Last week’s events will be remembered for many reasons but for us, the major market mover was the International Energy Agency’s admission that global oil demand is wickedly higher than what the agency was willing to admit previously.
With the Ukraine crisis increasingly acute, there is growing danger of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, involving a significant possibility of escalating into a full-scale war between Russian and the NATO. At the core of the crisis is how to strike an agreement on durable geopolitical order to which Ukraine is central as a crucial strategic buffer between Europe and the Eurasia, or between a peninsula and a landmass. Thus, prescribing a geopolitical settlement is more necessary than ever.
Exploited and abused for generations by white colonial powers and manipulative economic structures, there is a growing feeling of solidarity within parts of the African continent, as exemplified by the #NoMore movement. Covid vaccine inequality and environmental injustice, together with recent events in Ethiopia have galvanized people.
A ground-breaking initiative has been launched to expose Syrian crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court. For the first time, a primary focus is the culpability of Iran and its proxies.
Lawyers have said that Tehran’s support for Assad had come “at the cost of hundreds of thousands of killed, injured and displaced Syrian civilians.” Evidence will show how Iran-backed militias deliberately targeted non-combatants, forcing thousands to flee and significantly contributing to the more than 13 million Syrians who have been displaced. Meanwhile, observers have documented Russian forces in 2022 systematically displacing citizens through indiscriminate airstrikes against residential areas and civilian infrastructures.
Introduction
In this paper, I will attempt to analyze the downward trend of collective intelligence among Ethiopia’s political leaders and elites. (1) The analysis covers a historical period that begins with the reign of Emperor Menelik II (2) (r. 1889–1913) until the premiership of Abiy Ahmed (since 2018). The study will therefore also cover two other monarchical periods: the era of Empress Zewditu (r. 1916–1930) (3), who was modern Ethiopia’s first female head of state, as well as the period of Emperor Haile Selassie (r. 1930–1974). Subsequently, the analysis will move on to the country’s conflicting experiments with republican governance: the military regime of Socialist Ethiopia, or Derg, (in power from 1974 to 1991) and the ethnic-federalist regime of the EPRDF/TPLF (1991 to 2018). It will conclude with the current regime, in power since 2018.
The Ukraine crisis, similar to Brexit, is a vivid demonstration of the shaky nature of unions and alliances in Europe. This is not good news for the United States as it is determined to concentrate domestically and curb the rise of China. Putin’s determination to attack Ukraine also lies in the fact that NATO has no real intention of letting Ukraine join the alliance or waging war with Russia. In fact, NATO cannot fight Russia even if it wants to. The forces of the United States in Europe are not enough at all for this purpose, the same is true of the forces of Britain and France. Despite all the warnings about the Russian threat, why have no serious efforts been made or are being made by European troops to deter Russia and most NATO countries have always refused to increase their military spending to 2% of GDP? In short, because NATO is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine.
Discourses around economic policy in India seem to be taking different directions, many motivated by political ideologies and others by empirical facts and their interpretations, which again are not always entirely detachedfrom ideologies. However, what appears lacking is a totalizing coherency that renders these discourses accessible to the larger public, many of whom are intuitively aware of the troubled waters, yet fail to see a unified picture emerging from the accounts of experts who put across these complex and technical economic critiques and defences. It is, however, anticipated that a simple thesis that questions the entire substratum of the dominant economic philosophy may not be easily palatable to the large sections of intellectuals who dominate the economic sciences, i.e., those who are trained in neoclassical or orthodox school of economics.
While geopolitical commentators are fixated on Russia’s border with Ukraine, a more interesting development is slowly boiling underneath the surface of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that could potentially reorder international relations—namely, the death of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
When the war first broke out eight years ago, Natalya, 28, just hid in the basement when the gunfire and artillery bombardments came too close.
“Now it’s different. Now I fear for the children,” she said, holding her 3 1/2-year-old son and 5 1/2-year-old daughter by the hand as she crossed from the city of Luhansk, held by Russia-backed separatists since 2014, into Ukrainian government-held territory. “We’re leaving for good.”
Officials of Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina have rejected claims made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that these countries are sending “mercenaries” to fight in Ukraine, where there are fears of a Russian invasion.