Suchergebnisse

In this piece, I critique the proposed people-driven constitution-making process in South Sudan, identifying some challenges that may hinder meaningful participation by the people. One is mass illiteracy: over 70% of the population is illiterate. This can impact the people's capacity to meaningfully engage with some of the complex issues that may arise from the process. Another factor is that involving the people could exacerbate existing ethnic tensions in the country, as constitution-making is inherently divisive. My suggestion is to entrust the process to experts with oversight by parliament.

On Tuesday, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution introduced by Egypt and Mauritania and co-sponsored by more than 100 states demanding an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza. The measure won by 153 votes, with only 10 opposed and 23 abstentions. The resolution was triggered by the UN Secretary-General Guterres' invocation of Article 99 of the UN Charter citing a likely "complete collapse" of humanitarian services in Gaza. Article 99 enables the Secretary-General "to bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security."The UN Security Council's own resolution calling for a ceasefire failed after the U.S. vetoed it in a 13 to 1 vote on Friday.The General Assembly's vote margin on Tuesday was much bigger than the October 27 vote on a resolution calling for a "humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities" (somewhat weaker language than the latest resolution). That one was adopted with a huge margin of 121 votes in favor and 14 opposed. Most of the Global South states that had not supported the Oct 27 resolution were in favor this time around. These included India, Cambodia, Philippines, Jamaica, Zambia, Ethiopia, Fiji, and Benin. The shift of India, Philippines, Ethiopia, and Fiji is particularly notable from a geopolitical perspective.On the flip side, Argentina was one of the very few Global South states that flipped from being in favor to abstaining. This is likely an effect of the recent election of Javier Milei as president. Milei has taken a strongly pro-Israel stance. (Malawi and Equatorial Guinea were other two states who shifted their votes more toward the Israeli and U.S. positions.)A small set of Global South states maintained their stance against a ceasefire from the last vote, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Liberia, South Sudan, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, and several Pacific Island countries. Overall, out of 116 Global South states outside the Greater Middle East (defined as spanning a zone from Morocco to Pakistan), an overwhelming 80% voted for the ceasefire. Only about 20% did not. Of course, the percentage of affirmative votes becomes even more dominant (close to 90%) if we add greater Middle East states to this mix. Some divides over Hamas that emerged during this process are worth noting. During the October 27 voting process, the United States had introduced an amendment explicitly condemning Hamas. That amendment failed but garnered a respectable tally of 88 votes in favor. This time around, a similar amendment introduced by the United States "unequivocally" condemned "the heinous terrorist attacks by Hamas" on October 7 and "the taking of hostages." It garnered 84 votes in favor. About 28% of Global South states outside the Greater Middle East voted with the United States on the amendment. Of these, Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru, Philippines, and Singapore also backed the ceasefire resolution. Several other key Global South states abstained on the U.S. amendment, including Angola, Brazil, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam.This indicates that there remains considerable sentiment in the Global South that would like to go on record condemning Hamas and its actions on October 7 as terrorist in nature. It is however more noteworthy that this preference did not prevent almost all of these states from also calling for an immediate ceasefire. Their ceasefire demand was thus unconditional. Most Global South states have strongly opposed the Israeli war on Gaza and backed a ceasefire for many weeks. But the December 12 vote indicates that sentiment against Israel and the United States is hardening, and now represents a near-consensus among the developing world. There should be no doubt whatsoever that the United States and Israel stand isolated across Africa, Asia, and Latin America when it comes to Israel's ongoing bombardments of Gaza. Washington should take note and use its leverage with Israel to stop the civilian bloodshed — which is what this body clearly wants — fast.

Politics, violence, and secrecy have held back progress in post-war Tigray. This highlights not just the need to directly address security issues. It also emphasises the importance of improving transparency and giving marginalised stakeholders adequate information about current developments in the peace process.
Author information





Dimpho Deleglise



Dr Dimpho Deleglise is a Senior researcher in PRIF's research department "Glocal Junctions" and the research group "African Intervention Politics". She focuses on the African Union and IGAD Special Envoys' diplomatic initiatives in Tigray, Ethiopia, and South Sudan respectively. Her research interests include fragility and resilience interventions, inclusive peacebuilding, and post conflict policies and practices.

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Der Beitrag Potentially Vital AU Meeting on Tigray Leaves Communities of Interest in the Dark erschien zuerst auf PRIF BLOG.

Baroness (Pauline) Neville-Jones has issued a chilling warning about the 'growing' security threats and has called for the UK to spend 2.5% of GDP — even at the expense of tax cuts.It's a call to be taken seriously. She is a Conservative peer and former civil servant who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee in the 1990s, served on the National Security Council, and was Minister for Security and Counter Terrorism in 2010-2011. She was also the first to argue that the UK needed to help Ukraine after Russia's 2014 attack on the Crimea. Ministry of Defence officials scoffed at the idea that Russia might have grander ambitions in the region. Now, the ongoing war makes that look recklessly optimistic.In addition to Ukraine, there is currently an active war in Gaza, which could even escalate to Iran and elsewhere, plus over 35 major armed conflicts in Africa (including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. . And China is throwing its military weight around in the South China Sea, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.Things are now striking very close to home. UK and European supply chains are being disrupted in the Red Sea and Straits of Hormuz. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre has warned that the threat to vital UK internet systems is 'enduring and significant', with a rise in aggressive state-sponsored cyber-terrorism. And other western nations face the same threats.It does indeed look like a very dangerous world. So are we doing enough about it? The international comparisons suggest not. For the first time in its history, the Russian government's 2024 budget will set military and defence spending at 6% of GDP — more than goes on social spending. At the 14th National People's Congress last month, China announced it would be raising its military budget by 7.2%. Not only does the world look very unsafe, it looks increasingly unsafe.And all this is coming at the worst possible time. Donald Trump, who looks set to re-enter the White House at the end of the year, has already announced that he would turn off US support to Ukraine, and he has hinted that the US will not even suppose NATO countries unless they start spending more on their own protection. Meanwhile, the UK (like many other European countries) is deep in debt, thanks to a string of governments (including Conservative ones) that have put tax-and-spend and costly regulation ahead of entrepreneurship and economic growth,Given the geopolitical and military threats around, that is not a great position to be in. And now, senior Conservatives like Neville-Jones are talking about strengthening defence even if it means sacrificing any growth-stimulating tax cuts. If only our governments had listened to the pro-growth, low-tax, balanced budget arguments much earlier.

The people of Gaza are facing one of the worst man-made famines in recent history.The combined effects of bombing, displacement, and blockade have driven an already vulnerable population into severe, widespread hunger. This is not some accidental byproduct of conflict. Critics like Human Rights Watch charge that it is the result of a deliberate Israeli government policy to punish the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza for the crimes of Hamas. Now we are seeing the calamitous consequences of that policy for more than two million people, 90% of whom have been displaced from their homes over the last three months.Last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) initiative released a report on Gaza warning that a quarter of the population is now in the worst, catastrophic phase and that the entire population is highly food insecure and at risk of famine. According to the report, this is the highest level of acute food insecurity that the IPC has ever measured in a particular territory. Case in point: everywhere else in the world, there are roughly 130,000 people in IPC 5, the catastrophic phase, and in Gaza there are more than half a million. Arif Hussain of the World Food Program told the New York Times earlier this month, "I've been to pretty much any conflict, whether Yemen, whether it was South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Ethiopia, you name it. And I have never seen anything like this, both in terms of its scale, its magnitude, but also at the pace that this has unfolded." The WFP says that almost every Palestinian in Gaza is going more than a day without eating anything, and when there is an opportunity to eat, there is only a tiny amount to be split among extended families. According to reliable news reports, food is so scarce that people resort to eating whatever spoiled and rancid food they are able to find. Mothers with infants are so malnourished that they cannot nurse their babies, and what little food there is has become prohibitively expensive. The blockade of commercial imports means there is no way to meet the basic needs of the population. In northern Gaza, where infrastructure has been wiped out and aid deliveries are impossible, conditions are even worse than in the rest of the Strip. The UN emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, has said, "Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence – while the world watches on."The Israeli government's policies are creating this disaster. Based on its analysis of Israeli government actions and official statements since October 7, Human Rights Watch has concluded that the Israeli government is using starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The New York Times quoted Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch's Israel and Palestine director, "For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza's population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare." The Israeli government denies the charges that it is hindering aid, and points to the deliveries that have been let in, but this defense strains credulity. The small amount of food and fuel that is allowed in must first go through a laborious, time-consuming inspection process, and the aid that makes it through is insufficient to meet the needs of millions of uprooted people in a territory otherwise cut off from the outside world. Scholar Alex de Waal wrote in a new article that "the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a deliberate act. Gaza is a starvation crime scene." He explains that "[t]he rigor, scale and speed of the destruction of OIS [objects indispensable to survival] and enforcement of the siege surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years." De Waal has written an important history of modern famine, Mass Starvation, in which he wrote about the recent atrocity famines that have been created in this century in Yemen, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Syria, and Somalia. The U.S. government response to what is a new "atrocity famine" in Gaza has been poor and inadequate. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel Tuesday, and acknowledged the need for aid to get in and said that there "far too many" deaths in Gaza. But he did not assign blame to Israel and like all administration rhetoric, would not put any weight behind it. Continued unconditional support for Israel's military campaign and Washington's stubborn opposition to any resolution calling for a ceasefire at the U.N. have meant that there is little or no pressure on the Israeli government to change course. As Israel's principal patron and arms supplier, the U.S. bears significant responsibility for both the campaign and the policy of collective punishment to which it belongs. The only way to avert large-scale loss of life from hunger and disease in Gaza is an immediate ceasefire and a lifting of the siege. The longer it takes to secure a ceasefire, the more innocent people in Gaza will die preventable deaths. Staving off famine in Gaza should be Washington's top priority. If the U.S. does not act in time, it will be a black mark on our national reputation and one of the greatest foreign policy failures in our history.In Biden's first year as president, the State Department made the unpopular move of reversing the previous administration's designation of Ansar Allah, a.k.a., the Houthis, as a terrorist organization. The decision to remove the Houthis from the list of terrorist organizations was done because of the threat of famine to Yemeni civilians that the designation had created. The administration made the right call then to preserve the lives of innocent civilians, and it must do so again now.

Among the many diplomatic risks for the United States amid the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, further alienating the Global South — including Africa — is high on the list.It is difficult to generalize about African public opinion, especially given the absence of continent-wide polling data regarding the present violence. Yet after African governments' initially divided reactions to the round of conflict that began with Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, there are now numerous indications that most African governments, key African political factions, and substantial portions of African publics are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and appalled at the current Israeli military campaign in Gaza.Many African governments have historically supported an independent Palestine. In recent decades, however, Israel has increased its diplomatic presence on the continent, although not always in a linear fashion. Mauritania, for example, recognized Israel in 1999 before suspending ties in 2009. Amid the current crisis, however, African governments have virtually all been opposed to Israel's bombardment and invasion of Gaza.For example, on October 23, a Jordanian resolution calling for an "immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities" passed in the United Nations General Assembly by a vote of 120 for, 14 against, and 44 abstentions. Thirty-five African states (counting North African states) voted for the resolution, including Morocco and Sudan, which are signatories to the Abraham Accords that normalized their relations with Israel in late 2020. No African state voted against the resolution, although some did not vote, while a handful of others, such as Cameroon and Ethiopia, abstained. Support for such resolutions went directly against American wishes.At the diplomatic level, the African Union continues to support a two-state solution and, on October 15, joined the Arab League in a statement calling for peace and decrying "collective punishment" — a reference to the high civilian toll resulting from Israel's heavy bombing campaign.Meanwhile, at least two African countries have recalled their diplomats from Israel: South Africa and Chad. South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC), even before coming to power in 1994, was a longtime supporter of the Palestinian cause and, in particular, the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat, whom the ANC's Nelson Mandela called an "outstanding freedom fighter." On November 6, Pretoria summoned its ambassador back from Israel, citing civilian deaths in Gaza and what Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor called "collective punishment" of Gazans by Israel and what her government has also framed as "genocide."Two days earlier, Chad had recalled its chargé d'affaires from Tel Aviv, calling for a "ceasefire leading to a durable solution of the Palestinian question." Chad's move was particularly significant because it only recently upgraded its diplomatic relations with Israel and opened an embassy just this past February.Some African countries that initially appeared highly supportive of Israel immediately after Hamas's October 7 attack have since taken more nuanced stances as the death toll from Israel's response mounted: Kenya, for example, initially made a strong statement of "solidarity" with Israel, but has since backed calls for de-escalation. Despite their UNGA votes, African governments have been somewhat more cautious when it comes to allowing mass pro-Palestinian mobilizations on their own soil. The caution reflects at least two factors: such demonstrations could be used by their domestic political opposition, and some governments hope to quietly maintain their ties with Israel.In North Africa, pro-Palestinian protests have been stronger than in sub-Saharan Africa, with even Morocco — a signatory to the Abraham Accords and a partner of increasing importance for Israel — permitting huge protests. In sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, even the governments of some Muslim-majority countries have been reluctant to allow protests to proceed: on October 28, for example, Senegal denied permission for the National Alliance for the Palestinian Cause in Senegal to hold a rally, although a protest did eventually go forward in Dakar. South Africa, meanwhile, has unsurprisingly seen some of the largest protests south of the Sahara, given the historical solidarities mentioned above, as well as the presence of the Economic Freedom Fighters, an outspoken party to the left of the ANC. Another significant protest theater is Nigeria, both among Sunni and Shi'a Muslims.Expressions of condemnation of Israeli policy in different parts of the African continent come against the backdrop of a largely failed push by the United States to cajole African governments into taking sides on the Ukraine war. Before and after the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington in December 2022, Biden administration officials have found even longstanding allies, such as Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, unwilling to break completely with Russia.Given the massive financial, diplomatic, and military support that Washington is currently giving to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and the Israel Defense Forces, lining up African governments against Russia — or on other globally relevant conflicts — may become an even tougher sell.In the Global South, the idea of a "rules-based international order" rings increasingly hollow for many governments and their publics as Western governments (with few exceptions, such as Ireland) offer virtually unqualified support to the Israel's military offensive. Those actions are in clear violation of international laws against collective punishment, the targeting of civilians, the targeting of journalists, and the cutting off of food, water, and electricity, according to major Western-based international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and major media freedom groups such as Reporters Without Borders.In The Continent, an influential South African magazine, one prominent commentator accuses the U.S. (and Germany, among others) of deep hypocrisy when it comes to Palestine — for example, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier's public apology in Tanzania earlier this month over genocidal-level colonial repression landed awkwardly for some Africans. One Kenyan writer laments that the United Nations is toothless, the U.S. government seems "blasé" about Palestinian deaths, and "Western media…appears to have become a mouthpiece for US and Israeli propaganda."Meanwhile, amid both the Ukraine war and the crisis in Gaza, some Africans feel that the continent's own conflicts and tragedies (in Sudan, Ethiopia, and beyond) have been ignored, a dynamic that veteran observers have warned about as well. Washington may thus find it increasingly difficult to convince Africans that the United States represents a particular set of universal values.In Africa, the situation of Palestine evokes numerous solidarities: ethnic, religious, political, and more. Those solidarities are growing amid the present conflict, undoing some of Israel's diplomatic gains and posing long-term challenges to Washington's own diplomatic clout.

The cutoff of food, water, and fuel imposed on Gaza has created dire conditions for the Palestinians there in just the last six weeks. Soon, they could be starved to death.The trickle of aid that has been allowed in under international pressure is not nearly enough to sustain the civilian population. According to the World Food Program, only 10% of the necessary food is entering the Gaza Strip, and the people there now face an "immediate possibility of starvation." The WFP also warns that the "food infrastructure in Gaza is no longer functional," and what little food is available is being sold at inflated prices and much of it cannot be used because people have no means to cook it. There is a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. People are not just starving, they are being starved, and it is happening with the support of our government.Human Rights Watch and legal scholars say Israel is committing war crimes by waging a "war of starvation" against civilians in Gaza. Insofar as Washington continues to assist Israel's military campaign and blockade, it is helping to enable it. The meager amounts of humanitarian aid that the Biden administration boasts about facilitating are a drop in the bucket of what the population needs, and at current rates they cannot stave off large-scale loss of innocent life. The need for a ceasefire and an emergency relief effort is undeniable and Washington's resistance to it is a potential death sentence for thousands of people. Starvation has been used as a weapon with disturbing frequency in several conflicts over the last decade from Syria and Yemen to Tigray and South Sudan. Governments typically use economic warfare and physical blockades to achieve their ends. The current blockade of Gaza involves both by effectively shutting down Gaza's economy and cutting it off from outside supplies. The forced starvation of a civilian population is a form of collective punishment. Israel has an obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention "of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population." The Israeli government is obviously not fulfilling that obligation, and instead it has been doing the opposite. It is not surprising that President Biden had nothing serious to say about any of this in his recent op-ed in The Washington Post. The president acknowledged that many innocent Palestinians have been killed in the war, but he said nothing about those responsible for killing them. Biden insists that there must be "no siege or blockade" while both are ongoing. He mentioned no consequences if the Israeli government ignores his list of things that "must" not happen. The Biden administration may have "called for respecting international humanitarian law," but it is not acting to uphold it and it is not holding violators accountable.The president has once again rejected the option of a ceasefire: "As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace." This fails to take seriously the devastating consequences that allowing the war to rage on will have for all parties. No one imagines that a ceasefire will resolve the conflict or immediately create conditions for a permanent settlement, but it is imperative for protecting the lives and health of millions of people facing death from starvation, disease, and conflict. As the political scientist Sarah Parkinson explained in Foreign Affairs, "A cease-fire is the only politically reasonable, security-enhancing, and morally defensible policy to advocate, especially if Washington has any hope of remaining a respected player in the Middle East." Opposing a ceasefire in this war is a profound strategic and moral error that will cost the United States dearly in the months and years to come. Biden stresses that the U.S. is aiding Israel in its self-defense, but self-defense does not give a state the unlimited right to do anything it wants. Adil Ahmad Haque wrote an incisive article on self-defense and proportionality in Just Security earlier this month, in which he said this: "Under the law of self-defense, even a legitimate aim must be set aside if it is outweighed by the harmful effects of the force necessary to achieve it. Even if Israel's right to self-defense is engaged, its current exercise of that right is disproportionate."If this war were happening almost anywhere else and if it didn't involve a U.S. client state, it is very likely that our government would insist on the necessity of a ceasefire and U.S. officials would be repeating that there is no military solution. It is only when the U.S. or a U.S.-backed government is fighting that Washington sees no merit in adhering to international law. Unfortunately, this looks like the U.S. is least interested in stopping the wars over which it has considerable influence, and it is most vocal in demanding ceasefires in wars where it has little or no clout. If millions of people were facing an immediate threat of starvation in some other conflict, the U.S. would be appealing to the belligerents to lay down their arms and to do everything possible to facilitate the delivery of life-saving aid. That is exactly what our government should be doing now in this war. Brief pauses in the fighting will not be enough to ensure the safe, consistent delivery of aid.Acting in self-defense doesn't free a government of its obligations under international law, and self-defense isn't a catch-all excuse for violating the law. Some political and military goals can't be reached at an acceptable cost. The harmful effects of waging this war are already too great to justify continuing it, and they will only get worse the longer that this war is allowed to continue.

Since the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin on August 23, much ink has been spilled on the future of his private military company (PMC), Wagner Group, and its affiliated companies. Most attention remains on Ukraine, where the PMC has not been formally active since Prigozhin declared victory in Bakhmut on May 20. Meanwhile, Wagner continues to conduct military operations in both Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR).On November 14, the Malian Armed Forces (FAMA), backed by Wagner, took the separatist stronghold of Kidal. Despite entering a town nearly abandoned, the capture was undeniably a symbolic victory for Mali's Interim President, Colonel Assimi Goïta, and his military regime. There is a significant risk that FAMA's March on Kidal will further exacerbate humanitarian crises in the region, all at a time when the international community is stepping back from the Sahel. This is a mistake. The Sahel has become the epicenter of the West's, including the United States', two great threat narratives: jihadist terrorism and the expansion of Russian influence. Their accompanying containment narratives almost ensure counterproductive, knee-jerk reactions to future events on the ground.To avoid these pitfalls, the international community must focus today on creative solutions that account for Russia's presence in Africa.BackgroundThe past five years have seen a popular backlash against peacekeeping and humanitarian-military operations in central Africa and the Sahel. While politicized, the criticism has not been without merit. Peacekeeping missions have undoubtedly improved the lives of many. They have also often empowered the most violent and produced more, not less, armed groups. Yet it was Wagner Group's interventions in Sudan and CAR that turbocharged the criticism.
The structure of Wagner's 2017 intervention in Sudan initially followed standard practices for Africa's private security sector: training and security provision in exchange for mineral concessions. (A notable exception was the political consulting and media operations Prigozhin's team also offered.) In Sudan, the structure stayed consistent. In CAR, events on the ground shaped the nature of Wagner's intervention. In 2018, Prigozhin's men became diplomats.Wagner's diplomacy in CARIn February 2019, the CAR government and 14 major armed groups signed the Khartoum Agreement — a peace deal hailed by the United Nations. A considerable contribution to this process belonged to Prigozhin's working group, although experts from various Russian government entities also participated.
For Prigozhin, the prospect of peace would translate into increased access to mining concessions. It would also deliver a win to Moscow and increase the chances for Kremlin subsidies to fund his Africa gambit. For armed group leaders, the Agreement was a chance to obtain lucrative ministerial positions, while President Faustin-Archange Touadéra could shore up his vulnerable position vis-à-vis the armed groups.
The significance of the Agreement was immense, but unfortunately most walked away with the wrong conclusions. The international community felt it could finally distance itself from CAR's seemingly endless problems. The CAR government and Prigozhin, victims of their own success, felt they could abandon notions of an inclusive government. All seemed unable to account for the return of the largest potential spoiler of the peace, former president François Bozizé, and his decision to run in the 2020 presidential elections.
Despite rising tension between Touadéra and Bozizé, the CAR government, Wagner, and the international community pushed elections at all costs, even as a new coalition of armed groups — nominally led by Bozizé and including six of the fourteen Khartoum Agreement signatories — advanced on Bangui, the capital.
As a result of the rebellion, Wagner's mandate changed from that of a training mission to a military operation. The resulting counteroffensive brought nearly all major towns under government control.
The partial victory — armed groups are down but not out — led to overconfidence within Wagner's ranks: Military solutions were possible. The PMC came to view the Khartoum Agreement through a cynical lens as insiders reframed it as a clever way to weaken and divide the armed opposition, rather than the genuine effort at conflict resolution it was at the time.Wagner began to fashion itself as Russia's "security solution," Moscow's most successful export to Africa. Back then, Prigozhin had the ear of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Taking advantage of Moscow's light footprint on the continent, Wagner's boss could define what Moscow's interests in Africa were.Wagner's military solution in the SahelBy 2020, all actors recognized the value of the "Wagner threat" to Africa; not least African governments which leveraged narratives of "cooperating with" or "countering" Wagner to extract concessions or support from both Russia and the West.
Cold War containment narratives became a self-fulfilling prophecy in 2021 when, after a second coup, tensions between Colonel Goïta and France resulted in French military withdrawal from Mali and Wagner's arrival. Goïta's grievances with Paris were first political: He wanted France to recognize his government. Second, anti-French rhetoric helped build political legitimacy for the military regime.
The rhetoric tapped into genuine grievances with France's Operation Barkhane, especially among Mali's military class. At the top of the list was France's quiet cooperation with Tuareg separatists to oust the jihadists in northern Mali. Bamako saw that cooperation as a violation of sovereignty. Intervenors and those intervened upon could not agree on who the terrorists were.
Wagner's arrival in Mali further revealed the conflict's separate realities. Western analysts focused on human rights abuses and the territorial expansion of Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara (ISIS-GS) to prove Wagner's intervention a failure.
Goïta's circle was far less focused than western analysts on controlling territory outside the capital. The potential for another coup in Bamako was more important, and the government relied on internet influencers and political entrepreneurs to shore up its popularity. In turn, it became a prisoner of its own jingoistic claims to return Kidal to the fold.The resulting Wagner-backed operation has enjoyed more success than predicted. The Malian army has demonstrated increased combat capability and coordination between branches of the armed forces. Wagner's operations in Mali also reflect a new level of cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Russian officers are involved in planning military operations and acting as advisors. Wagner mercenaries participate in ground operations, but, unlike in CAR, they are always embedded within FAMA.A return to diplomacyFAMA does not have the ability or capacity to fight both separatists and jihadists. Indeed, FAMA and Wagner are on the path to an unwinnable counterinsurgency in the north. Interaction between Tuareg separatists and JNIM suggest the jihadi group is not quite neutral in the conflict, and its role could grow.Despite the current success of Wagner's military solution, it is evident that only peace talks, a process of reconciliation, and the equitable distribution of power and resources between Bamako and the provinces can end the conflict.The victory in Kidal puts the government in Bamako in a stronger position to negotiate with separatists. But given the prospect of an unwinnable war in the north, the continued threat of jihadist groups, and a host of economic woes, the window for "cashing in" on victory will be short.Of course, the Malian government has demonstrated little interest in serious negotiation to date. Few outside powers have leverage over its decision-making. Russia, and the Wagner Group in Mali, have more influence than most. For Russian diplomats, efforts to bring peace to Mali would reinforce Moscow's growing prominence in the Sahel. Wagner Group, too, has consistently engaged in diplomacy when it sees greater potential for profit in peace than open warfare.The international community has leveraged the presence of Wagner Group in Mali as a pretext to step away from the conflict. Yet the crisis in Mali, and the Sahel more generally, cannot be ignored. Efforts should be made to create at least conditions for a negotiating process.The West's exceptional concentration on the war in Ukraine and its support for Israeli operations in Gaza have damaged its credibility in the Global South. Competing with or trying to contain Russia (or China, for that matter) in Africa only does further damage to that credibility. Limited, compartmentalized work with all partners in the Sahel will show that the U.S. can view issues in the Global South outside these prisms.Russia is here to stay in Africa. Mali, and the Sahel more generally, should be an opportunity to engage in geopolitical deconfliction rather than competition.

For the Arab Gulf kingdoms, the Horn of Africa is a strategic perimeter. They want to minimize political threats — some are hostile to Islamists, all want to suppress democracy movements. Anticipating a post-carbon and food insecure world, the Gulf States want to possess rich farmlands. Each has its own vision of African client states that will do their bidding. This is a recipe for proxy wars, state fragmentation and autocracy in northeast Africa.For the Horn of Africa, today's crises are existential. War, dictatorship and famine are causing state collapse. The African Union is compromised, its peace and security system unravelling. The United Nations is retreating from peacemaking, increasingly reduced to a bare-bones humanitarian provider.The dangers were illuminated by the surprise New Year's Day deal between Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia, and Muse Bihi, president of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, a breakaway region of northwest Somalia. Ethiopia has been renowned for careful diplomacy, including championing the inviolability of existing boundaries. After fighting wars with Somalia in the 1960s and '70s, Ethiopia had learned to be circumspect and consultative in its dealings with Mogadishu.Last week, Ethiopia upended that tradition. It promised to recognize Somaliland as an independent sovereign state, in return for Somaliland leasing it a 12-mile stretch of land, including a seaport, that will allow Ethiopia to establish a naval base. This in turn unleashed strong words from Somalia — which had not been informed ahead of time. The AU called for Ethiopia to treat Somalia with respect. Fears of new conflicts were stirred. Unsaid in public is that the UAE is widely suspected to be the patron of the deal.For the United States, crises in the Horn of Africa are a sidebar to the ongoing Israel-Gaza war and the confrontation with Iran. Gunboat diplomacy in the Red Sea — the warships deployed under Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect shipping from attacks from the Houthis in Yemen — is the priority.The narrow strip of water carries 12 percent of world seaborne trade. For sailors, the Red Sea is "a sea on the way to somewhere else," its shores at best an inconvenience, at worst a security threat.There's a global consensus on keeping the shipping lanes open. If the Red Sea shuts down — as happened following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war— the knock-on effects on trade between Europe and Asia would be economically severe. The EU-run Operation Atalanta runs an anti-piracy flotilla involving warships from 13 European nations, (including the UK, which provided the flagship until Brexit), working with ships from Ukraine, India, Korea and Colombia.After a few years the flotilla commanders concluded that the solution to piracy lay onshore, in the form of diplomacy to resolve Somalia's conflicts and economic assistance to provide livelihoods to impoverished fishermen. That was a step in the right direction.Saudi Arabia chairs a Red Sea Forum that includes eight littoral states (all except Israel), to tackle piracy, smuggling and marine resources — not political issues.Six years ago, Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa who chairs the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for the Horn of Africa, introduced the term "Red Sea Arena." The idea was to create a diplomatic forum that would include not just the littoral states, but all the other countries with vital interests in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden or with political and commercial links across the narrow strip of water.The former AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, Ramtane Lamamra explained: "The Red Sea has historically been a bridge rather than a divide, with the peoples on the two shores sharing culture, trade, and social relations." Egypt has millennia-old interests in the Nile Valley and both shores of the Red Sea. Ethiopia has a vital interest in access to the sea. The UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Turkey all have historic or current interests.Regional and global power struggles are played out in the Red Sea Arena. Seven nations including the U.S., China, Turkey and the UAE have naval bases there. Others, including Iran and Russia, have warships in the vicinity and are actively seeking bases. The port of Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba is Israel's strategic back door, as the Houthi attacks on shipping have dramatically shown.The plan for a standing conference of Red Sea Arena states built on proposals contained in the World Peace Foundation report to the AU, "African Politics, African Peace" — for which Mbeki and veteran UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi co-authored the preface. The idea was that Middle Eastern states should sign on to the principles of the AU's peace and security architecture and establish joint mechanisms for cooperation.The AU failed to act on these proposals. Nor were they raised at the UN Security Council.Instead, Arabian Gulf states are increasingly assertive in the Horn, and they're bringing an aggressive form of transactional politics, including funding proxies to fight wars. The U.S. — whose security umbrella sheltered the Red Sea for decades — seems uninterested.Saudi Arabia has long seen the African shore of the Red Sea as part of its security perimeter. Qatar and Turkey sought influence in Sudan and Somalia, especially among the Islamists. Israel has discreetly sought a determining role in the region.But the key actor is the UAE. A small, rich state, it uses proxies to project power, and supports separatists in disregard of international norms. Abu Dhabi's clients include key players in Libya and Chad, and it is positioning itself as kingmaker in the Horn. The UAE supports and arms Ethiopia. It already controls many ports in the region — including, it is suspected, the proposed Ethiopian port and naval base in the land leased from Somaliland. But Abu Dhabi has yet to clarify its strategic goals for the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.The UAE has long had a free pass in Washington. Only recently has the U.S. begun to criticize Abu Dhabi's adventurism in Sudan, calling out its arming of the murderous Rapid Support Forces there.The last decade has been a rollercoaster of hope and horror for the peoples of the Red Sea Arena. Popular uprisings in Yemen, Ethiopia and Sudan all descended into lethal brews of autocracy, war, atrocity, and famine, with local conflicts escalating into proxy wars. Guided by the short-term imperative of staying in power — and by the ambitions of cash-rich foreign sponsors — today's leaders are too often short-sighted and transactional.Under UN and AU guidance, a raft of peace agreements was crafted to serve as the threshold for democracy. Today a peace pact, such as the threadbare "Permanent Cessation of Hostilities" that ended Ethiopia's war in Tigray, may be no more than a truce. The principle of the primacy of politics — that served Africa's peace agenda well — has come to mean short-term transactionalism rather than a commitment to democracy, good governance, and inclusivity.A key African norm was "sovereignty as responsibility," developed by the Sudanese/South Sudanese lawyer and diplomat Francis Deng. Today we have its antithesis, decried as "neo-sovereigntism" by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe.Today's regression means that Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki is being rehabilitated. For 30 years, Isaias has ruled an iron fist, with no constitution let alone political parties or an open media, hoping that the tide of global liberalism would recede. He looks to be proven correct.Sudanese General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as "Hemedti," commander of the Rapid Support Forces, the insurgent paramilitaries notorious for their human rights abuses, is touring Africa in a Royal Jet airplane (an Emirati airline). He arrived in Addis Ababa last week where he met Prime Minister Abiy. Extending protocol to Emirati-backed disrupters is the new normal in the region.To the extent that it functions at all, the AU is becoming the face of illiberal multilateralism, veering away from its founding principles. The UN's practice of deferring to its regional partners leaves it eviscerated. The InterGovernmental Authority on Development — the eight-member northeast African bloc — is now deeply divided and approaching paralysis.With the Horn of Africa and Yemen slipping far down the priority list in Western foreign ministries, America and Europe are sending mid-ranking diplomats into the snake pit, woefully under-armed for the perils they encounter. Too easily intimidated by swaggering local despots, perhaps swayed by zombie "Pan Africanist" slogans that challenge their right to talk about human rights, they have left their countries irrelevant in the face of ruthless Gulf power-broking.Recent developments could not have been anticipated in detail. But American diplomats saw the broader challenge some years ago. In 2020, a bipartisan "senior study group" on the Red Sea convened by the United States Institute of Peace, prioritized a broad diplomatic strategy for the Red Sea Arena. The USIP report warned that conflicts in the region could threaten U.S. national security and proposed a high-level envoy with a broad mandate.The Biden administration quickly appointed a special envoy for the Horn of Africa, but the Africa Bureau at the State Department soon downgraded the position. The cost of this strategic neglect is becoming clear today.There's still a chance for a diplomatic forum that promotes collective security. Washington has lost its best opportunities to take a lead — any U.S. initiative today will arouse deep suspicions among others. Middle Eastern powers don't, as a rule, propose collective action, and the Gulf states are divided. The Europeans will follow, not lead.The onus of leadership then falls on Africa and on the United Nations. Acting together, they can create a consensus that brings on board America, Europe, China, and Russia in a forum framed by the agenda of a stable and cooperative Red Sea Arena.

U.S. President Joe Biden, in his rousing State of the Union speech, warned that Vladimir Putin's Russia is on the march, "invading Europe and sowing chaos throughout the world." There's no doubt that Russia is a rogue, nuclear-armed state which crushes dissent at home, exports war abroad, and endangers what the United States and its allies call the "rules-based international order."But many people around the world — especially civil society activists from the Global South — are not just concerned about Putin's threats to the rules-based order. We also worry about Biden's commitment to it. As Israel's death toll tops 30,000 in Gaza with Washington's material support and diplomatic cover, many of us shake our heads at Biden's moral dualism on international norms.Indeed, if President Biden truly wants to save the rules-based order, he should start by looking at the United States' own behavior. Then, he should urgently push for United Nations reform that checks both Putin's influence, and America's own. Biden's administration should also back systemic changes that put the world's people, not the world's powers, at the center of global decision-making.Our research — based on over 250 interviews and articles we published over the last year on civil society activism — shows that the Biden administration's hypocrisy on Gaza is seriously undermining the rules-based international order. Crucial global governance systems like the UN Security Council, already weakened by Russia, are now at their breaking points. The unrelenting carnage in Gaza makes clear that the UN cannot stop wars as long as the belligerents have leverage in New York.It's easy for us to call out Putin. His atrocities in Syria and Ukraine confirm — in the worst way possible — that he is willing to go to any length to preserve his power.That's why many activists — including from Ukrainian and Russian civil society, who suffered the brunt of the invasion — applaud American support for Kyiv. But Gaza's wreckage has all but buried the goodwill the U.S. gained in support of Ukraine.Israel, like Russia in Ukraine, has disregarded almost every rule of international humanitarian law in its response to the October 7 Hamas massacre. Yet Biden has put no restrictions on American weapons flows to Israel, even as they are used to bomb and starve innocent people.At the Security Council, where the U.S. has often called out Russia's self-serving obstruction on Ukraine, the Biden administration has used its veto power just as cynically to cover for Israel's actions in Gaza — which the International Court of Justice says is plausibly genocide — and to block a ceasefire.With such hypocrisy at the helm, it's no wonder the UN system's response has pivoted to trying to supply never-enough humanitarian relief, rather than proactive diplomacy to stop the fighting and hold perpetrators accountable.The U.S. isn't the only country exercising double-standards in international affairs.When The Gambia brought genocide charges against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice, Britain stood with the Rohingya and argued that blocking aid to civilians was a war crime. But when South Africa used the same argument at the ICJ against Israel, a UK spokesperson derided the suit as "wrong and provocative."Sadly, South Africa is not immune to hypocrisy, championing the Palestinians while withholding criticism of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's persecution of the Uyghur people.Indeed, double-standards are hardly the West's purview. The expanded BRICS coalition claims to be an alternative to Western hegemony, but its members include the most repressive countries on Earth, some of whom have exported war and suffering to Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere.Hypocrisy reigns in "peaceful" forums, too. The UAE used the COP28 climate summit to ink oil deals. And from the UN General Assembly to the G20, world leaders in 2023 spoke the language of democracy and rights on the one hand, while repressing citizen activism or sidelining civil society on the other.The results of these double-standards are all around us: a world beset by war, economic inequality, and rising temperatures.No country can fix these problems alone — all must work together. Despite his record on Gaza, Biden in particular has an opportunity to pull the rules-based international order from the brink.First, he should change tack on Gaza to prove he believes human rights apply equally regardless of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.Second, his administration should champion UN Security Council reform to either abolish the much-abused veto or allow a UN General Assembly vote to override it. The perfect time to achieve such a change is September's Summit of the Future in New York.Biden's administration can also use the Summit of the Future to challenge the UN's state-centric approach to diplomacy. Currently, the UN, despite its public commitment to human rights, favors governments even if they are unelected or unaccountable to their own people.To boost popular participation and oversight instead, the U.S. should push for the UN to adopt the five recommendations of the UNmute Civil Society initiative at the Summit of the Future. These modest reforms include appointing a UN civil society envoy, mandating a civil society day at the UN, and providing wider public access to the UN through digital technologies.More boldly, in the spirit of the UN Charter which begins with the words, 'We the Peoples', Biden's team should back a world citizens' initiative, modeled on European Union processes, to allow people to petition to put issues directly before the General Assembly. Even better: a UN parliamentary assembly of elected representatives alongside the General Assembly to further balance state power with people power.All these reforms would curb powerful states' ability to act with impunity — including the US, Russia, China and their respective allies. But trading double standards for diplomacy is a worthy price if it means reducing the risk of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide across the board.Above all, U.S. leadership on global governance reform would show that Washington doesn't just talk about the rules, it plays by them, too. Putin would hate nothing more.

Jordan Branch on Google
Maps, State Formation, and the International Politics of Cartography







The territorial
underpinnings of international politics are as familiar as they are contested
within the discipline of International Relations. While the presumed 'territorial
trap' of the discipline has been attacked from many sides (see, for instance, Theory Talk #4),
Jordan Branch is more interested in turning the question around. 

His work has
carefully addressed the historical constitutive effects of mapping practices
and technologies on the subsequent transformation of practices of, and ideas about,
rule and the international system. In this fascinating Talk, Branch,
amongst others, discusses the significance of cartography for international
politics, explores the effects that contemporary digital mapping might have on political
spaces, and illustrates how innovations in mapping impacted on rule with the historical
example of France.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is according to your view the most
important challenge facing global politics and what is/should be the central
debate in the discipline of International Relations (IR)?



While
there are many different debates going on at the same time within the discipline,
the one that has interested me most is the relationship between ideas and
practical or material factors. There is a very simplistic version of this
dichotomy that has been debated to death in the constructivist versus
rationalists debates, particularly in the American field of IR—an over-drawn
distinction, as many have pointed out. I am more interested in actual
explanations for the process, outcome, or phenomenon we're looking at. Rather
than separating them out, I am interested in how the ideational and material
relate to one another, how they fit together.



This
relationship poses questions for my specific interest in technological change. We
are experiencing fast-paced technological changes—for example, the information
technology revolution—which can yield a natural yet incorrect assumption, namely,
that this change will inevitably have some kind of major effect on, or
interaction with, politics and, specifically, with international relations.
This may be true, but it is too often assumed. Indeed, this raises another
problem. Even if there is such an effect, is it something we'll be able to
observe, let alone predict or explain, as it is happening? From my historical
work on the role of maps in state formation, for example, it is quite evident that
for people at the time, there was no way to see the impact maps had on the
political/spatial/ideational constitution of the state.



The information
technology (IT) revolution is the most obvious current example of dramatic technological
change. Although it has been playing out for the last 20 or 30 years, it only
continues to accelerate. Over the past couple of years, a lot of discussion has
focused on 'big data' and what it implies for business, financial analysis, and
the like. Of course, it also presents possibilities as a new tool for social
science. But there is a danger here. There is a tendency of seeing new
technological phenomena only in their material contexts, specifically focusing
on possibilities for measurement, for example, thereby neglecting to think
about the ideational. How do ideas about collecting and using data actually
play into the collection and analysis itself? So while they are in practice
always entangled, analytically, I find the distinction between the ideational
and the material a very fruitful one, not so much as a debate between opposing
fields, but as way to think about technological change.





How
did you arrive where you currently are in your thinking about these issues?



It is
funny—people often ask this sort of question, and I did not necessarily see a
natural trajectory for my thinking or work until I began to look and think
back. This interest in connecting technological and political change goes as
far back as my undergraduate time at Stanford University, where I initially
majored in mechanical engineering, and later switched to International
Relations. While technology remained an important preoccupation, I became more
interested in politics, history, and theory. So the interest formed into
questions about the political implications of phenomena like technology. But
this didn't happen instantly. Just before beginning my PhD at the University of
California, Berkeley, I was planning to do comparative work on regime change
and democratization. Then my older brother (Adam Branch), who is also a
political scientist, gave me a copy of Hendrik Spruyt's The Sovereign State and its Competitors (1994), and he said: 'Hey
you might like this!' So, I literally read that on a beach the summer before
starting grad school—which may sound funny, but I sat down, read it, and found
it fascinating. Yet I didn't immediately start thinking about these questions
then. It took a year or two, when I started really thinking about what I wanted
to work on. I came back to this work and realised these were the kind of
questions I was interested in: the origins of the territorial state and its
characteristics.



The
interest in the state as a concept had been with me for slightly longer. As an
undergrad my first introductory course to IR was taught by Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk #21).
Krasner has strong views, and the class was very rigorous. A lot of his work
focuses on the state and I think his framings influenced me early on. I don't entirely
agree with some of Krasner's arguments about sovereignty, but these
disagreements are more about the specifics of salient time periods or cases.
Other work which influenced me early on was that of John Ruggie on
territoriality. Indeed his approach became central as I was developing these
questions myself. I also discovered a host of literature in political geography
that turned out to be very interesting and useful. 



So,
one could say that my trajectory was really more focused on understanding the
historical outcome of the territorial state than on what role technology,
specifically maps, played in this process. The focus on technology, while
existent from my engineering days, really began to materialize as a link missing
from existing explanations of state formation. I was thinking about how we might
be able to find some additional traction on these questions by including
technology more prominently. It has certainly been part of some scholarship on
state formation, as in Charles Tilly's work or William McNeill's on
technological change and warfare. Surely, technology has always been in there,
but the discussion has been centered on war fighting technology and maybe on
transport, and only to a lesser degree on communication technology in the
broader sense.



Another
piece of work which triggered my focus on the relationship between the
ideational and the material was Ron Deibert's book Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia (1997, read the 1995 PhD thesis
that became the book here, pdf). He talks about internet
communication technology but also about the printing press and the impact it
has on the global distribution of power. Yet, only when I read this book for
the second or third time just as I was finishing up my dissertation did I realize
how much his framing had shaped how I formulated my thesis. He does touch on
the role of mapping, but it is his elaboration on the way in which media
informs how people think about the world which was spot on for me. For me, maps
as a medium very importantly framed how people thought about and imagined the
world in the past—but of course these questions about technology and its role
in constituting the international political system, states, territorial
boundaries, and so on are still relevant today.





What would a student need to become a
specialist in global studies or understand the world in a global way?



I
think it is important to be really excited and interested in your topic and
what you want to do. The key thing is to enter a grad program that fits you in
terms of your interests and to be willing to do whatever methodological training
ends up being needed for your research project.



I
think there's a tendency to look for a 'one size fits all' graduate training
model, which does make sense at the initial level. Everyone should get a
certain amount of background in a variety of methods, whether they'll end up
using those or not. For example, I have not used quantitative methods in my own
research, but I'm glad that I had to take classes on those methods in grad school.
They give you the ability to understand work which may connect to your own but
comes at it from a different angle. And you should always be open to a variety
of methods. The key is to be able to understand a broad array of approaches, otherwise
you won't be able to engage in broad conversations.



I
also feel I gained a lot from exploring, and reading widely, from other
disciplines such as history and sociology. I already mentioned political
geography, which is really not too distant but, nonetheless, in the U.S. it
sits in a different department. You might think that some work is 'on the other
side of the fence' but it is important to be able to bring that work into your
thinking.



The
final thing is to be open and ready to change your mind, whether it is about
the answer you're expecting to get to your question, or even changing the
question itself. Obviously there is a certain point when you're almost done
with a project where that might not be a good idea…. but if it is early on and
it works and you can do it logistically, I think it is important to be willing
to do that. Five years later you're going to be a lot better off.





So far, your work has been mainly
historical. Can you explain the importance of 'looking back' for understanding
contemporary international relations?



I
think it is extraordinarily important and useful. A lot of us in this and other
fields do see strong connections between today's politics and past events,
institutions, and ideas. There is an important notion that we cannot engage
meaningfully with the present if we do not understand its genealogy. That is
certainly a driver for me in thinking about the origins of the state and
territorial boundaries. It may help us to observe patterns we might see
replicated or appear in some kind of altered yet recognizable form today.
Indeed, it can help us think about where were might be headed.



Although
I also hesitate here slightly: always looking to the past for the answers can
be problematic. History can help us to observe patterns, dynamics, and maybe
relationships that might tell us something about other periods or about contemporary
international relations. But we should never do so thinking that the patterns
are definitely going to be the same or are deterministic. I think one can look
for patterns or relationships without automatically assuming that they have to
apply everywhere.



Historical
analysis can be problematic in its own right, because there is no way to
discover or absorb the past 'as it really was.' All history is some kind of
construction, whether it is based on contemporary or historical sources. Additionally,
in the social sciences we often have to rely on secondary sources. That is not
inherently a problem; this fact just introduces more variables to think about.
Pure narrative purporting to capture 'what really happened' can be very
problematic.



Given these disclaimers, it is useful to consider
the past. I think what should be emphasized is that, specifically at the grad
school level, students should be encouraged to dig a little deeper
historically. They shouldn't hesitate to do that excavation work.





IR, it has been argued, rests firmly on
a spatial or territorial understanding of politics. What constitutive role does
territorial space play in IR and is that role based on historical fact or is it
myth?



I
like that question. I think it is actually both—sort of a myth and sort of a
fact.  In one sense, territory informs at
least the state ideal (i.e., states as we think of them): it informs what the
state is, the interests of states, and of course how we distinguish one state
from another. And yet, while this is all inherently territorial, we also know
that this is far from an accurate description of a lot of regions and places in
the world. There are many different spatial ideas, practices, and organizations
with political agency that are non-state or non-territorial.



But
regarding the myth of state territoriality: I think it is important to point
out there is a lot of detail in the 'conventional narrative' of the state, such
as timing of when territoriality came about as pinpointed in Westphalia, that
has been quite effectively debunked by a number of scholars in the last 10 or
20 years (scholars like Andreas Osiander or Benno Teschke, from different
theoretical perspectives). This is a strongly supported finding. But it really
hasn't penetrated the mainstream narrative very well. While we can gradually see
a little more nuanced discussion in IR textbooks in the U.S., they more often
than not will still start with 1648 and Westphalia.



We
can now confidently say that states—states as we think of them now—did not
appear in 1648, let alone earlier. This is especially true if we look at the
specifically territorial or spatial aspects of statehood, which again are so
central to how we think about the state internationally. The focus on defending
cleanly demarcated linear boundaries and the idea of asserting absolute
sovereign authority within those lines; this is really not consolidated until at
least the 19th century. So, part of the myth is the timing and the
how and why we have states.



But
there still is a factual quality to territoriality in this story we tell
ourselves about the foundation of the international system and the supposed
creation of sovereign states. In a certain setting and for a certain period I
think this describes the ideas and practices of international politics quite
well. The most obvious example of this is 19th century Europe. While
there are still ways in which it diverges from the ideals of the typical state system,
in a lot of ways it actually did fit that. This happened at the same time as
the development of modern Western historiography, and it was the setting for some
of the traditional foundation of political science and IR. So we can see how
one shaped the other: history-making and state-making. The singular territorial
ideal of statehood from the 19th century has subsequently been
applied to other issues, actors, and areas. Even if it does not fit exactly, it
is applied today still and it is made to fit retrospectively much earlier
periods, where it applied less well.



Ultimately,
it is a powerful myth which has informed how we think about international
relations to such a degree that we shouldn't just throw it out. Instead, we
should think about exactly how it actually informs the way that international
relations is understood and practiced.
Practitioners and officials don't exactly read IR journals and base their
decision-making on our knowledge production, but the basic ideas of states, boundaries,
and territory which inform the practice of international relations—as well as
the study of it—should be our concern.





You have looked specifically at how
mapping has contributed to imagining and formation of the modern state system. Could
you elaborate more on how something as technical as cartography matters for
international politics?



I've
argued in my recent work that early modern mapping technologies were really
essential to the consolidation of the territorial state, particularly the
specific territorial features of states today. Maps, which have been a popular
medium over the past few centuries, really do shape how people understand the
world and their place in it. This gets us back to the connection between the
material and the ideational.



In early
modern Europe a revolution took place, first in mapmaking technologies and,
slightly later, in the ideas and practices of political rule, especially as it
relates to territory. I argue this was really not a coincidence. How rulers and
subjects conceived of rule and how rulers conceived of their realms was really
altered as they increasingly used maps that depicted the world in this one
particular way. The key characteristics of modern statehood – at least of the
ideal of modern statehood – such as linear boundaries between homogenous territorial
claims, really appeared first in maps and only subsequently in political practices
on the ground. Of course, there were existing authority structures, but these were
not particularly spatial or were not spatial in this linear demarcated way. Subsequently,
however, these authority structures were ignored or sometimes even actively
renounced in favor of the kind of authority which could be literally shown and
drawn on a map.



It is
interesting because initially, maps were not predominantly produced by rulers, states,
or officials. They were certainly involved in sponsoring some mapping projects,
buying maps, and using them, but mapmaking was more of a commercial private
scientific enterprise, if we can apply the label 'scientific' in the 16th
and 17th centuries. These map-makers certainly didn't have any articulated
goal of changing politics, at least not on this broad level. They were really
concerned with making money, maybe creating art, and advancing what they
thought was a growing science of cartography.



We
can however see that the map, as a technological artifact—maps as actual things—had
an impact on the practices of rule both between rulers and between rulers and
their subjects. I argue that this process occurred quite broadly across the
European development of the international system at that time. And you can see
this sequence really clearly in a case like France.



Let
me illustrate that. Here are three maps of 'France' ranging from the 1400s to
the 1700s—the quotation marks are necessary because the notion of there being
one entity called France across this whole period is more a matter of us labeling
it as such rather than it being one recognizable entity.









The
first map is from a 15th century manuscript about royal and noble
genealogy in France. The image is purported to represent 'all the realm of
France' and shows the country as a collection of what I would call places
rather than a single linearly demarcated space. You do have the notion of spatial
boundaries here, in terms of rivers as means for demarcation. Yet, very
clearly, the visual language of this map focuses on towns. And this is how rule
was practiced and operationalized as well: negotiations would be over places, or
maybe collections of people based on identity, jurisdiction, or where they were
allowed to reside, but not in term of linear demarcations between claims.









Now
look at the second map, which is just from about 150 years later, from the
1590s. It is from an atlas by a follower of Mercator, and its label Gallia is
the Roman designation for France. From our modern perspective we can recognize
something that looks a lot like a modern map of France. Maybe even a state, although
the boundaries are not exactly like we would expect them to be. But this is the
visual language of mapping that we are familiar with: longitude, latitude,
spatial expanses colored in, homogenous territorial claims—there is something
about the space depicted that argues that it is all the same, that is all
France.



And
despite this familiarity, it was actually far from an accurate depiction of
French rule. Not just in the actual placement of the boundaries, which are
contestable, but in the discrete nature of the boundaries themselves. Along
these frontiers, so clearly demarcated on this image, the claims of the French
king were often unclear and overlapped with those of other rulers. This was
even true for the interior of France during this period.









The
third map is another 150 years later, from the 1740s. This is from a map
showing the triangulation of the realm, undertaken by a group of geographers, known
as the Cassini survey, as several generations of the Cassini family headed up
this effort. The realm is being mapped explicitly using geometric tools with
the important emphasis that the image is actually meant to represent reality.
It is understood that way: it's supposed to measure reality, in order to enable
the French king to better understand what he rules. Moreover, this mapping took
place at the same time that rule was being implemented in practice on the
ground in terms of spatial expanses as we think of them, in the form of
demarcating boundaries with neighbors which had previously been unclear,
overlapping jurisdictions.



Although
maps of the second generation (i.e., the map from the 1590s) were 'inaccurate,'
they were extremely influential. They were widely distributed and purchased by
the elite, both inside and outside of government. Using these maps provided
rulers with this particularly new territorial meaning to their centralizing and
bureaucratizing efforts. As a consequence, the use of these maps as material
tools of governing and negotiation really changed the language of rule. Rule becomes
cartographic, at least in part. When two opposing sides come to the negotiation
table, for example, they at the very least have already agreed, implicitly, that
the division should be a linear boundary—it is just a question of where.



By
the time the third map is produced, the government is much more directly
involved in map production using accurate geometrical measurement. Yet the very
desire for this mapping was shaped by the earlier use of those commercial maps
that built up the visual grammar of geometric space. The French case is useful
because it is very well documented, but we do see the same sort of process
repeated either simultaneously or later throughout Europe and also elsewhere. In
fact, there is a lot of interesting scholarship on the introduction of mapping
and modern geographic thinking into regions outside the West. Siam Mapped (1994), a book by Thongchai Winichakul,
is a fantastic study that I found really useful for my thinking about Europe,
even though it deals with Siam (Thailand) in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.



This
is my story about mapping and territory, but I think there is a broader frame
to your question: do we want to bring in these sort of technical factors into explanations
in International Relations? And while we don't want to be technologically
determinist, there is some useful thinking around technology and its effects we
should consider. The impact of maps has been so strong, and yet they are such
common artifacts that they are largely conceived of as 'unremarkable' outside
of geographic-oriented disciplines.





So can we juxtapose this insight that mapping practices precede the
practice of rule and state formation to the anthropological present, that is,
what do the contemporary, some say radical, shifts in mapping techniques entail
for international politics?



Absolutely.
When I initially present my work, there is often an assumption that I use GIS
in my study. Instead, my work focuses on analyzing mapping itself—maps as
historical artifacts, their effects and their interaction with political
identities, interests, and organizations. But I think the ways in which methodology
and the subject of study overlap on subjects like technology could potentially
contribute to stretching the boundaries of IR. The big data question is both a
question of studying what big data means for politics but also how we can use
big data to study politics. The way in which new technologies can simultaneously
play into our methods and into our answers or questions is a pressing and
fascinating issue.



For
instance, there has been a lot of back and forth on the question of whether
more open-access mapping techniques entail some sort of democratization. While
I think we have seen that more participatory forms of mapping are possible, we
shouldn't think that this type of mapping is completely open, as no
technological system is completely open to anyone and everyone at all times.
But, indeed, there is a democratization of mapping under way. Authorship in a
whole host of domains, including mapping, is opening up where there used to be
a single authoritative voice or at least a single type of authoritative voice. So
maps are an example of this opening up and collective authorship. At the same
time, accommodating more voices also means that a lot of information is being
shared without authority or attribution or what we think of as a legitimate
source… When you open a map from Rand McNally or National Geographic, you know
that specific cartographers thought this was accurate and you can blame or
praise them. But when you open up a layer of Google Earth that has been
crowd-sourced you don't know who put that pin there, and you don't know why.



It's
really interesting to explore a bit further how this is different from the
recent past. In the 19th and first half of the 20th
century, mapmaking was essentially state-led. The U.S. geological survey, the
Ordnance Survey in Britain, or large mapmaking geographical institutions such
as National Geographic represented the owners and producers. Mapping was so
technical, so obviously technical that the everyday person would not be able to
make a map to Rand McNally's standards. This has changed, and quite importantly
so. Not only do we have the technology to do this, people are aware that they
can use it as easily as opening a smartphone app, thereby incorporating more
points of view. This is not necessarily good or bad. Politically, it does open
up new possibilities. Maps have always been political, both implicitly and
explicitly. It certainly opens up the possibility of some kind of broader shift
in ideas about territory. Let me illustrate with an example. I haven't
necessarily come across specific maps that present some completely novel visual
grammar potentially reshaping the way we think about the world. But, an
interesting example I like to bring to my students: there was a September 2011blog post on Google's Lat-Long blog (which is the company's blog about Google Maps and Google Earth). Its headline
read: 'South Sudan is now official on Google Maps,' and it displayed a
screenshot of the new boundary. 







They changed their base layer by adding a boundary between South Sudan and
Sudan. This of course followed the referendum and the UN's recognition, and all
the traditional precursors to official statehood. South
Sudan became a recognizable entity on that blog. Google Earth, a
non-governmental actor, indeed a huge corporate actor—and thus not necessarily
democratizing—becomes part of the discourse of declaring South Sudan's official
existence.



This
is an example of how things might be going. Interestingly, the whole enterprise
of mapping today actually resembles more closely that of the 16th
and early 17th centuries then that of the 19th or early
20th century, not technologically but organizationally. The
state-centric view of the world was enforced by the state-authored mappings of
the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, by contrast, there is a
kind of shared or unclear authorship, there is crowdsourcing, there are multiple
sources of conflicting and quite openly unreliable or uncertain information.
This environment of rapidly increasing distribution and use also describes the
creation of the early atlases in the late 16th century and early 17th
centuries, which involved the collation of all kinds of information from multiple
sources.



And
of course it was in the 16th and 17th century when this
sort of non-state-controlled mapping presented innovative images of the world—those
images that ended up shaping and consolidating the state form of territory. And
so it was these new tools for understanding and acting on the world which gave
the state its territorial shape. As key information-producing activities are
being opened up, some forms of power are being redistributed. This certainly
means that we need to widen our scope in terms of whom we consider to be a
stakeholder or what sort of actors we want to study. We know that the dichotomy
of state versus non-state is not sufficient. We need to be subtler in our
inquiries. In IR, of course, the stereotypical over-emphasis on states is being
questioned, and this is really just one more sign that a piece of the power of
the state, in this case map-production and distribution, is shifting elsewhere.




I
recently had a conversation with students in my undergrad seminar on technology
and international politics. I went into it saying: 'Hey, all this mobile
mapping and GPS and Google Earth is totally revolutionary. This may change how
we think about the world.' And they were all completely unconvinced, since they
use these technologies all the time—to a bunch of twenty-year-olds these tools seem
unremarkable. And maybe that is actually a more accurate analysis. But it is
interesting how it is such a different analysis from that of my generation and anyone
older, all of us who have spent a lot of time, for example, driving around
without GPS. It is partly this perception and the 'unthinking usage' which make
the relationship between technologies and social and political outcomes so difficult
to observe. Our ideas may be changed, and especially the ideas of younger
generations may be changed, without anyone particularly noticing how dramatic
the changes might be. This also means that the connections, because they are
'unthinking,' can be quite foundational to people's ideas of social identities
or political practices. They are tacit and embodied. That makes it both hard to
observe but also an interesting puzzle. But it is worthwhile mentioning that
the images presented by Google Maps and other digital mapping tools,
particularly satellite imagery, might carry a greater legitimacy in terms of
depicting 'the truth'. It looks like a picture of the world and therefore
whatever is on it, even layered on data (like a new international boundary),
must be true. It represents another apex of the scientific trajectory of
mapping.





If it is just about adding a data layer on a base map that remains the
same, does that then mean that ontologically this kind of mapping technology
actually doesn't challenge territoriality?



That
gets to an interesting point, which entangles with a lot of the more careful
discussions of globalization and the state. One version of that is that the
state is not dying, is not being destroyed. It is just that other things are
being layered on top of it, and the state and its boundaries still remain and
still matter for certain things. In this case, maps are perfectly capable of
showing state boundaries—they look very fixed, very strong—but one can layer on
top other types of information, maybe transactional flows or particular places
that are connected in different ways.



I
think that could be an interesting argument: these new mapping tools can really
show so much, and it is matter of selecting what you want to show and
unselecting things you don't want to show. Thus they don't do anything to
undermine one particular view of the world. Now that is not necessarily a good
or bad thing. If we look at the history of mapping and the origins of state
territoriality, a key part of that was that it was really hard to depict
medieval jurisdictional and personal notions of rule on early modern maps. Printing
technology and mapping tools prescribed depiction in a certain way—drawing
lines and coloring in spaces. Maps made it harder to show and thus think about
the other forms of rule. If digital maps are still perfectly capable of showing
states and their boundaries, they may do very little to undermine that notion
of territory.





Finally, if we are interested in the politics of maps, to what extent do
we need to study not only the maps as political artifacts but the mapmakers as
political actors as well?



I
think it is extremely useful to do both, and obviously if we study mapping
today, we can do both. In terms of
historical work, we can only rely on very limited sources, such as what mapmakers
themselves wrote about what they were doing. We don't know a lot about their
goals or ideas about politics. I would have loved to have been able to read
exhaustive memoirs by mapmakers such as Ortelius and Mercator. Of course, they might
not have said anything about the questions we are interested in. On the other
hand, a lot of map-makers today are involved in mapping for explicit political
reasons: for example, Ushahidi-type collaborative mapping (www.ushahidi.com), or humanitarian and
relief mapping. Here we can dig into the question of how the maps produced relate
to specific objectives. That is a great way to get more analytical leverage on
a lot of these questions.



Jordan Branch joined the Political Science
department at Brown as an Assistant Professor in summer 2012. He received his
PhD in Political Science at UC-Berkeley in 2011, and spent 2011-2012 as the
Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Studies at
the University of Southern California. His interests include international
relations theory, the history of the sovereign state system, contemporary
challenges to statehood, and the intersection of technological and political
change. In 2014, Cambridge University Press published his book, The
Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty. His
research has also appeared in International Organization and
the European Journal of International Relations.







Related links





Faculty profile at Brown University
Read
Branch's Mapping the Sovereign State:
Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change (International Organization 2011) here (pdf) 
Read
Branch's Colonial Reflection' and
Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood (European Journal of International Relations,
2012) here (pdf) 








Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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Ukrainian officials continue to engage in direct, back-channel discussions with their Russian counterparts, with "tough" and "unpleasant" in-person meetings happening along the border between the two countries and in Istanbul, according to a new report from the Washington Post.The reported topics of conversation are far more limited than the early days of the conflict, when a ceasefire or even a peace deal appeared possible. The officials focus instead on practical issues like prisoner swaps, and the return of Ukrainian children who have been taken to Russia.The report sheds useful light on the status of diplomatic efforts related to the war, including the role of international intermediaries and mediators. Turkey, Qatar, the UAE, the Vatican, and Saudi Arabia are the main state-level players in this regard, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has also played a role.One notable area in which Ukrainian and Russian officials have never engaged in one-on-one meetings is the question of Ukrainian grain exports, which largely flowed via the Black Sea prior to the war. According to the Post, the talks "took place in a four-sided format: Turkey; the United Nations; Ukraine and Russia, which was represented by Defense Ministry officials."These discussions resulted in one of the only positive diplomatic signs since the war began: the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which created corridors for shipping much-needed foodstuffs through the Russian blockade. Rustem Umerov, who has since become Ukraine's defense minister, helped lead the Istanbul-based talks, a role made easier by Umerov's fluency in Turkish, the Post notes.But Russia killed the deal earlier this year over allegations that the West had not upheld its side of the bargain, which Moscow says included a relaxation of sanctions on fertilizers and related chemicals.When it comes to prisoner swaps, Ukraine views Turkey and Saudi Arabia as key players whose role "ensured that Russia was less likely to back out, to avoid angering two of Moscow's important partners," the Post writes.The report also reveals the complex role played by the Vatican, which has led on efforts to return noncombatants like military cooks and medics. The Holy See, under Pope Francis, has attempted to rebuild ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Kirill.While the war has put a strain on those efforts, some aspects of the rapprochement between the Christian denominations are paying off, according to the Post. Ukraine reportedly passes lists of prisoners to the pope's envoy in the country, who then sends the names to the Holy See. Next, Vatican officials forward the documents to the Russian Orthodox Church, and Kirill himself brings them to the Kremlin's attention.The most positive revelation in the Post's reporting is the news that "groups of children have come back to Ukraine on a semiregular basis" following direct negotiations with Russia, which has quietly felt the pressure of the International Criminal Court warrant against President Vladimir Putin for alleged unlawful transfers of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied areas.Groups of Ukrainian children "have been dropped off at a far western part of the Ukraine-Belarus border, cross over by foot, and are met in Ukraine by Save Ukraine, a nongovernmental organization," the Post writes.In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan moved forward a parliamentary proposal to ratify Sweden's accession to NATO, putting Stockholm one step closer to joining the alliance, according to AP News. But another obstacle remains: Hungary, whose ruling party has accused Swedish officials of telling "blatant lies" about the state of the country's democracy, pushed back a vote on the issue until at least next month. One ruling party lawmaker said there was "little chance" that Hungary would ratify Sweden's accession to NATO this year. — With dwindling support for Ukraine aid at home, U.S. President Joe Biden has started making the argument that its massive new funding proposal will be a boon for the American economy, according to Politico. The new line, which is a far cry from previous arguments about defending democracies and the rules-based order, is in large part aimed at Republicans who see Ukraine as a distraction from other priorities and are intent on expanding the U.S. defense industrial base. This angle will likely draw fire from progressives, who often note that military spending is far less effective at creating new jobs than other kinds of government investment.— Russia withdrew its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on Wednesday, opening the door to a new era of nuclear weapons testing amid increased tensions between Washington and Moscow, according to Reuters. Putin framed the decision as an effort to "mirror" the U.S. position on the treaty, which it signed but never ratified. While Russia claims it will only resume testing if the U.S. does so first, new reporting from CNN shows that both countries have expanded their nuclear testing facilities in recent years.— The Biden administration's public support for alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza has led to charges of hypocrisy from many leaders in the Global South who have bristled at Western claims of moral clarity regarding the war in Ukraine, according to the Washington Post:"When the war in Ukraine first broke out, Palestinians were elated by the tough stance taken by Western capitals against one country occupying another's land, said Nour Odeh, a Ramallah-based Palestinian political commentator. 'But it seems that occupation is only bad if the guys who are not on your side are doing it.' (...)There is a perception that the West 'cares more about Ukrainian refugees, about Ukrainian civilians suffering, than we do when they are suffering in Yemen, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Syria,' said Hanna Notte, a Berlin-based Eurasia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.That helps illustrate why the West has failed to woo countries like India and Turkey into supporting sanctions against Russia. Given the situation in Gaza, that effort is unlikely to succeed any time soon."U.S. State Department news:In a Monday press conference, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the U.S. is "deeply concerned" about Russia's ongoing detention of an American-Russian journalist for Radio Free Europe, who faces charges of failing to register as a foreign agent and has been in Russian custody since June. "We have requested consular access; so far it has not been granted. We will continue to press for it," Miller said, adding that "we have not even been officially notified of her arrest by the Russian Government."

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to launch an invasion of Rafah, a city located along the Gaza-Egypt border where more than 1.5 million Palestinians currently shelter.Egypt's stakes are extremely high given how much spillover from Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula could be destabilizing. Cairo understandably wants this war to be over immediately.A massive refugee influx into the Sinai from Gaza could result in Palestinians waging an armed resistance against Israel from Egyptian soil — a nightmarish scenario from Cairo's perspective. Egypt also does not want to be seen as accepting Palestinian refugees in exchange for money from the U.S., which would contribute to perceptions on the "Arab Street" that President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi's government is complicit in a "Nakba 2.0."Understanding Egypt's vulnerability to spillover from Gaza requires considering Cairo's other foreign policy challenges too. The Gaza war's spread into the Red Sea has harmed Egypt's economy in the form of lost Suez Canal revenue with ships rerouting to avoid the body of water altogether. Additionally, Rafah isn't the only border security crisis concerning Egyptian officials. "They've got Sudan in the south, which is a mess. To the west, Libya is a mess. So basically, everywhere Egypt looks now is a problem. There's also the issue of the Renaissance Dam," noted Kenneth Katzman, a Senior Fellow at the Soufan Center, in an interview with RS.The U.S. RoleSince October, Egyptian diplomacy has been key to efforts aimed at implementing a ceasefire, negotiating hostage-prisoner swaps, and delivering Gaza humanitarian assistance. As a result, the Biden administration perceives Egypt to be more indispensable than ever. Notably, Biden and his team haven't recently criticized the Sisi government's human rights record — a major contrast to Biden's rhetoric as a presidential candidate.The White House understands Cairo's concerns and Biden's public position is that Israel should not wage a full-scale assault on Rafah without ensuring the safety of Palestinians sheltering there. But Egypt continues to be frustrated with Biden's refusal to deploy Washington's leverage to pressure Israel into actually changing its conduct on the ground."Washington's support [for Egypt on this front has been] confined to making clear its opposition to any full-scale transfer of refugees, forced, unforced, permanent, or temporary," Charles Dunne, a former U.S. diplomat who served in Cairo and Jerusalem, told RS. "It is pushing back on talk in Israel — so far unofficial — that a mass population transfer could be part of the solution to Israel's Gaza problem," he added."My personal conclusion is that [U.S. officials] probably made the point [to their Egyptian counterparts] that some of the Gazans would inevitably be needed to be let into Egypt in order to prevent a greater humanitarian catastrophe as the Israelis move military operations closer to Rafah," Dave DesRoches, an assistant professor at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, told RS. "My guess is the Egyptians are concerned both that the Gazan presence would become permanent as well as that Egypt would be seen as abetting the Israeli military operations," he added.If Israel wages an all-out assault on Rafah and there is a massive displacement of Palestinians into Egypt, Washington would probably financially assist Cairo. But Katzman belives the White House is likely more focused on trying to prevent that from happening. "My impression is that [the Biden] administration is not really tackling the idea of what if there is a flood of refugees into the Sinai, while I think [its] strategy is to make sure that doesn't happen in the first place," he told RS.Katzman added, "The U.S. is encouraging Israel to coordinate with Egypt to the extent possible, which I think is happening. But beyond that, I don't think the administration has done any planning because they don't expect that worst case scenario to happen.""Cairo worries that even entertaining the idea for emergency planning purposes could be seen as a green light to the IDF. That appears to be where we are for now, and Cairo has focused on building a fortified buffer zone along the border with Gaza to prevent a refugee crisis," said Dunne.Red Sea CrisisAnother important aspect of U.S.-Egypt relations amid the Gaza war and its regionalization is the Red Sea security crisis. Since November, the Houthis have been launching missiles and drones at ships off Yemen's coast, claiming to support Gaza by targeting vessels linked to Israel, the U.S., and the UK. As of last month, Egypt's Suez Canal revenue had decreased by 40 to 50 percent throughout the crisis, according to Sisi.Gordon Gray, the former U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, told RS that there is "strong incentive for Egypt to assist the U.S. efforts to guarantee freedom of the seas" given what is at stake for Egypt in terms of Suez Canal fees amid Houthi maritime attacks.But despite economic setbacks from the Red Sea security crisis, Egypt did not join Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) and Cairo has played no official role in the Washington-led bombing campaign against the Houthis that began almost two months ago. This is not because Cairo doesn't share the West's concerns about the Houthi attacks on vessels. To the contrary, Egypt and the U.S. strongly agree that no Yemeni group should be allowed to disrupt maritime shipping in the region. In fact, when Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm in March 2015, Egypt committed its naval forces to provide security in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. At that time, Sisi referred to the Red Sea as an "Arab lake" and identified the Bab al-Mandab as important to "Egyptian and Arab national security."Public opinion at home mostly explains Cairo not joining OPG nor formally supporting the U.S.-UK strikes. Many Egyptians would now see their government overtly aligning with Washington and London against the Houthis as Cairo facilitating Israel's war on Gaza."Egypt has refused to join [OPG] and, while it's possible that Egypt is making some behind-the-scenes contribution, any such contribution is pretty much invisible to the naked eye at the moment. If anything, it's the very least they can get away with doing," according to Dunne.DesRoches believes that the Egyptians have probably been allowing London to use Egyptian airspace for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. "Extrapolating, I'm confident that U.S. support, intelligence, and resupply flights are probably transiting Egyptian airspace," he told RS. "I have a slightly lower degree of confidence that the Egyptians share intelligence and the common operating picture from their various assets to locate missile tracks and launch sites. This is probably limited more by the lack of Egyptian capacity than by any policy decision to not cooperate." Ultimately, the U.S.-Egypt alliance remains strong. But Cairo must approach this relationship with more caution given Washington's role in Gaza's destruction and its growing isolation in the Arab-Islamic world.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has meted out economic punishment both as a means of coercion and a moral warfare tool, rendering it a de facto accompaniment in the naming and shaming of various foes of the United States. The largest sanctions of all have been imposed on Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately, this case has also become the greatest example of the failure of sanctions to achieve their desired results. Together with the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, this has contributed to the growing belief that this war may end in stalemate, or even Russian victory.By 2021, the U.S. had already imposed over 8,000 sanctions on individuals and companies globally, targeting regional sectors in a range of countries. In the last two years, this number has seen an astronomical increase. According to a Columbia University database, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) holds comprehensive sanctions on six countries and three regions. Targeted export sanctions extend to 19 countries including Belarus, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, prohibiting under U.S. law any financial and commercial relations with designated companies or individuals. On multitudinous occasions, these U.S.-led sanction regimes have been found to inflict asymmetrical burdens on impoverished foreign citizens, hinder democratization, and in the most serious cases exacerbate humanitarian crises in violation of international law.In the days following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, President Biden introduced a series of allies-coordinated sanction packages targeting Russia's weapons industry, technology exports, foreign assets, banks, energy companies, and wealthy businessmen. Western states then went on to completely isolate Russia from the global financial market. In these measures lay a hope that such a severe sanctions regime would not only impede Russia's warmaking capabilities but cripple support from political elites so drastically that Putin's technocratic regime would collapse. Nearly two years into the war, Biden's introduction of new sanction packages every other month since February 2022 has not toppled the Russian regime or led it to agree to Western demands for a withdrawal from Ukraine. Russia's increased allocation of national GDP to defense, which is predicted to reach an all time high of 6%, stands as proof of this unpleasant truth. James Galbraith of the Institute for New Economic Thinking remarks that most Western studies on the Russian economy today begin with the question of how badly it is doing. This framework — focused on finding pain in the Russian economy and highly reliant on confirmation bias — forgoes the intellectual distance necessary to accurately pinpoint the roots of sanctions failure.There is no doubt that Russia's economy is feeling the impact of sanctions and faces a rather bleak future. Its aviation and car manufacturing sectors were particularly affected with a decline of 80% due to inaccessible components. The collapse of Western direct investment, combined with capital flight and severe brain drain, foreshadows decades of economic struggle for Russia's future generations.Still, this is nowhere near the outcome promised by U.S. officials. Claims that the Russian economy is about to collapse seem to stem from a need to reassure voters who are suffering from collateral sanctions damage, be it rising energy prices or deteriorating living standards.The most widely discussed reasons for the failure of Russia sanctions focus on issues in their enforcement: Their bypassing by southern states in complex supply chains, the loopholes of dual-use goods exports, and companies' reluctance to completely halt business with the Russian market. It is also clear that Western planners greatly underestimated the worldwide willingness (including by Western partners like India) to reject sanctions and continue buying Russian energy. Most recently, a POGO report found that even the U.S. Department of Defense has remained a loyal client of Russian oil.However, one can also credit Russian economic planning for cushioning the blow of sanctions. At the very outset of the war, the government and the Central Bank promptly reacted with a combination of restrictions on the free flow of capital and a 20% increase in interest rates. In only two months after the invasion, banks saw 90% of initially withdrawn funds returned to Russian accounts. After 20 months, a war economy has replaced Russia's pre-war export diversification and technological innovation priorities. Moscow's GDP shows a resilient growth of 2.2% this year, with the IMF only recently altering its prediction for the year 2024 from 2.8% to 1.1%. Despite severe capital flight, Russia's current account surplus grew to $16.6 billion in the third quarter of this year, reflective of a large increase in foreign trade despite Western sanctions regimes. There are, however, questions about the reliability of official figures, especially given that Russian trade statistics were made private for over a year, resuming only in March 2023. In line with Fortress Russia economics, the government recently imposed new measures compelling Russian exporters in energy, metals, and agriculture to convert their foreign currency earnings into rubles, and released new duties on non-oil exporters. Overall, anti-dollar strategies and currency swaps have pushed Russia closer to countries such as China, Iran, and Turkey, some of which share the aim of curbing American financial influence. This illustrates another danger in U.S. sanctions: Far from strengthening U.S. global power, they are in fact spurring other countries to reduce their economic dependence on the U.S.It appears therefore that the West may have to rethink its sanctions policy. As each side of the conflict begins to fathom the possibility of a non-military resolution, Western states must also face the difficult truth that sanctions (and Russia's frozen sovereign debt) could become be a necessary sacrifice in negotiations if Russia is to be brought to make peace. Indisputably, timing would be of key importance to what is perhaps still at present an unimaginable step for most U.S. officials. If proposed prematurely, an initiative to ease sanctions on Russia would also risk backfiring politically, which is why it should be broached in entirely confidential talks with Russia. Sanctions relief should come only as part of a settlement, and should be accompanied by firm and binding guarantees that the sanctions would be automatically reimposed in the event of fresh Russian aggression.The failure of sanctions against Russia echoes a long series of such failures, against Cuba (for sixty years), Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and elsewhere. While they may have some utility as bargaining leverage in negotiations, this only applies — as in the case of Russia — if the United States is prepared to lift them in return for agreement. What is more, sanction-setting betrays a pattern of stickiness: Once legislated by Congress, U.S. sanctions have historically tended to become permanent.It is high time that the United States recognized the clear lessons of modern history and modified its approach to the intermittently useful — albeit deeply flawed — strategy of economic coercion.

The 2024 presidential candidates are not holding back. Across the board they are issuing strident condemnations of Hamas's brutal attacks against Israel and support for Israel's ensuing war in Gaza.Nearly all are using the events to blame Biden Administration policies in the Middle East.Only one, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, has urged restraint on the part of the U.S., pointing to his colleagues' anti-Iran rhetoric as a possible slide into war for Washington and a broader Middle East conflagration.Republicans overall offered the most bombastic takes, with Trump proclaiming that his Abraham Accords had brought "peace" to the Middle East before Biden came in and blew it all up.The accords, which sought U.S. normalization with Arab states, were only signed by Morocco, Bahrain, UAE, and Sudan (whose government was overthrown this year and is in the middle of another civil war) before Trump left office. While "peace" is clearly in the eye of the beholder, these agreements were not only upheld, but the Biden White House has praised and sought doggedly to expand them, reportedly offering Saudi Arabia all sorts of concessions to join.That the accords left the actual peace process – between Israel-Palestine – off the table, is being blamed in part for the tinderbox that led to last weekend's attacks.Beyond that, candidates are demanding reprisals, blaming Iran, and warning of terror attacks in the U.S.Cornel West, who is running as an independent primary candidate on Biden's left flank, was the only one to offer a warning against civilian killings on both sides, and lays blame for Hamas's action at the feet of US-Israeli policies.Here's how they all line up:The 2024 Democrats:President Biden: "In this moment we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself and respond to this attack. There's no justification for terrorism. There's no excuse."Marianne Williamson: "Innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the actions of the Israeli government are, even as I write this, either being tortured or killed or are dead already. Children have been taken hostage. A nation is terrorized. (...) And yes, I know. These events did not occur in a vacuum. I could write about — and indeed I have, and at length — the myriad injustices Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel. (...) I will have much to say in the coming days about what is happening in Israel and how I feel the United States should respond. For now, I stand with Israel. And I stand with the Palestinian people. I do not stand with Hamas, nor will I ever. For their cause is not justice. Their cause is terror.2024 RepublicansDonald Trump: "The atrocities we are witnessing in Israel would never have happened if I was president." (...) "less than four years ago, we had peace in the Middle East with the historic Abraham Accords. Today we have an all-out war in Israel, and it's going to spread very quickly. What a difference a president makes."Later he added in a Truth Social post, in all-caps: "CROOKED JOE BIDEN MUST TAKE BACK AND FREEZE THE 6 BILLION DOLLARS RIGHT NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. HOW COULD ANYONE BE SO INCOMPETENT AND STUPID? BIDEN CAUSED THIS WAR, AND IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE!!!This has become a ubiquitous charge lobbed against the White House by Republicans in the wake of the Hamas attacks. The U.S. had unfrozen $6 billion in Iranian oil profits that were being held by South Korea, in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages last month. The money is currently held by Qatar, which was expected to be doled out for humanitarian needs in Iran. None of that money has left Doha, according to reports.Gov. Ron DeSantis: Proposed anti-Iran sanctions for the state of Florida on Tuesday, calling the Tehran government a "clearinghouse for terrorist funding in the region." Meanwhile, he said, "Israel, with the full support of the United States, should kill Hamas members and extinguish their entire infrastructure,"He also blamed Biden for unfreezing $6 billion for Iran.Amb. Nikki Haley: Her message to Israel was simple. "Finish them. Hamas did this, you know Iran's behind this. Finish them.""What happened to Israel could happen here in America," Haley said in a separate interview. "I have been terribly worried about the fact that Iran has said that the easiest way to get into America is through the Southern border … we don't need to wait for another 9/11."Vice President Mike Pence: "Biden should demand the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages in Gaza and direct JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) to be prepared to mobilize US Special Forces with Israeli Defense Forces to get our people home. Hamas gives 'em up, or we go get 'em."In response to a report that Biden is considering sending a second aircraft carrier, Pence said "Just do it!"Pence also attacked what he said were "voices of appeasement" in the GOP, including Ramaswamy, Trump, and DeSantis, who have all urgedrestraint and questioned U.S. interests in the Ukraine War. "This is also what happens when you have leaders in the Republican Party signaling retreat on the world stage."Sen Tim Scott: "The last thing we need is a Joe Biden wing of the Republican Party on foreign policy," echoing Pence on the issue of Israel and Hamas.He also called the attacks "an assault on Western Civilization. The truth is though, Joe Biden funded these attacks on Israel. America's weakness is blood in the water for bad actors, but this is worse than that. We didn't just invite this aggression, we paid for it."Later, he added, "at least 9 Americans have been killed at the hands of evil Hamas terrorists. It's time to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel, who has the resources and the power to wipe Hamas off the map."Gov. Chris Christie: "What I would be doing is making sure, one, that Israel has everything that it needs to be able to take whatever actions it needs to take." In this interview, he also criticizes "irresponsible" GOP House members for removing Speaker Kevin McCarthy and paralyzing the House in a time of crisis.More Christie: "Biden's appeasement of Israel's enemies has invited this war against Israel. Appeasement anywhere never works. We must do whatever it takes to support the State of Israel in its time of grave danger, and we must end the scourge of Iran-backed terrorism. This terrorism is funded by Biden's idiotic release of $6 billion to the Iranians."The Hamas war against Israel is now the second war started under Biden's failed presidency, first by Russia in Ukraine and now by Hamas in Israel. Both could have been deterred by strong American leadership."Christie also blamed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as signaling weakness.Vivek Ramaswamy: He pushes for strong support of Israel and blasts Hamas, but warns of a wider war that could include the U.S. He presented a 6-point plan on X, which included critiques of Haley and Pence for escalatory rhetoric:"These histrionics are unhelpful & unserious. The U.S. should provide Israel with diplomatic support, intelligence-sharing, and necessary munitions to defend its own homeland, while taking special care to avoid a broader regional war in the Middle East that would *not* advance U.S. interests."The 2024 independentsRobert F. Kennedy Jr.: "This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state's right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I'll make sure that our policy is unambiguous so that the enemies of Israel will think long and hard before attempting aggression of any kind."I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need. However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action. America must stand by our ally throughout this operation and beyond as it exercises its sovereign right to self-defense."Cornel West: In an interview with POLITICO, West said that "Israel and [the] United States are primarily responsible" for the violence that took place near the Gaza strip that has resulted in more than 1,000 deaths and hundreds more in retaliatory strikes. But, he added, "Hamas must take responsibility for killing innocent folk.""The United States bears some responsibility, no doubt about that. And I think that Hamas and [Islamic J]ihad bear responsibility for killing innocent people," he said. "Palestinians have a right to defend themselves in the same way that Israel has a right to defend itself. There's no doubt about that. But neither has a right to kill innocent people."He added that "the state of Israel has been doing that for 75 years."Earlier, West said, "I would stop the killing of innocent people — be they Palestinians or Israelis — by calling for an end to the vicious U.S.-supported Israeli occupation. This violent resistance to oppression is the desperate language of an occupied people."