Briefing Archive

After almost three years of talks, Colombia’s peace negotiations with the FARC guerrilla group will end soon—with or without an agreement. Amid an uptick in violence in recent months, Humberto de la Calle, the government’s chief negotiator, said in a July 5 interview with the Colombian media, “It’s clear to me that the process is coming to its end, for good or ill. It could be because we’ve reached an accord, as we’re in the homestretch of the fundamental issues [on the negotiation agenda]. Or for ill, if—as is happening—Colombians’ patience runs out.” Two days after de la Calle’s interview, […]

Earlier this month, European ministers met in Luxembourg to discuss the Mediterranean migrant crisis and the redistribution of asylum seekers. Though France and Germany voluntarily committed to take in 21,000 migrants, other European Union member states rejected the call for a mandatory quota system. Leading that call was one of the most vocal opponents of the EU’s asylum and migration policy: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Last month, Orban defiantly suspended the asylum rules known as the Dublin Regulation, which allows refugees to be sent back to the country where they first requested asylum, citing technical difficulties with its implementation. […]

Today, the phrase “Arctic energy” has become synonymous with snowy oil rigs, icy ocean exploration and Greenpeace activists. The conditional U.S. approval in May of Shell’s plans to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska has reinforced this narrow delineation of what’s included in polar energy debates. Reflecting how observers and international policymakers view the Arctic more generally, northern energy is written as an extractive narrative. From the opening of shipping routes to warnings of climate change consequences, the Arctic is frequently framed and valued by how it can help those living below the 66th parallel. But there is another […]

The relationship between South Africa and Nigeria, generally troubled since the end of apartheid in 1994, deteriorated markedly in recent years during the respective presidencies of Jacob Zuma and Goodluck Jonathan. This crisis in relations is not in the interests of either country or the wider continent, which needs its two hegemons to work in collaboration to address Africa’s myriad problems. Both sides seem locked into antagonistic postures from which there appears to be no easy exit. But there is a way out. Ties already in a freefall under Zuma and Jonathan reached their nadir in May, when Nigeria temporarily […]

Both the Brazilian and U.S. governments billed President Dilma Rousseff’s late June meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington as a reset of relations between the Western Hemisphere’s two largest democracies. Revelations in 2013 by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. eavesdropping on Brazilian officials, including Rousseff herself, caused her to cancel her state visit scheduled for that October, putting bilateral relations on ice for almost two years. Arguably, Brazil and the United States had already been on separate tracks for some time prior to that, given Brasilia’s more assertively independent foreign policy under the […]

On Tuesday an independent panel of experts released a scathing report criticizing the World Health Organization’s (WHO) response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The panel, led by the former head of Oxfam, Dame Barbara Stocking, said that politics and bureaucracy were to blame for the WHO’s mismanaged response and called for the WHO to create a new division to coordinate emergency responses. The report comes days after Liberia, which was previously believed to be Ebola-free, confirmed two new cases of the disease, prompting fears of a resurgence. While often harsh, the panel’s findings are unsurprising. As Jeremy Youde […]

In eastern Mediterranean politics, it used to be Turkey and Israel versus Greece and Cyprus. Now it’s Israel, Cyprus and Greece versus Turkey. This formulation is certainly exaggerated, but Israel and Cyprus do appear to be strengthening their ties, as represented by President Nicos Anastasiades’ visit to Jerusalem last month. The shift is reflective of changed regional conditions in both the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East at large, as well as within the countries themselves, particularly Turkey. In the mid-1990s, Turkey and Israel drew closer because of shared regional threats and challenges from Iraq, Syria and Iran, with a particular […]

In March, Sweden abruptly decided not to renew a five-year defense industry cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia, amid a diplomatic spat after Sweden’s foreign minister criticized Riyadh over its human rights record. The controversy led to headlines around the world and exposed the tension for Sweden, the world’s 12th-largest arms exporter, between promoting global defense sales and advancing democracy and human rights. But this is far from a new issue for Stockholm, and given the worsening security climate in Europe, the Saudi episode is unlikely to change minds in Sweden about the need to export defense equipment, even to non-democracies. […]

With water scarcity increasing political tension and threatening economic instability in countries across the world, transboundary water disputes often become highly charged and bitterly divisive. A prominent example has been the Nile basin in northeast Africa, where the nations sharing the Nile’s waters have for years sparred over their usage allotments amid concerns that upstream countries may interfere with water flow into downstream countries. Most recently, the region’s flashpoint for transboundary water conflict has been Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam, which within several years will stretch across the Blue Nile at the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. The controversial project has […]

At the African Union’s biannual summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 13-15, the principal task was to consolidate the “Africa rising” narrative—the belief that the continent has moved onto a new and more positive political and economic trajectory over the past decade. Two of the principal themes of that narrative are good governance and democratization. While the AU’s formal declarations in this area are encouraging, several developments suggest the gap between AU theory and practice will once again be persistent. Moreover, the very structure of the organization may stand in the way of progress. The summit was overshadowed by […]

In late May, at a high-level Community Party meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping cautioned that religions in China must be free from foreign influence and incorporated into socialist Chinese society. Xi’s warning appears to have its limits: It has not deterred the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, from reiterating his hopes that the embryonic dialogue between Beijing and the Holy See will continue to move forward. But the prospects of warmer ties between Beijing and the Vatican doesn’t play well in Hong Kong, where the city’s Catholic leadership has been a vocal supporter of the democracy movement in […]