OPINION

Giancarlo Elia Valori In a little less than two weeks, the annus horribilis 2020 will (finally!) come to an end. A year that has seen the whole world devastated by a flu pandemic that has caused not only hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide, but also disastrous economic …

Eleonora Ardemagni Three years after my LSE blog post Emiratis, Omanis, Saudis: the rising competition for Yemen’s Al Mahra, Yemen’s Al Mahra has become an example of ‘collateral militarisation’. I use this concept to describe a stable region geographically close to a conflict area whose local system, although separate …

Farzad Ramezani Bonesh Turkey and the UAE have extensive cultural, competitive and economic ties, but their relations have deteriorated significantly in recent years. The following article has examined the UAE’s current approach to Turkey. Economic pressure on Turkey The volume of trade between Turkey and the UAE in …

James M. Dorsey Turkey is leveraging its successful backing of Azerbaijan’s recent war against Armenia to counter Iran in the Caucasus and gradually challenge Russia in Central Asia, the heart of what Moscow considers its backyard. The Turkish moves have elicited different responses from Russia and Iran, two countries Turkey …

Raad Alkadiri The genesis of the article ‘Iraqi Politics: From Sectarianism to Nationalism’ was a series of conversations and indicators over the course of the previous year that pointed to a significant shift in popular sentiment regarding the government and the political order. Political activists in the country, …

Giancarlo Elia Valori In 1992 the Japanese American historian and political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, gained his undeserved 15 minutes of fame by publishing a pamphlet with an evocative title, The End of History and the Last Man. The writer’s thesis was very simple: with the fall of the …

Global climate change opens up new opportunities for international transport networks, particularly with the trend towards glacier retreat around the North Pole. If the trend continued, Arctic routes could be used more reliably, at least during the summer months and for longer periods of time. The North Sea …

Daniel DePetris Nearly a year after Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was killed by a U.S. drone strike on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, Iranians woke up to the news that one of their top nuclear scientists, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was ambushed and assassinated outside Tehran. Israel is widely believed …

 James M. Dorsey Increasing strains between Pakistan and its traditional Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, is about more than Gulf states opportunistically targeting India’s far more lucrative market. At the heart of the tensions, that potentially complicate Pakistan’s economic recovery, is also India’s ability …