Defense & Security Archive

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. On Jan. 18, authorities in Sri Lanka destroyed $108 million worth of cocaine seized from a single shipment in the port of Colombo, which is a growing hub for international drug trafficking. While Sri Lanka does not appear to be a final destination for many of the drugs transiting the country, drug abuse has spiked in recent years, prompting the government to launch ambitious measures aimed at mitigating, and possibly eliminating, drug use by 2020. In an email interview, Sunimalee […]

In January 2017, under pressure from other West African leaders and much of his own population, Gambia’s longtime dictator, Yahya Jammeh, flew into exile in Equatorial Guinea. His successor, Adama Barrow—the winner of an election whose results Jammeh at first respected, and then disavowed—promised to pursue accountability for crimes committed during Jammeh’s more than 22-year tenure. So far, Barrow’s administration has had little luck concerning Jammeh himself, whose hosts in Equatorial Guinea are refusing to extradite him. Nevertheless, authorities recently arrested several of Jammeh’s top former associates, holding out the possibility of some justice. But at the same time, some […]

HELSINKI, Finland—Tucked away in an unassuming office building near Helsinki’s waterfront, a group of around 10 academics and government officials—most of them Finns—spend long days and nights tracking disinformation and influence operations emanating from neighboring Russia. They make up a newly formed research and strategy unit tasked with lifting the veil on a range of security threats that blend conventional and unconventional tactics. The European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, known as the Hybrid CoE, was founded last year in Helsinki by a dozen member states of the European Union and NATO. It defines hybrid threats as the […]

Analyzing the United Nations is rather like being a nervous seismologist in California. Geological experts are accustomed to tremors and small quakes along the San Andreas Fault, which bisects America’s most heavily populated state. But they are on alert for a much more powerful earthquake that could wreck some of the country’s most prosperous cities. Some say this will come soon. U.N. experts are likewise hardened to the regular crises that shake the organization but do not upend it. From Mali to Syria, the U.N. is struggling to make or keep peace. But despite occasional bouts of diplomatic frustration, the […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the production and trade of arms around the world. In late January, Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, unveiled a plan to make his country one of the world’s top 10 arms exporters. Currently, Australia exports about $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion in defense equipment annually, a figure that Turnbull said his government is seeking to increase significantly in the coming decade. In an email interview, Greg Colton, a research fellow in the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, explains what is behind the government’s strategy and […]

Over the past few months, the Trump administration has reportedly been mulling a limited, preventive military strike against North Korea, what has been called the “bloody nose” strategy. Pushed hardest by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, it is based on the belief that if North Korea has the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, Washington would be deterred from intervening on the Korean Peninsula, thus allowing Pyongyang to step up its aggression against South Korea and other nearby nations. The only way to prevent this scenario, the thinking goes, is a military […]

The contentious relationship between Turkey and the West hit a little-noticed but significant milestone this week, when the Dutch government announced it was formally downgrading diplomatic ties and officially withdrawing its ambassador from Ankara. Turkey and the Netherlands remain NATO allies, and diplomatic relations continue at the level of charges d’affaires. While not garnering the attention of the escalating confrontation between Turkey and NATO in Syria, the Dutch move is an important marker of Turkey’s continuing drift away from the West under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The decision was also unexpected because Turkey and the Netherlands had been in talks […]

Michel Thierry Atangana Abega spent 17 years in detention in Cameroon, locked in a tiny underground cell. He was alone for nearly all that time, denied access to lawyers and doctors and dependent on charity to supplement meager, state-issued rations. His primary connection to the outside world came from a radio that carried local stations and, sometimes, Radio France Internationale and the BBC. Born in Cameroon in 1964, Atangana studied in France and became a naturalized French citizen in 1988. He embarked on a career as a financial engineer and, in 1994, traveled back to Cameroon to develop road projects. […]

Late last month, Japan and Malaysia concluded a weeklong joint coast guard exercise focused on combating piracy in Southeast Asia. Despite a recent decline, piracy is still a threat across the region and cooperation between states—including some, like Japan, that are outside the region—is seen as an important mechanism for mitigating it. In an email interview, Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, a foreign affairs and security analyst on Asia-Pacific issues and a former lecturer at the School of Social Sciences at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, discusses the state of piracy in Southeast Asia and what kinds of multilateral […]

The National Defense Strategy released by the Pentagon in January paints a worrying picture not only of the world, but also of the Pentagon’s perception of it. In doing so, the document manages to achieve an extraordinary feat: repudiate the worldview of both the sitting president and his predecessor. The National Defense Strategy, or NDS, portrays the international arena as a field of strategic competition, where geopolitical contests have replaced terrorism as the chief threat to American security. This newly competitive world pits the U.S. against great powers in China and Russia and regional ones in Iran and North Korea. […]

On Jan. 22, a court in the Central African Republic convicted and sentenced a former warlord and leader of the anti-Balaka militia, Rodrigue Ngaibona, to life in prison. Human rights groups described it as a first in the war-torn nation and a “decisive first step” in delivering justice for crimes committed during the violence that has gripped the country for the past five years. In an email interview, Elise Keppler, the associate director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, and Lewis Mudge, a senior researcher in the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch focusing on the Central […]

Editor’s Note: In July 2019, this story received an Honorable Mention by the National Press Club for the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence, which recognizes excellence in reporting on diplomatic and foreign policy issues. It is also one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. For 15 years, El Salvador’s zero-tolerance approach to gangs—known as mano dura, or iron fist—has resulted in devastating violence while failing to address the root causes of the crimes it’s supposed to eliminate. Yet this approach to dealing with gangs […]

In early December, four new bills were introduced in the Australian Parliament that together represent the most sweeping proposed changes to the country’s national security laws in decades. In supporting their passage, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull referenced Soviet spying in Australia decades ago. “The threat we face today is greater than when Soviet agents penetrated the federal government during World War II and the early years of the Cold War,” he warned. The four bills have all been submitted for review to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is expected to report its recommendations and any […]

International institutions offer spies incredibly easy places to ply their trade. Although this is a sensitive topic, it may be these institutions’ most important contribution to international stability. While organizations like the United Nations and African Union emphasize their contributions to peacemaking and sustainable development, their headquarters are also hunting grounds for spooks. Last month, Le Monde revealed that Chinese intelligence services have been downloading vast amounts of data from the servers at the AU’s offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, every night for five years. Beijing says that this is absurd. Everyone else assumes it is a fact. China generously […]

This week, a Chinese airline, China Eastern, canceled 106 round-trip flights to Taiwan around the busy Lunar New Year, citing a refusal by Taiwanese authorities to approve the flights. The spat is the latest in an escalating row between Beijing and Taipei at a time when the Trump administration’s policies in East Asia are raising concerns among some U.S. allies in the region. In an email interview, Joel Atkinson, an associate professor of East Asian international relations at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea, discusses what’s behind the heightened tensions, how Washington fits in, and what […]

Last month, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull traveled to Japan for what has become an annual summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, highlighting the sustained growth of strategic relations between Tokyo and Canberra. During the visit, both sides agreed on the importance of working together in the Indo-Pacific and combining their shared interests in the rule of law and the freedom of navigation—a signal toward China, with its increasingly aggressive claims in the South China Sea, and the United States, at a time when the Trump administration has raised unfamiliar questions about America’s position in Asia. In a joint […]

In the middle of the night on June 29, 2014, the Mexican army massacred 22 civilians in a grain warehouse in the small town of Tlatlaya in central Mexico. The government claimed the soldiers had been attacked by members of a drug cartel and had opened fire to protect themselves. But witnesses and journalists told a different story. There was little evidence of a prolonged shootout, and Clara Gomez, whose 15-year old daughter was one of the victims, testified in court that she and other survivors had been tortured into backing the government’s version of events. A year later, the […]