Security & Defense

Les analyses de la crise de Sebta de juillet 2026 reproduisent un réflexe interprétatif classique : chercher la ou les causes, désigner le ou les responsables ou évoquer la ou les motivations déclarées ou, à défaut, trouver celles non-déclarées. Les uns évoquent un différend géopolitique entre le Maroc et l'Espagne, avec l'Algérie en arrière-plan. D'autres réduisent l'événement à une manipulation calculée du Maroc en renvoyant automatiquement à la crise semblable mais non-identique ...

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 ...

With America's 250th anniversary, there will be many analyses of the country's history from domestic and international perspectives. But the meaning of the American story should also be assessed in key regional settings, from Asia to Latin America, and in transatlantic terms. In this vein, it is worth exploring the U.S. engagement in and with the Mediterranean world, one of the first places of U.S. international activism, and a setting where diverse aspects of U.S. foreign policy ha ...

 Cet article a initialement été publié sur la plateforme confrontations.org Février 2022 : face à un nouveau contexte international, les Européens se rallient aux idées de souveraineté européenne et d’autonomie stratégique, brisant ainsi un tabou. Octobre 2025 : après cinquante ans de contentieux, le Conseil de sécurité ouvre la porte à une reconnaissance officielle de la souveraineté marocaine au Sahara occidental.Apparemment sans rapport, ces deux évènements sont reliés ...

En un siècle, le cours de l’once d’or est passé de 20 dollars à 5 300 dollars au premier trimestre 2026. Cette étude, consacrée à l’analyse de cette envolée, comporte deux parties.La première privilégie une approche historique. Elle retrace tout d’abord le changement de statut du précieux métal jaune, monétisable jusqu’en 1971 puis démonétisé par la suite. Elle rappelle ensuite que cette évolution, loin d’être linéaire, est ponctuée de phases de forte hausse, de stagnation et d ...

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 ...

Cet article évalue la pertinence du paradigme de la réconciliation pour analyser la rivalité maroco-algérienne. À partir d’une démarche qualitative, historico-interprétative et interdisciplinaire fondée sur un corpus raisonné de travaux académiques et de sources institutionnelles, il montre que cette conflictualité ne se réduit ni au différend du Sahara ni à un simple antagonisme bilatéral. Elle se construit à l’intersection de mémoires concurrentes, de mécanismes de sécuritisation, ...

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 ...

Les relations, très étroites, entre l’énergie et la géopolitique sont bien connues. Cela vaut aussi pour plusieurs conflits armés. Mais, dans la période récente, le conflit le plus lié à l’énergie est la guerre d’Iran de 2026, qui a débuté le 28 février. Un cessez-le-feu est en vigueur depuis le 8 avril et un protocole d’accord a été signé le 17 juin par l’Iran et les États-Unis. Mais, comme le montrent les attaques de l’Iran contre des navires et les frappes américaines de ces dern ...

We Are Watching You In April 2026, the UK Ministry of Defence revealed that it had tracked a covert Russian submarine operation apparently intended to map critical undersea cables and pipelines in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. A Russian attack submarine and two specialised intelligence vessels operated by the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, commonly known as GUGI, were reportedly monitored for four weeks by the Royal Navy, including HMS St Albans and P-8 Poseidon ...

Cet essai analyse la guerre Iran–États-Unis–Israël de 2026 comme un révélateur de la transformation profonde de l’ordre international. À travers le prisme du droit de la mer, du détroit d’Ormuz, des alliances fragmentées, des câbles sous-marins et des flux énergétiques, il montre que le pouvoir mondial se déplace progressivement du contrôle des territoires vers la maîtrise des infrastructures de circulation. Loin de disparaître, la mondialisation entre dans une phase de connectivité ...

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 ...

The inventory is worrisomely low The US military has fired off more than 1000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly ten times the number it currently buys each year. The Pentagon used more than 1200 Patriot interceptor missiles, "more than three million dollars a pop", and more than 1000 precision strike, ground based missiles, "leaving the inventories worrisomely low." US commanders were forced to ration interceptors by letting unguided or less destructive missiles hit empty or no ...

Three years after the adoption of the first National Action Plan (NAP) on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, Morocco has made real institutional progress, but implementation is still inadequate. The extension of the NAP opens a window of opportunity to prepare a second, more ambitious and operational cycle.This Policy Brief identifies four persistent obstacles: a virtually stagnant female employment rate of 19.1%, less than 3% female representation in peacekeeping contingen ...

L’Afrique atlantique émerge aujourd’hui comme un espace de réflexion stratégique majeur. Longtemps envisagée sous l’angle de sa fragmentation ou de sa marginalité relative dans les grands récits géopolitiques, cette façade maritime tend désormais à être appréhendée comme un ensemble en devenir, structuré par des dynamiques géopolitiques, économiques et sécuritaires de plus en plus intenses. C’est dans cette perspective qu’a été initié le Africa Maritime Symposium (AMS), dont la ...

History devotes considerable attention to the rise and fall of great powers. Scholars have spent centuries analyzing why empires collapse, why nations decline, and why dominant states eventually lose their position. By comparison, relatively little attention has been devoted to a different question: what happens when a country succeeds beyond its own expectations? ...

Fin mai 2026, des frappes israéliennes ont visé les abords du château de Beaufort (Qalaat al-Chaqif), près de Nabatiyeh, avant que l'armée israélienne n'en annonce la prise. Ce fait soulève une question centrale : pourquoi une hauteur fortifiée au Moyen Âge conserve-t-elle une valeur militaire à l'ère des satellites, des drones et des missiles de croisière ?Le présent Policy Brief tente de démontrer que la valeur de Beaufort est géographique avant d'être idéologique ou technologique ...

The early March 2026 Pentagon briefings were tuned towards triumph and surrender - unconditional. The white flag of defeat was visible on the Iran horizon, and America's commander in chief needed only a few more weeks to declare "their military is gone. Wiped out". His secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, added to Trump's assessment his own, the Iranian navy was "decimated, destroyed and defeated", the naval fleet of the enemy rested on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Iran's defense indu ...

At the end of May 2026, Israeli airstrikes targeted the surroundings of Beaufort Castle (Qalaat al-Chaqif), near Nabatiyeh, before the Israeli army announced that it had captured the site. This development raises a fundamental question: why does a medieval fortified hilltop retain military value in the age of satellites, drones, and cruise missiles?This Policy Brief argues that Beaufort's significance is geographical before it is ideological or technological. Overlooking the Litani ...

La Marche Verte ne peut être perçue seulement comme un événement daté, historiquement situé, une action accomplie et achevée. L’événement n’a pas fini d’apparaitre comme un processus aux prolongements très variés, aux conséquences multiples, étalés sur le temps et déployant leurs effets jusqu'à aujourd’hui. ...

This article draws in part on perspectives shared by members of the Rihla Initiative for Green Economic Growth, whose regional insights helped inform the sections on how the costs of the war are being felt across the Global South. The war on Iran and in the Gulf has made it impossible to treat the Strait of Hormuz as a regional issue. The disruption around the Strait has moved through the world economy in concrete ways, from higher fuel bills and pressure on food and fertilizer ...

This essay argues that the current debate about the future of the international monetary system is not really about Gulf currencies, oil pricing, or de-dollarization in the narrow technical sense. It is about something deeper and more important: whether institutional trust can survive when geopolitical certainty is eroding.The Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—increasingly exist in a world where the United States no longer looks ...

The global energy system has entered a period of acute structural stress following the strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran in late February 2026, and the subsequent disruption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz. According to the International Energy Agency, the resulting shock marks the most severe disruption to global energy markets since the 1970s oil crises, with systemic characteristics comparable to the combined effects of those crises and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine ...

Le rapport annuel sur la géopolitique de l’Afrique est cette année à sa dixième édition, cela fait donc dix ans que le Policy Center for the New South consacre à l’Afrique une tribune par laquelle les africains tentent de récupérer le narratif sur leur continent. Ce chiffre 10 n'est pas anodin : il marque la maturité d'un projet éditorial fondé sur une conviction simple mais exigeante : l'Afrique doit se penser elle-même, depuis elle-même, avec les instruments analytiques ...

The energy shock caused by the war between the United States and Israel and Iran has highlighted the need for Africa to refine more of its own crude oil. Africa is a net hydrocarbon exporter, but remains stuck in the old colonial economic model: it mostly exports raw materials and imports refined products. Africa exports about 2.6 billion barrels of crude oil every year, and imports about 1.4 billion barrels of refined products. This is a problem for two reasons. First, Africa ...

Driven by its mission to reflect on and analyze the major geopolitical, economic, and societal transformations shaping the contemporary world, and with a view to contributing to knowledge-sharing and disseminating the main outcomes of its research program, the Policy Center for the New South regularly publishes collective volumes addressing issues of particular importance to Morocco, Africa, and the broader Global/New South. In this spirit, the Center has recently released two volum ...

This Paper was originally published on mitvim.org.il This paper argues that the reconstruction of Gaza will depend not only on the amount of funding mobilized, but on how financing is structured, governed, and anchored within a broader politi`cal context. In a setting shaped by movement restrictions and weak institutions, financial design is not neutral but shapes priorities, distributes power, and determines what can be implemented on the ground. The paper examines the key cha ...

Cette publication est le résultat de la 19° édition des Dialogues Stratégiques, organisée le 24 octobre 2025, où ont été présentés et débattus 15 chapitres autour de deux thématiques majeures: « Recompositions et dynamiques croisées en Asie du Sud-Ouest : Focus sur PIran, l'Afghanistan, le Pakistan et l'Inde » et « Nouvelles perceptions de l'Afrique dans les stratégies internationales».Au croisement de ces discussions, émerge une interrogation centrale: comment les États et les régi ...

Trump’s Strategy of Overriding Constitutional SafeguardsPerhaps bearing in mind that only a minority of voters in the United States support U.S. military action against Iran, President Donald Trump has called the war a “short term excursion” and a “little journey” that may be over “pretty quickly”. The war is thus not a war, although Trump has said the U.S. will take Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong”, and the U.S. military has admitted to attacks on 14,000 Irania ...

Trois ans après l'adoption du premier Plan d'Action National (PAN) sur l'Agenda Femmes, Paix et Sécurité (FPS), le Maroc affiche des avancées institutionnelles réelles mais une mise en œuvre encore insuffisante. L'extension du PAN ouvre une fenêtre d'opportunité pour préparer un second cycle plus ambitieux et opérationnel.Ce Policy Brief identifie quatre obstacles persistants : un taux d'activité féminine de 19,1% en quasi-stagnation, une représentation des femmes inférieure à 3% da ...

We are now in the fifth week since the U.S. airstrike that killed top leaders of the Iranian regime, initiating a war involving the United States and Israel against the country. More than a month of mutual bombardments between Iran and Israel has ensued, extending to other Persian Gulf nations, U.S. military installations—and even Cyprus. From a global perspective, the impact has stemmed primarily from disruptions to regional production of goods and the blockade of the Strait of Hor ...

This essay examines the establishment of the Board of Peace as a test case in contemporary peace governance and hegemonic experimentation. While the Board, politically activated in early 2026 and formally anchored in a resolution of the United Nations Security Council, benefits from derivative legality under the UN Charter, its legal foundation remains constitutionally fragile, its mandate ambiguously constrained, and its accountability architecture underdeveloped, notwithstand ...

Sous Trump II, la conflictualité s’affirme moins comme un simple effet de la polarisation partisane que comme un principe d’organisation de l’exercice du pouvoir. À partir des prises de parole présidentielles, ce Papier montre comment des enjeux distincts, tels que l’immigration, la fraude, la sécurité, les controverses culturelles ou les rivalités internationales, sont intégrés dans une même architecture discursive orientée vers la restauration de l’ordre. La conflictualité y appar ...

Les conflits armés ont toujours des coûts économiques exorbitants, sans parler des pertes humaines. Le coût de la guerre est difficilement chiffrable.  Il dépend de la durée de l'enlisement et des « à-côtés ».  En fait, les conséquences économiques, tout comme les causes des conflits armés sont toujours complexes à appréhender. Les risques liés aux conflits génèrent de nombreuses incertitudes économiques, directement perceptibles dans les contraintes budgétaires, ...

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 ...

L’arrestation du président vénézuélien Nicolàs Maduro a suscité la sidération internationale en interrogeant sur le respect du droit international ; puis, fort logiquement, cette opération a conduit à maintes analyses tant sur les arguments politiques, sécuritaires et géostratégiques avancés par Washington que sur les ambitions sous-jacentes ayant présidé à cette décision sans réel précédent dans l’histoire récente. Outre la lutte contre le narcotrafic, c’est bien évidemment la ...

The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolàs Maduro caused international astonishment, raising questions about respect for international law. And, quite logically, the operation led to numerous analyses, both of the political, security and geostrategic arguments put forward by Washington, and of the underlying ambitions behind this decision, which has no real precedent in recent history. In addition to the fight against narco-trafficking, it was of course the oil issue that came first ...

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 ...

Le Mali, le Burkina Faso et le Niger, réunis au sein de l’Alliance des États du Sahel (AES), affirment l’ambition de bâtir une souveraineté nationale qui leur permettrait de s’émanciper de la domination et des influences extérieures et de se doter d’une liberté d’action dans les choix de développement politique et économique. Cependant, cette ambition se heurte à de nombreuses contraintes économiques et sécuritaires.La souveraineté ne peut se construire sans une base économique soli ...

La création de l’Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) symbolise une rupture politique et géostratégique majeure, appuyée sur un discours souverainiste et anti-occidental. Deux ans après, Mali, Burkina Faso et Niger peinent à assurer leur intégrité territoriale, à stabiliser leur sécurité intérieure et à bâtir une gouvernance solide. L’intégrité territoriale est un problème commun aux trois États, car dans ces pays, la cohésion de l’État et le contrôle du territoire sont directement men ...

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 ...

Les pays membres de l’Alliance des États du Sahel (le Mali, le Burkina Faso et le Niger) demeurent dépendants d’un nombre restreint de corridors d’accès à la mer, une configuration qui limite leur capacité d’ajustement en cas de perturbation et accroît la sensibilité de leurs chaînes d’approvisionnement. Le blocus du tronçon Kayes-Nioro a illustré la forte criticité du corridor Dakar-Bamako : l’interruption d’un segment unique a entraîné une contraction rapide des flux, révélant la ...

The member countries of the Alliance of Sahel States, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, remain dependent on a limited number of maritime access corridors, a configuration that constrains their adjustment capacity in the event of disruption and heightens the vulnerability of their supply chains. The Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) blockade of the Kayes-Nioro area revealed how critical the Dakar-Bamako corridor is for the political and economic stability of Mali. Its interr ...

The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean—the most significant since the Cuban Missile Crisis—comes at a moment when a new world order is taking shape, its contours still unclear, and in which the U.S. seeks to be more assertive in the Western Hemisphere. This disposition toward South America and the Caribbean was underscored by the recent publication of the new U.S. National Security Strategy, in which the Monroe Doctrine is explicitly invoked. This Policy Brief situates the devel ...

The return of President Donald Trump to the White House at the start of 2025 was expected to signal an American retreat from international engagement, especially in regions of traditional security interest, such as southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. To the surprise of many observers around the Mediterranean, and perhaps to the dismay of some in the Trump administration’s ideological orbit, this has not happened. If anything, the second half of 2025 has seen a high d ...

I recently participated in a discussion between Israelis and Arabs, some living in the Middle East, some living abroad[1]. The discussion topic was ‘The Two State Solution’. This article presents my personal takeaways from the discussion. It does not try to describe the details, and other participants may have different takeaways.I joined the discussion thinking that the two-state solution was dead. Most of the other participants felt the same way—all very pessimistic. But I left fe ...

An unusual gesture indeed—the dictator, more often than not a recluse, withdrawn behind his fortress and protected by 1.2 million armed soldiers, finally admitted what had long been seen on the battlefield in Ukraine and by spy satellites far above. North Korean soldiers—possibly 12,000 of them—are fighting on front lines alongside Russian troops, and they are falling or being wounded; some 4,000 men so far, by current estimates.  ...

In 2025, the global landscape became increasingly fragmented and uncertain. Great power competition intensified, regional conflicts became protracted and exacerbated, while economic nationalism reshaped the rules of trade and development. The mechanisms for conflict resolution and cooperation that have long provided a foundation for international cooperation are now under strain due to polarization and mistrust. Even longstanding alliances, bilateral and collective security architec ...

Although the crises affecting the Sahel have been widely analysed through the lenses of armed groups, state fragility and geopolitics, much less is known about how women experience insurgent governance in their everyday lives. This is particularly pertinent to members of the pastoralist Peuhl ethnic group, which has been strategically targeted for recruitment by the Central Sahel’s dominant Islamist armed group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), as a means of facilitating ...