Cyber threats

Armed-group drone use in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin has scaled from rudimentary commercial-quadcopter Improvised Explosive Device (IED) drops in 2023 to a capability set that now includes First-Person View (FPV) strikes with shapedcharge anti-armor warheads, fiber-optic FPVs that defeat radio-frequency jamming, coordinated drone-and-ground assaults on hardened airfields, and a 25-drone non-state swarm. Four groups—Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the Azawad Liberation ...

We take the 2026 G7 Summit in Évian-les-Bains as a case study for understanding how a leading existing multilateral organisation adapts to a more fragmented, technologically inflected, and multipolar world. We argue that the significance of Évian lies less in the summit agreements themselves than in what the summit reveals: a qualitative shift in governance away from exclusive summit diplomacy and towards more selective coalition-building, broader engagement with non-state actors, a ...

Depuis le lancement de GPT-4 en mars 2023, un discours de plus en plus en vogue affirme que « si vous ne maîtrisez pas l'Intelligence artificielle (IA) vous serez dépassé ». On parle de prompt engineering comme s'il s'agissait d'une compétence ésotérique réservée à une élite technologique. Les réseaux sociaux professionnels regorgent de profils qui se présentent comme « experts en IA » après avoir suivi une formation de deux semaines. L'alarmisme fait vendre, et ...

In 2017, eight scientists from the Google research team published in the journal Advances in Neural Info Processing Systems the remarkable article “Attention is all you need,” which introduced a Transformer neural network architecture. The paper has been cited over 173,000 times and ranks among the top 100 most cited papers of the 21st century. It builds on the attention principle introduced in 2014 by Bahdanau, Cho and Turing Award winner Bengio, who proposed neural machine transla ...

Divergent regulatory regimes for data, driven by different motivations, ranging from privacy protection in the European Union to information control in China, could eventually produce distinctively different, and possibly contradictory, bodies of data. Artificial-intelligence models trained on those datasets could produce differing and possibly even conflicting outputs. To the extent that AI outputs start to shape human perception and to influence decisions, in governments and ...

From the use of tariffs as a foreign policy instrument, to the weaponization of critical resources, and from targeted sanctions to attacks on critical infrastructure, economic security is at the forefront of international debates. The aggressive use of economic instruments for strategic purposes has become an explicit feature of international affairs, in a way not seen since the interwar period[1]. Beyond the weaponization of resources of all kinds, an increasing ‘monetization’ is u ...

Fuel access has become a strategic pressure point across Mali and its neighbors. In 2025, Jama’t Nusrat al Islam wal- Muslimeen (JNIM) shifted from sporadic interdictions to a deliberate fuel-blockade strategy intended to pressure Bamako without holding territory. By selectively constraining movement along the Sikasso–Kayes–Bamako corridor, the group turned fuel scarcity into a tool of coercion, governance, and narrative control—shaping behavior in the capital while remaining largel ...

This Paper was originally published on transatlantic.org The contemporary maritime domain is increasingly recognized as a geopolitical and economic space, but also as an environment intertwined with human, social, ecological, and governance systems ashore. The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR 2024) report argues that maritime security has evolved from a narrow naval and state-centered concern into a multidimensional issue embedded in global human s ...

This Policy Paper analyses the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) through the critical lens of technological colonialism. It argues that the fusion of physical, digital, and biological technologies is not merely a technical phenomenon but a civilizational shift reshaping the foundations of global power. The article traces a historical continuum from previous industrial revolutions, demonstrating how patterns of inequality and extraction persist, now transposed into the digital realm ...

This opinion was originally published in japanupclose.web-japan.org   On December 16, 2022, the Japanese government approved three important defense documents. The first is the National Security Strategy, which defines the general lines of the country's defense policy for the next decade. The second is the National Defense Strategy, which sets defense objectives and defines the means to achieve them. The third is the Defense C ...

Kim Ju-ae, supposed daughter of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, was introduced by her father for the first time to the world and 26.1 million citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on November 19, 2022. Her first public appearance was unusual: at the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) costing up to $10 million (Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2022). Unlike a DPRK spy satellite launched on May 30, 2023, which broke up in midair before reach ...

Tea for two was planned in a friend’s house in California’s Beverly Hills, but, surprise, we were joined by one of the great futurist of America, a science fiction master, who turned “Fahrenheit 451” into a bestseller and himself into an admired visionary - Ray Bradbury. Bradbury who? Time is erasing memories, even of great minds - we met in the 80s at Harold Nebenzal, the producer (Cabaret) and author (Café Berlin) whose father produced German  film classics as “M” (1931) and ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Having experienced considerable growth in recent years, artificial intelligence corresponds to technologies capable of processing hybrid sources, particularly unstructured data. Complex tasks are thus delegated to increasingly autonomous technological processes, capable of driving economic and social development. In current African society, AI is becoming more popular and seeking to cover all ...

La place de l'intelligence artificielle (IA) dans notre vie quotidienne est de plus en plus importante. Ayant connu un essor considérable durant les dernières années, l’intelligence artificielle correspond aux technologies capables de traiter des sources hybrides et notamment des données non structurées. Ainsi, des tâches complexes sont déléguées à des procédés technologiques de plus en plus autonomes, en mesure d’impulser le développement économique et social du Maroc ...

Information is among our planet's most coveted resources, calling upon us to examine how it is incorporated as an object of power and domination into national and international political processes. Tensions around this resource arise not only in territories directly controlled by States, but also in contested territories, including the intangible acceptance of these, as occurs in cyberspace. The Russia-Ukraine war epitomizes this. Having "disconnected" Russia and conversely maintain ...

L’information constitue l’une des ressources les plus convoitées sur la planète, et invite à examiner la manière dont elle s’intègre en tant qu’objet de pouvoir et de domination dans les processus politiques, nationaux et internationaux. Les tensions autour de cette ressource s’expriment non seulement à travers les territoires directement contrôlés par les États mais aussi ceux disputés ou de compétition, y compris dans leur acceptation intangible comme pour le cyberespace. La guerr ...

Thanks to the positive momentum in transatlantic relations brought about by the arrival of the Biden administration, significant progress is expected on a range of key digital issues. New rules are emerging that are designed to level the playing field for economic actors and ensure the respect of civil liberties, while significant new investments in technological innovation are taking place amid considerable industrial reorganizations. This paper proposes to shed light on seven part ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a cataclysmic impact on all aspects of the functioning of our world. The relevance of the possibility of the spread of a global virus with the spread of terrorism is not immediately obvious as it is difficult for a direct causal link to be scientifically established. However, taking into consideration how state responses and pre-existing socioeconomic grievances can be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic can lead to innovative findings on how terrorist gr ...

Poker is a game for real men, cowboys, for example, ocean divers, stunt men, gambling away their meager pay. Poker is America, as oversized as its trucks, egos and steaks. Poker made its way from quaint southern New Orleans to the rough west, where gold diggers gambled away fortunes, and settlers risked their wagons and horses for a game of cards. Decades ago I met Johnny Moss, a descendent of this wild bunch in Las Vegas. He is the greatest poker player of our time, as his biograph ...

The so-called QAnon conspiracy theory has inspired groups with millions of members on Facebook and is considered by some observers to be “a new American religion”. For the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, the conspiracy theorists could pose a domestic terrorist threat. Q followers believe the baseless messages of their faceless leader(s) that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child-trafficking ring and plotting against Donald Trump, who i ...

Alors que de nombreux Etats adoptent des mesures strictes appelant au confinement et allant jusqu’à la fermeture des frontières, certains pays ont eu recours aux technologies de surveillance afin de contrôler la propagation du virus, alors que d’autres se penchent sur des solutions similaires. Le dispositif le plus répandu est la géolocalisation des données smartphones, le traçage numérique, la cyber-surveillance et la reconnaissance faciale, dont l’objectif consiste à détecter les ...

Our Senior Fellow, Len Ishmael has contributed to the Quarterly Journal by Beyond the Horizon ISSG (Volume 3 Issue 1), under the theme « Influencing and Promoting Global Peace and Security Horizon Insights », with a Policy Paper where she addresses China’s use of crises to « deepen and extend power and influence in Europe and the world ». Standing in solidarity with countries in Europe and elsewhere in the fight against COVID-19, China scores a diplomatic coup and extends its claim ...