and stable international order of enhanced cooperation and well-managed competition based on respect for the UN Charter and international law:
- Shape the international environment. The UK will actively shape, balance, cooperate and compete to create the conditions, structures and incentives necessary for an open and stable international order and to protect global public goods.
- Deter, defend and compete across all domains. We will strengthen our integrated approach to deterrence and defence, to counter both state threats and transnational security challenges. We will also work to uphold strategic stability, establishing new frameworks and building a new international security architecture to manage systemic competition and escalation in a multipolar environment.
- Address vulnerabilities through resilience. We will develop the UK’s approach to resilience, addressing the economic, societal, technological, environmental and infrastructural factors that leave the UK exposed to crises and hostile actors.
- Generate strategic advantage. We will reinforce and extend IR2021’s focus on strategic advantage – the UK’s relative ability to achieve our objectives compared to our competitors. We will cultivate our national strengths and update our tools of statecraft to maintain the UK’s freedom of action, freedom from coercion and our ability to cooperate with others.
IR2023 will guide the allocation of resources across national security and foreign policy for the remainder of the Parliament. We will ensure all government’s instruments work together, coordinated at the centre, to achieve our objectives.
Last updated 16 May 2023 + show all updates
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Added: Adolygiad Integredig Diweddaraf 2023: Ymateb i fyd mwy cystadleuol a helbulus (HTML)
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Addition of Welsh language version of the IRR.
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First published.