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Fragmentation as Strategy: Why the New Global Order May Leave the UN Behind

Yunis Gurbanov
World , UN , Peace & Security , Economy , Analysis
10 July, 2025

Introduction As the G7 recalibrates its global priorities around economic resilience and geopolitical control, a new architecture of fragmentation is emerging, which is one that sidelines multilateral institutions. This piece examines how recent shifts in trade, security, and climate diplomacy reflect not a failure of global coordination, but a deliberate strategy of selective engagement. Drawing…

In the Garden of Limits: Student Visas and the Decline of U.S. Educational Appeal

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…

What is a Sadistic State and how can it be countered?

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…

BRICS: Navigating a Complex Economic and Political Landscape

Johnatan Santos
Russia , World , India , Peace & Security , Analysis , Foreign Affairs
28 August, 2024

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…

The Birth of the Confederated Alliance of the Sahel States

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…

The Hidden Crisis of Lake Chad: How Environmental Degradation Fuels Boko Haram

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…

The Iran Nuclear Deal – A Missed Opportunity ?

Alejandro Zurita
World , Middle East , Peace & Security , Analysis
One response
28 May, 2024

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…

A Global Perspective on Responsible Democratic Citizenship

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…

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Photo: REUTERS

Nuclear Facilities as Military Targets – The Zaporizhzhia Case*

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…

PRAYING FOR THE END OF HISTORY…

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…