A moment of opportunity: Can the UN’s new special representative for Libya break the country’s cycle of devolution?

While a precarious ceasefire has uneasily prevailed in Libya since the end of its third bout of civil war in 2020, the country is increasingly showing signs of an eventual relapse into conflict today. This may be why many policymakers were quick to hail as a breakthrough the appointment of Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for Libya and head of the United Nations (UN) Support Mission to Libya in September. After two months into the job, SRSG Bathily may be quickly realizing that Libya’s war never abated, and that it is now simply fought by other means in the halls of the UN and corridors of foreign capitals.

To counter the Wagner Group’s presence in Africa, the US will need to prioritize stabilizing Libya

The war in Ukraine has brought Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group to the forefront, with the United States now focusing on countering their presence beyond Ukraine, particularly in Africa.

One theatre Washington is now prioritizing as part of this burgeoning effort is Libya, where Russia’s influence is mainly projected through Wagner mercenaries. There, Wagner has acted as the Kremlin’s surreptitious foreign policy tool for over three years, significantly expanding its footprint in the country after supporting General Khalifa Haftar in his failed attack to capture Tripoli and oust Libya’s United Nations-recognized government in 2019. Quelling Wagner’s influence in Libya will be challenging, as the US must address Libyan realities and unite Europe and regional powers to support its foreign policy endeavor.

Macron vows era of French interference in Africa is over

The era of French interference in African affairs is “well over”, President Emmanuel Macron said in Gabon on Thursday during his four-nation tour of central Africa.

Speaking on the fringes of an environment summit in the Gabonese capital Libreville, Macron said France harboured no desire to return to past policies of interfering in Africa.

Morocco to Become a Huge U.S. Military Base to Counter Russia in Africa. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

There may be questions about whether Russia is winning the war in Ukraine, but there is no doubt it is winning the global war against the West. And it’s starting in Africa

Pundits have for months claimed that Ukraine has made great advances on the battlefield and taken back considerable swathes of territory that Russia held. While this claim is losing its validity in recent weeks there, most western analysts indulge themselves with their own blinded dogma and refuse to look at the bigger Ukraine war: commonly known as the ‘global south’ but in reality is actually just the ‘rest of the world’ beyond the boundaries of so-called western countries.

The World Teetering on the New Polycentric Geopolitics

The world is yet to see how dangerous the decade before us will be, what the new global geopolitical architecture will look like and who is to build it.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mentioned in his address to his colleagues on 10 February 2023 in Moscow: “All of us are professionals and we are well aware this is certainly not an exaggeration.” Lavrov elaborated on the remark made by Vladimir Putin that this is a historic crossroads for the world and that the most important, the most uncertain decade as well as the most dangerous decade since the Second World War is ahead of us. His opponents tend to express rather similar sentiments. Strangely enough, when one shakes off the mirage of propaganda slogans galore, the deep-seated and growing pessimism is almost palpable as for which side of the crossroads ahead will hugely benefit from it all. Namely, Martin Wolf, the chief columnist in Financial Times in the economy section and one of the most influential world economists according to Bloomberg, says that this is a moment of overwhelming fear but also that of a vague hope. Once an avid advocate of globalization and deregulation based on the U.S. neoliberal model, he seems to have revised and conveniently adapted his views in the meantime.

Nord Stream Terror Attack: The Plot Thickens

What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris.

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.