War & Conflict Archive

In the run-up to this year’s high-level meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, there were almost too many issues to address: a global pandemic, climate change, renewed and continuing conflicts and great power competition, to name a few. But when it came to the crisis in Myanmar, attention focused on a single question: Who should represent the country in New York? The answer would determine how much the international community can do to help Myanmar, a country now teetering on the edge of civil war, in the months ahead. The turmoil began on Feb. 1, when Myanmar’s military, known […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wedenesday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Last Wednesday, the Biden administration unveiled a historic security partnership in the Indo-Pacific region between the U.S., Australia and the U.K., known as AUKUS. As part of the deal’s terms and conditions, the United States and the United Kingdom will help Australia build and deploy nuclear-powered submarines, as […]

In July, British Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the U.K. had agreed to pay France roughly $72 million to fund border personnel and equipment that would be used to stop asylum-seekers from crossing the English Channel. The deal came amid a dramatic rise in the number of channel crossings. In the first half of 2021, more than 8,000 asylum-seekers completed the voyage to land on England’s southern shore. The deal with France was controversial, including within Patel’s own Conservative Party. Noting that this was the second such payment to France in the past year, Tim Loughton, a leading Conservative […]

Editor’s note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Middle East Memo, which takes a look at what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s on the horizon in the Middle East. Subscribe to receive it by email every Monday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it. Talking is good, but how much should expectations and hopes be raised now that Middle East rivals are talking without necessarily putting a pause on their disputes?  Friday saw the unveiling of a new “public display of diplomacy” in the broader region when an aide to […]

After a military retreat by Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front last week in the Panjshir Valley, the group’s head of foreign relations, Ali Nazary, appeared in Washington last Friday to vow that it would continue holding out against the Taliban and to seek military assistance for doing so. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the NRF has hired lobbyist Robert Stryk to seek military and financial support for their ongoing fight against the Taliban.  The NRF has made similar entreaties to the U.K. and France, as well as other countries closer to Afghanistan. They are one of only several militant groups with the potential to muster an […]

For much of the Syrian civil war, the southern city of Deraa and the surrounding Houran Plains, an agricultural region near the Jordanian border, were divided between government forces and armed rebels. Fighting raged back and forth, killing thousands. It was not until Russia backed a government offensive in 2018 that the situation changed in earnest. That year, Moscow brokered a series of agreements with rebel factions that brought the area back under loose government control.  This summer, fighting returned to Deraa—the epicenter of the initial 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that sparked the civil war—when government forces moved to […]

No one in the Iranian government was sad to see U.S. and NATO troops leave Afghanistan. In fact, Tehran would prefer to have the Taliban next-door than often-hostile Western powers. But Shiite-majority Iran has also been a target of attacks in the past from the Sunni Islamist Taliban, and it worries that if Afghanistan descends into chaos, it could negatively affect Iran’s ability to exert influence and trade with its neighbor—or worse, that the volatility could spill over into Iran. Tehran will have to pull off a delicate balancing act if it’s to benefit from the U.S. and NATO withdrawal.  […]

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 is an opportune moment to reflect on the lessons the United States drew from those horrible events. One of the most problematic was the belief that the main threats to U.S. and international security emanated not from powerful states, as in the past, but from weak and failing ones. This questionable conviction led to a sweeping reorientation of U.S. foreign and national security policy that distracted the country from more important sources of danger and reinforced a militarized approach to the very real development and humanitarian needs of the world’s fragile states.  In late summer […]

Twenty years ago, a major terrorist attack against the U.S. homeland shocked a country many imagined to be as indispensable as it was exceptional. Today, it seems almost fitting that the United States should mark the 20th anniversary of that attack under the shock of the ignominious end to the intervention in Afghanistan. Whether shock will be enough to prompt a reckoning with the mistakes of the past 20 years, though, is far from certain.  That reckoning is necessary, because if the interminable global war on terror that followed 9/11 prevented another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland, it did so […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which gives a rundown of the week’s top stories on WPR. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. When U.S. President Joe Biden initially chose the 20th anniversay of 9/11 as the deadline for ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, he probably expected the date’s symbolism to resonate more triumphantly. But in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover of Kabul and the chaotic evacuation that followed, the remembrances of the […]

U.S. President Joe Biden campaigned for the 2020 Democratic nomination promising not only to restore the defense of human rights and democracy to a central position in U.S. foreign policy, but also to “build back better” in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. But for Africa’s 54 countries and 1.4 billion people, despite a welcome change in tone from the administration of former President Donald Trump, there is little to show for the first nine months of Biden’s presidency when it comes to engagement on values—or anything else of substance.  In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden triumphantly […]

While the failure of the United States’ two-decade campaign to reshape Afghanistan was a source of no little schadenfreude in Moscow, the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s U.S.-backed government has thrust Russia into a challenging position. Even as President Vladimir Putin confirmed that Russia has no intention of deploying troops to Afghanistan itself, the potential for radicalization and violence around Russia’s borders is foisting greater responsibility for regional security on Moscow at a time of mounting domestic difficulties.  The Ghani government’s collapse and the departure of U.S. forces from central Eurasia, seemingly for good, also offers Russia a window of opportunity to […]

There is extensive evidence that the Chinese government is violating the human rights of ethnic Uyghurs, and that these violations include crimes against humanity and genocide. Satellite imagery, testimonials, demographic data and photographs substantiate the extensive allegations against China, which include the use of mass surveillance technologies throughout Xinjiang province, the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, the separation of children from their parents, systematic sterilization, rape, forced labor and organ harvesting. While survivors, relatives and diaspora communities have long sought to draw attention to the systematic […]

Two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, I argued that a United Nations peacekeeping mission should be considered as part of, or complementary to, a strengthened mandate for the U.N.’s existing political mission in the country, UNAMA. Since then, a group of over 20 scholars has been working with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Human Security Lab to game out scenarios, consolidate the supporting evidence and make some research-backed guesses about whether peacekeeping should be on the table in Afghanistan today. The emerging consensus in this group is that there are reasons to think it should, based on peacekeeping’s record of success […]

It is difficult to speak of European ambitions for international crisis management against the backdrop of the images from Kabul over the past few weeks, which seem to tell a story of the failure of Western interventionist policies. But that discussion is urgently needed. Yes, it will be necessary to assess the lessons of the defeat in Afghanistan. But that war, with its U.S.-dominated state-building, is in many ways a special case that must be analyzed distinctly. In the meantime, there are many other global crises and conflicts in which the European Union, as well as the United Nations and […]