Almost exactly three years ago, a coalition of rebel groups dominated by Tuareg fighters started a military campaign for the independence of Mali’s northern regions. The separatist campaign led to a coup by disgruntled soldiers that shattered Mali’s image as a beacon of democracy in West Africa. But the world was really shocked into taking notice when Islamist groups associated with al-Qaida took advantage of the power vacuum in the north to establish a quasi-state, raising the specter of what some called an “Afghanistan on Europe’s doorstep.” Today, after a major French military intervention and the deployment of a large [...]
“The media refused to see the Syrian revolt as anything other than the continuation of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, at a time of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring. Journalists didn’t understand the sectarian subtleties in Syria, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand.” That was Fabrice Balanche, a leading French scholar of Syria who specializes in political geography, in an eye-opening interview with the Carnegie Endowment’s Aron Lund last Friday. Balanche’s research mapping Syria’s uprising-turned-civil-war is mostly in French, as Lund noted, and so has only recently entered into English-language Syria analysis, which should be all the better for [...]
Infighting over control of the levers of power rumbles on in Yemen, where last month Houthi rebels forced the resignation of the government at gunpoint. Although it has attracted less attention, the country’s economy is also in increasingly dire shape. If, as is likely, nothing is done to shore up government finances in the coming months, a long-predicted economic collapse is more or less certain. President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi announced his plans to step down on Jan. 22, shortly after his prime minister, Khaled Bahah, and the Cabinet he assembled last November said they were resigning en masse due to [...]
