After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, Russia’s long-term trajectory under Putin looks increasingly dire. The enormous complexity of Russia’s challenges is more likely to paralyze Russia’s elites in ways that will enable Putin to delay a reckoning until long after the damage he has done can no longer be fixed.
Jordan is considered a Syrian refugee “success story.” But Syrians who reside there are increasingly concerned about changes in the government’s posture toward them. They fear that they may soon be pressured to leave.
The recent coup in Niger presents the United States with a familiar dilemma in how it conducts security assistance. There is no easy solution, but current dynamics in the Sahel, which indicate that without outside help al-Qaeda and Islamic State-affiliated groups will rapidly gain strength in the region, call for U.S. policymakers to pursue a pragmatic course.
The end of the war in Tigray in November 2022 brought relative peace to the region and eased international pressure on Addis Ababa. Yet, it has precipitated the explosion of another devastating war, this time between Ethiopian government forces and their erstwhile partners in the Tigray war from the country’s Amhara region.
In early August, Kenya volunteered to lead a multinational police force, to which it will deploy 1,000 police officers. to reestablish security in Haiti. But when Kenya’s assessment team arrives in the country in the coming weeks, it will discover that Haiti’s crisis is not just a policing challenge. It is an urban warfare nightmare.
When Myanmar’s ruling military announced last week that it was issuing a partial pardon for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, it seemed a sign that the regime might be preparing to loosen its grip and perhaps even compromise with the opposition. That optimistic interpretation, however, is being rejected by many Myanmar observers.
In the past two weeks, the coup in Niger has snowballed into a confrontation pitting the civilian-led states of ECOWAS against military juntas in West Africa. But the standoff is a symptom of broader dysfunctions in the global system that underscore the need for the EU and its members to reassess their approaches to foreign policy.
Since the launch of the “great power competition” framework, U.S. policymakers seem to have moved on entirely from the war on terror, focusing instead on countering China and Russia. But as the U.S. military’s significant presence in Niger demonstrates, it would be a mistake to consider the war on terror as solely in the past.
The coup in Niger caught much of the outside world by surprise, given the country’s image as a relatively stable outlier in a region beset by upheaval. But if foreign observers were stunned by President Mohamed Bazoum’s ouster, it did not come as a shock to many Nigeriens, and not solely because of Niger’s history of military coups.
Ukraine’s wartime travel restrictions trapping most of its male population inside the country have had dire impacts on the civilian population. Although it’s easy to view the travel ban’s biggest victims as civilian men, a new report shows that it is actually Ukrainian women who are particularly keen to modify or lift it.