A key aspect of Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s ambitious “Total Peace” plan is resuming negotiations with the largest remaining rebel group in Colombia—the ELN. Warming ties between Colombia and Venezuela remove one obstacle to that objective. But other remaining challenges mean that progress will be slow and difficult.
The latest row between Washington and Riyadh over the decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production is not just a dispute over oil prices. It is a more fundamental divide between the U.S. and most of its Middle East security partners over what’s at stake in the war in Ukraine, and how each side sees the current geopolitical map.
On Oct. 6, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Prague, as part of a new effort to normalize relations. A changed geopolitical landscape in the region has removed some obstacles to a rapprochement, but the current efforts could still be derailed by other stumbling blocks.
The killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military in May has been widely reported and denounced internationally and regionally. But there has been little international media and public attention paid to the broader problem of intimidation, threats and targeting faced by Palestinian journalists.
It is not polite, as Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas put it in June, to say, “I told you so.” But the West had a “Russia problem” long before it had a “Putin problem.” The Baltic states warned Europe and the rest of the world about this. The world didn’t listen. And Ukrainians have paid a horrible price as a result.
The results of Brazil’s first-round presidential election were an unpleasant shock for the left, even if Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, or PT, finished first and remains the frontrunner against Jair Bolsonaro on Oct. 30. The PT is now a diminished political force, due as much to its own mistakes as the rise of the far right.
The focus on Peruvian President Pedro Castillo’s political travails are understandable, but they have overshadowed one of the more significant policy developments from his presidency so far: a recently introduced stimulus package designed to promote flagging economic growth that backtracks on Castillo’s hard-left economic agenda.
With the United Nations COP 27 Climate Change Conference set to take place in the Egyptian city of Sharm El-Sheikh beginning on Nov. 6, many observers have raised concerns about the country’s human rights and environmental records and what this will mean for the conference as well as climate justice more broadly.
The news that Russia has begun to employ Iranian military equipment, particularly kamikaze attack drones, in its war against Ukraine has led some observers to frame that conflict as a proving ground for Iran’s military technology. But the implications for military dynamics in the Middle East are far from clear.
Kenyan President William Ruto’s inauspicious first month in office has seen several false starts, unforced errors and warning signs, confirming for some observers that the widespread popular disillusionment that drove voter turnout in August’s presidential election to its lowest level in 15 years was prescient.
Five years after Catalonia’s leaders sought to break away from Spain through an illegal referendum, the independence movement has lost steam and the region’s separatist governing coalition has fallen apart. The story of how the Catalan government arrived at this moment can be told through three key dates over the past two months.
In July and September, Albania suffered two cyberattacks attributed by the U.S. to Iranian state cyber actors. But Albania is not Iran’s first victim. Among the world’s cyber powers, the Iranians have been among the most aggressive in using hacking for coercion. And while still relatively unskilled, Iran is a dangerous cyber actor.
Russia’s annexation of four partially occupied areas in Ukraine would appear to turn the U.N. Charter on its head, prompting some observers to wonder whether it has outlived its usefulness. In fact, however, the charter is working exactly as was envisioned, and perhaps even better than its framers hoped, for three reasons.
Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is favored to win the 2022 presidential election and return to the office he held between 2003 and 2010. But despite Lula’s pledge to prioritize relations with Africa as he did in his first stint in office, a return to the heydays of the 2000s is a long shot.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked an opportunity for Germany and Poland to converge around their shared interests in the face of a common threat. But developments since then have resurfaced the many lingering questions regarding the two countries’ differences, which often reflect broader divides across the continent.
At the Summit of the Americas in June, 33 governments of the region pledged to tackle violence against environmental defenders by taking “concrete actions.” But rather than declarations, changing the situation on the ground demands that governments address the drivers of violence and repression against these defenders.
Many analysts expected Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to include a cyber Armageddon as part of the conflict. So when those expectations didn’t materialize, the initial surprise quickly turned into declarations that Ukraine had won the “cyber war.” But it’s still possible that Moscow will turn up the dial on its cyber operations.