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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 […]

In 1925, Syrians rose up against their French colonial authorities. The revolt started in southern Syria, in the rugged homeland of the Druze, an esoteric religious sect with roots in Shiite Islam. Druze rebels near the town of Suwayda shot down a French surveillance plane, and before long a full-scale rebellion spread to Damascus and farther north, led by a Druze leader, Sultan al-Atrash, who became a nationalist hero in Syria. Nearly 90 years later, the Syrian uprising that began in 2011 also got its spark in southern Syrian—not in the Druze homeland, but in the dusty border town of […]

When it comes to the power of arcane financial matters to capture global attention, nothing in recent weeks compares to the drama surrounding Greece’s debt. But there is another simmering crisis with potential to do far more damage to the world economy. Consider that as depositors in Greece lined up at ATMs to withdraw pocket change from their bank accounts, investors in China were bleeding assets at an unprecedented rate. And these days, even a small financial tremor in China can be felt around the world. The Chinese stock market has endured its sharpest drop in more than 20 years. […]

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 […]

George Clemenceau, who as prime minister of France presided over the final year of World War I, once famously said that war was too important to be left to the generals. If the Pentagon’s recently released National Military Strategy (NMS), penned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is any indication, the generals should be left pretty far away from strategy, too. This year’s NMS, the first since 2011, is a typical farrago of threat-inflation, strategic incoherence and “a glass half-empty” conception of 21st-century international affairs, lubricated by the oft-heard notion from inside the Pentagon that the U.S military “must provide […]

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 […]

Last month, Indian special operations forces conducted a brief raid into Myanmar looking for militants. In an email interview, Iskander Rehman, a nonresident fellow at the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, discussed India’s special operations forces. WPR: How developed are India’s special operations forces, and what are their principal capabilities? Iskander Rehman: That’s a difficult question to answer, in part because some of India’s special operations forces (SOF) units may bear a closer resemblance to what Western military analysts would consider to be elite and/or specialized infantry than to special operators. Within the Indian army, for example, there […]

June 2010, a start-up company in the Bay Area launched a new service to match riders with taxi cabs via a smartphone app. Today, just five years later, Uber operates in over 58 countries and 300 cities. Venture capitalists as well as investors such as Goldman Sachs, Google and the Chinese company Baidu have all poured in capital, with the company currently valued at $41 billion dollars. And even as it encounters violent protests in Paris and legal crackdowns elsewhere, Uber seems poised for still more growth. Some estimate that the company will generate revenues of $10 billion by the […]

On June 30, the Pentagon issued the latest iteration of the National Military Strategy (NMS) of the United States. The new version, the first update to the strategy since 2011, depicts today’s international security environment as being more challenging for the United States due to the unprecedented reach of globalization, the diffusion of military technologies and the rise of revisionist great powers. The NMS establishes U.S. military objectives and explains how the Pentagon will achieve them. It describes the overall global security environment in which the U.S. military operates as well as the threats and opportunities that affect U.S. national […]

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. […]

In May, amid increased migrant flows from Africa to Europe, Niger approved a bill that will translate the United Nations protocol against the smuggling of migrants into national law. In an email interview, Oliver Kaplan, an assistant professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and associate director of the Human Trafficking Center, discussed the U.N. protocol and Niger’s efforts to implement it. WPR: What are the main provisions of the U.N. protocol against smuggling migrants? Oliver Kaplan: The U.N. protocol against smuggling migrants contains provisions for the criminalization of smuggling and the care […]

If ambitious aliens reached Earth tomorrow, they might conclude that the planet is too troublesome to bother conquering: The world looks like an ungovernable place. The European Union faces an ever-intensifying crisis over Greece. Arab powers and their Western allies are struggling to keep up with terrorist attacks and atrocities by the Islamic State. The U.S. military reported last week that Russian and Chinese assertiveness now makes the chance of great-power war “low but growing.” Can these crises be defused? The answer may lie in Vienna, where talks on an Iranian nuclear deal are coming to a head, after widely […]

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 […]

Last month the United Nations released a policy paper, “Uniting our Strengths for Peace,” on the future of peacekeeping. Written by a panel of 16 experts, including former East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta, the report is a subtly subversive summary of the current problems with U.N. peace operations. To further explore this subject, World Politics Review partnered with the Global Dispatches podcast to produce this interview with WPR columnist Richard Gowan. Gowan and host Mark Leon Goldberg discuss U.N. peacekeeping, the challenges it faces and how current trends in global security will force the U.N. to adapt. For more […]

It seems a little odd that the final countdown to a Greek default saw the clock run out on what was in reality a puny payment. Greece was due to pay the International Monetary Fund a mere 1.55 billion euros Tuesday, by itself a rather inconsequential sum in the global credit markets. Athens’ inability to pay that small amount set off the chain of events that put global markets on high alert and continues to threaten the decades-old project of European integration. While Greece has held testy exchanges with creditors from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central […]

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 […]