A number of flashpoints around the globe could spiral from minor border skirmishes into full-blown conflagrations that could drag their broader regions into conflict.
Given the tectonic shifts in the international system and renewed focus on great power competition, the prospects of inter-state warfare are now receiving more scrutiny.
General Michael Kurilla, head of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), has suggested that at its current trajectory, Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) would be able to conduct external operations within approximately six months.
Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, counterterrorism analysts have warned about the growing threat of ISK, especially in light of the U.S. troop withdrawal and limited human intelligence assets in areas where ISK and other terrorist groups operate.
Africa today consists of 56 different experiences in nation-building with some remarkable successes and many inevitable failures. In many African countries a new player has entered the game: a younger generation that is better educated, more ambitious and, at the same time, less gullible than its ancestors in the 19th century who looked away while imperial powers carved the golden goose.
After besieging and starving 120,000 Armenians of the South Caucasus Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) since December 2022, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military offensive against Artsakh on September 19, subjecting the capital Stepanakert and other cities and villages to intensive fire using heavy artillery and drones.
Here’s the full text of the written interview that I gave to Dutch journalist Laura Oorschot, who incorporated some of the insight during her appearance on blckbx’s livestream on this subject on 22 September.
Pashinyan is in a very difficult position after this week’s events since many among the population consider him a traitor to their national cause, which they regard as extending into Azerbaijan’s Karabakh Region. He came to power in what can be described as a Color Revolution that he fueled through a combination of nationalist and liberal rhetoric. The 2020 conflict and the latest one discredited his nationalist credentials, while his orders to break up protests after both discredit his liberal ones.
The Taliban have enabled some terrorist groups and reined in others, elevating longstanding concerns for U.S. policy.
Two years into Taliban rule, the question of whether Afghanistan would once again become a safe haven for international terrorism remains alive. Longstanding fears were affirmed a little over a year ago, when the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan, before killing him in a drone strike. The fact that the Taliban would bring Zawahiri back to Kabul, despite repeated assurances to U.S. negotiators both before and after the Doha agreement that they had distanced themselves from al-Qaeda, significantly elevated concerns.
Twenty years after the Iraq War began, scholarship on its causes can be usefully divided into the security school and the hegemony school. Security school scholars argue that the main reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq was to safeguard the United States against the conjoined threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argue instead that the purpose of the Iraq War was to preserve and extend U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. Debates between these camps inform broader disputes about the lessons of the Iraq War for the future of U.S. foreign policy and the analysis of other key questions about the war’s origins. Nonetheless, this binary may not be productive for Iraq War scholarship, and more attention to global and cultural factors would be a useful way to advance this field.
Geopolitics has become marginalized in modern international relations scholarship despite its foundational role. This essay seeks to bring geopolitics back to the mainstream of international relations through conceptual, historical, and theoretical analyses. I make three arguments. First, definitional confusion about geopolitics comes from an overly broad understanding of geography. Notwithstanding various uses, however, geography itself should be re-centered as the analytical core of geopolitics. Second, classical geopolitics sought to inform grand strategy using geography as an explanatory variable and was thus institutionalized in U.S. strategic education. To wit, geography was used as “an aid to statecraft.” Finally, although largely ignored in mainstream international relations, the basic premise of geopolitics still undergirds much of its research. But the asymmetry, relativity, and comprehensiveness of geography have not been well explored. Drawing from classical geopolitical works, I offer some suggestions for future research on how to use geography in international relations scholarship.
On 30 August, elite troops slaughtered over 50 civilians planning to protest perceived foreign interference in the eastern DR Congo, three months ahead of elections. The government has asked the UN for an “accelerated” withdrawal. Crisis Group experts Richard Moncrieff and Onesphore Sematumba explain the stakes.
