I was reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts when I came across the line: “This isn’t America and you can’t say all the things you think,” said by an officer to a United States ambassador’s daughter in Nazi Germany. I warn against drawing too many comparisons between that time and place and our…
A new kind of state is born Reflecting on what is happening in the US since the (second) Trump inauguration on 20 January 2025, people say it is becoming an authoritarian state, a corrupt state, an anti-immigrant state, a human rights crushing state, a white nationalist state, an oligarch-controlled state, and a state that is…
Initially formed as “BRIC” – Brazil, Russia, India, China – and subsequently becoming “BRICS”, with the addition of South Africa,[1] this group of countries constitutes a unique coalition of emerging economies that collectively represent a significant counterbalance to the established economic powers of the West. Despite their collective identity, BRICS members are markedly different in…
On Saturday, 6 July 2024, in Niamey, capital of Niger, during the first meeting of the Alliance of Sahel States[1] (ASS/AES) a new agreement was signed to mark the beginning of the Confederated Alliance of the Sahel States[2]. According to the communiqué final of the summit, the former military Alliance of the Sahel States has…
Situated in Central Africa, Lake Chad was once a flourishing freshwater reservoir that sustained the lives of more than 30 million people across Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria. However, the lake has drastically shrunk by around 90% since 1963. This diminishing body of water crucial for irrigation, fishing and drinking is now at the heart…
After twenty months of multilateral negotiations, the Iran nuclear deal, formally called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed in Vienna on 14 July 2015. The signatories were, on one side Iran, and on the other side the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, i.e. China, France, Russia, UK and US, together…
The modern notion of “citizenship” is connected to the nation state and has emerged to a large extent from the struggle for civic rights in Western societies. In recent years the term “citizenship” or “citizen” is occasionally used in a broader sense, informally as in “citizen of the world”, or even formally, as in “citizen…
For the first time in history, a nuclear power plant has become a military objective during a war. While previous military operations at the Iraqi Osirak reactor (1981), the Iranian Bushehr plant (1987) and the Slovenian Krško plant (1991) were somewhat ad hoc, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant continues to be contested between the parties…
When in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama evangelized “the end of history,” he did it in the context of a widely held belief that the collapse of Communism and the victory of Liberal Democracy was a major milestone in human evolution. Beyond the end of the Cold War, this was supposed to…
More than support for the candidates, it seems that voters’ rejection of Bolsonaro or Lula will decide the presidential elections. A ‘country-continent’ with 215 million inhabitants, twice the size of the European Union and the leading power in Latin America. This is Brazil, a federal republic with a presidential system made up of 26 states…
