Far from his home in the Republic of Congo, Harvest-Spring Kibonge represents a cookie-cutter immigrant success story. In Senegal, he got an education and then started a business running a modest open-air smoothie shop on one of the capital’s lively beaches.
Long viewed as North Africa’s most isolated and inscrutable country, Algeria is suddenly the belle of the ball. This year, Algeria has hosted official visits from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the foreign ministers of France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, and the United States (the first visit by a US secretary of state since 2014). Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman will travel to Algiers next month. Meanwhile, Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has visited Egypt, Italy, Kuwait, Qatar, and Turkey and is expected in Moscow later this year.
Ever since Russian troops first crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, the Kremlin has employed characteristically euphemistic language in order to downplay the criminal nature of the unfolding invasion. This has led to the creation of an entire alternative reality where Russian troops are noble liberators waging a chivalrous campaign against dastardly Ukrainian Nazis who bomb themselves and stage fake atrocities by massacring their own civilian population.
Since Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the United States and Europe have deployed tools of economic warfare with the explicit goal of crippling the Russian economy and rendering the Kremlin unable to wage its war of aggression. The alacrity and scale of the Western response—which has included freezing Russia’s foreign-currency reserves, cutting off many Russian banks from the SWIFT payment system, and coordinating export controls—shook the foundations of the Russian economy.
A power struggle between eastern and western-based rival governments has brought Libya to the brink of renewed civil war.
U.N. mediators have failed, thus far, to persuade contending factions to agree to a process for national elections.
The Crown Prince and de-facto leader of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), visited key regional countries ahead of the planned July 16 regional summit with President Biden.
MBS’s visit to Egypt and Jordan, both key allies of the Kingdom, as well as to rival Turkey (Türkiye), sought to coordinate regional stances ahead of the Biden visit.
Members of the Russian private military company Wagner Group have been implicated in numerous criminal activities throughout both North and sub-Saharan Africa.
While some believe Wagner activity in CAR is designed to offset sanctions on Moscow by accessing precious metals, others see the typical rapaciousness that comes with mercenary activity in fragile states.
The EU is trying its best, but it is not a magician. For a peace treaty to be brokered and signed requires one country – Armenia – to halt its support for separatism. Armenia has often acted like Russia in both backing territorial integrity of states and backing the ‘self-determination’ of the Karabakh region in Azerbaijan.
Cholera outbreaks in Ukrainian cities whose infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian forces has already attracted attention, but Natalya Vinograd, a Lviv epidemiologist warns that there are risks of tetanus and typhoid epidemics there as well for the same reason.
The month of May-June 2022 has been the global calendar of important global multilateral interactions. Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United States gathered for the first-ever Special Summit held in Washington, D.C., on 12-13 May 2022. The Quad Security Dialogue a group made of four nations, India, Japan, the US, and Australia held its Quad leader summit on the 24th of May in Tokyo to discuss the development of the Indo-Pacific economically and threats rising across the Indo-Pacific region. 9th Summit of the Americas held in the United States in first week June for the first time playing host since the inaugural meeting in 1994. Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit (SCO-RATS) 2022 anti-terror body Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure was held between May 16-19 in Delhi. 14th BRICS Summit, convened under the Chairship of President Xi Jinping of China on 23-24 June 2022, in a virtual format. Group of Seven (G-7) Summit, Krün, Germany from June 26–28. 2022 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit, Madrid from June 29 to 30. NATO leaders will also take the decision to invite Finland and Sweden to become members of NATO.