China’s campaign to incorporate Taiwan under its leadership has been a focus of tensions in the region for decades. Japan has been drawn into this wider conflict, as it is a littoral state of the East China Sea which borders Taiwan and China. Not only out of a historical rivalry between Beijing and Tokyo, the economic rise of the People’s …

The United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) are quickly reaching a crossroads on how to collectively support multilateral peace operations on this immense continent plagued on all sides by bloody conflicts of unprecedented violence. Rising levels of political violence across Africa are joined fragile peace agreements, a precarious macroeconomic environment, and a growing reliance on counter-terrorism efforts. Unless rectified, …

The shifting agenda of world politics has led to a new reality of power, to what is called “soft power”, the concept that was first introduced in international relations by Nye (1990). Nye described soft power as an opposite to hard power that implies more aggressive forms including military actions from one country against another. Soft power in contrast, is …

The last time a Russian warship fired on a British one in the Black Sea was during the Crimean War, over 165 years ago, therefore, this puts into perspective the absolute importance of recent events in the Black Sea, where the Russian government admitted that it had fired a warning shot at HMS Defender, a British destroyer that was sailing …

The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest intact forest. It is home to more than 24 million people in Brazil alone, including hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Peoples belonging to 180 different groups (Brazil and the Amazon Forest). Among other tribes, Yanomami are one of those largest isolated indigenous tribes. They belong to semi-nomadic communities and depend on soil regeneration …

On Sunday 27 June, the United States deployed strikes in Iraq on the Iraqi-Syrian border, killing at least five people (Le Monde, 2021). However, it was not armed groups sympathetic to the Iraqi regime that the American aggressor was targeting, but a pro-Iranian militia. This operation, the second of its kind since Biden took office, follows targeted attacks by Iranian-backed …

In mid-June, the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, publicly acknowledged that “the people’s food situation is getting tense” as the national agricultural sector had failed to meet its grain targets due to typhoons which caused flooding last year, destroying more than 40.000 hectares of cropland and approximately 16.860 (BBC, 2021; Bicker, 2021). Nevertheless, flooding worsened the already dire …

The whole Brexit process has been an earthquake, which has shaken the foundations of the relationship that the European Union and the United Kingdom had been able to forge. Brexit has threatened to be a significant turning point for both parties involved, changing the way of living of millions, ranging from Brits who live in EU Member States, to European …

The special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has experienced different periods of closeness but also of more distance. Nonetheless, one of the moments, which have extremely influenced this relationship is the signing of the original Atlantic Charter, as it was the structural document, which enabled this transatlantic relationship to be created. The importance of this charter …

Last month, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Felix Tshisekedi,  announced he planned to renegotiate mining contracts signed by his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, with special attention to those with China. Tshisekedi complained that contracts have put the population and the state at a disadvantage losing out on the mineral wealth of the country (Africanews, 2021). In 2007, …