Armed conflicts

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”President Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 This paper examines the economic and human impacts of the first six months of the Iran war—from February to the end of August 2026—on Iran’s Arab neighbors and compares these impacts with those on the three countries directly involved—Iran, Israel and t ...

In the two years since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Russia has restructured its Mediterranean presence. Although Russia’s limited and increasingly conditional access to the Khmeimim and Tartus facilities in Syria has been preserved, its presence in the country has morphed from Assad’s ‘patron-client’ configuration to a more negotiated engagement. Simultaneously, Russia has upgraded its force-projection and logistical infrastructure in eastern Libya, giving it an access path ...

On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Défense Agreement, a collective-defense pact widely compared to NATO’s Article 5. This essay argues that the comparison is misleading. Mecca borrows NATO’s language of solidarity without yet possessing NATO’s institutional machinery, and the Houthi offensive against Saudi Arabia in September 2026 provided an early and revealing test of what the agreement actually means in practice. Neither Pakistan nor Turk ...

Since around 2010, it has been known that the Eastern Mediterranean is a new gas province. Gas resources have indeed been discovered offshore four countries or territories: Egypt, Israel, Cyprus and Gaza. Two of them have become producers and exporters of natural gas, Egypt and Israel. Off the coast of Gaza, the Gaza Marine gas field has never been developed, and it is highly unlikely to be developed anytime soon given the very high tensions between the State of Israel and Hamas. By ...

Depuis 2010, environ, on sait que la Méditerranée orientale est une nouvelle province gazière. Des ressources gazières ont en effet été découvertes au large de quatre pays ou territoires, l’Égypte, Israël, Chypre et Gaza. Deux d’entre eux sont devenus producteurs et exportateurs de gaz naturel, l’Égypte et Israël. Au large de Gaza, le champ gazier de Gaza Marine n’a jamais été développé et il est très peu probable qu’il le soit prochainement en raison des très fortes tensions entre ...

The Mecca Agreement: A First Step Towards a New Regional Security Architecture? On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Agreement, a trilateral defense pact aimed at strengthening collective security and defense cooperation between the three countries. At its core lies a collective defense commitment under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all three. While many details concerning its practical implementation remain unclear, the agreeme ...

THE END OF AN ERAThe US-Israeli war on Iran, a 'little excursion' envisaged to be over within a matter of weeks, has entered its fourth month. Shock waves ripple across the globe. This war is just one in a series of recent crises which have fractured the international community, making the decades of the 2020's among the most disruptive in recent history. Each crisis compounds the deleterious effects of those which came before. The war in Iran is no exception. It abruptly stalled ec ...

Ethiopia continues to struggle to lay the economic foundations of food security for all, more than 30 years after first adopting the East Asian Developmental State Model (EADS) under Zenawi (1911-2012), continued under Hailemariam Desalegn (2012-April 2018), and later shifting toward a neo-liberal, Washington consensus-oriented approach under Abiy Ahmed (2018-present). The achievements recorded under the EADS approach—particularly double-digit annual growth, substantial poverty ...

Is Europe Prepared for War?European public opinion is moving from treating a major conflict as unthinkable to regarding it as a possibility for which governments must prepare. Attention is increasingly focused on Russian hybrid operations, vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and the risk of fragmentation within NATO. European defence policy is consequently undergoing a rapid transition from post-Cold War complacency towards preparations for high-intensity warfare. Recent ...

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 ...

The close relationship between energy and geopolitics is well established. The same holds true for several armed conflicts. In recent years, however, the conflict most closely intertwined with energy has been the 2026 Iran War, which began on February 28. A ceasefire has been in effect since April 8, and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by Iran and the United States on June 17. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by Iran's attacks on commercial vessels and recent U.S. strike ...