State of the world: many not-so-beautiful games The FIFA World Cup ended on 19 July with an apotheosis of the Spanish national team and a resounding boo for US President Trump. Whether one agrees or not with the appropriateness of these facts, there is a broader sense of a world caught up in an endless…
In my long (40 years), undistinguished career in marketing communications and journalism, I have had a chance to work with some very good and some not very good bosses. However, there was one in particular, who had common sense without being too common. He taught me a valuable lesson. In describing success, he said, “There…
Qatar is a tiny state with a population of around three million, in which foreign nationals make up approximately 76 percent of the population, while migrant workers account for nearly 90 percent of the labour force. And yet it plays an outsized role in global and regional politics, ranging from major investments in Africa and…
The end of the second world war ushered in a new era of change for humanity. Having tested out all of their new, shiny weapons on each other, the nation-states of Europe decided to tone things down for a while and to focus on rebuilding their war-ravaged continent. A key factor for the success of…
Part 2 of our talk with Ipsita Chatterjee, a human geographer interested in the economic, cultural, and geopolitical impacts of globalization. Ipsita is also a prolific author, and her latest book “The Alt-Right Movement: Dissecting Racism, Patriarchy, and Anti-immigrant Xenophobia” served as the basis of our discussion. To help me better understand this phenomenon, she took…
The attack on Ukraine has had tragic consequences for all Ukrainians and many Russians. The horror of families being killed and divided is a spectacle that nearly all Europeans believed had been banished forever from our Continent. Even most of the attacking troops and the Ukrainian population refused to believe it might happen. But the…
Whom to call when you want to talk to Europe was the famous question attributed to Henry Kissinger that pointed to the lack of a central node of international contact and decision-making in the European integration project. The question remained unanswered for decades, despite earnest efforts to provide a credible answer, notably with the establishment…
On July 11th, 2022, I was invited to attend “Russia and the Geopolitics of Borders and Migration” a conference held by the State University of Paraíba in Brazil, in partnership with the Research Project “Citizenship between Walls” [Cidadania entre Muros] that studies the phenomenon of ‘wall-building’, a geopolitical event that leads to the creation of…
Georgios is co-founder and Executive Director of FOGGS with almost thirty years of work experience in international affairs, both as a practitioner and as a researcher. His experience includes fourteen years with the United Nations, with a wide range of assignments in many different parts of the world, from Haiti to South Africa, working on…