collapse Archives - The Red Team Analysis Society

Planetary Security, or the Subversion of Collapse

On 3 November 2015, the Dutch Ministry of foreign affairs organises the conference “Planetary Security: Peace and Cooperation in Times of Climate Change and Global Environmental Challenges” at the Peace Palace in the Hague. This conference accompanies the worldwide mobilisation for the United Nations summit on climate change (known as “COP 21”), which will take place in Paris, France, from 30 November to 11 December 2015. The peculiarity of this conference lies in the fact that it infuses the idea of security with a political, strategic and societal meaning, while security also remains clearly defined as a moment of exchanges between policy-makers and experts on the threat caused by climate and environmental change. In other words, the very existence of …

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Collapse War in the Middle East?

The current war raging throughout Syria and Iraq is profoundly singular, because it combines itself with the social and environmental collapse, combined with the severe effects of climate change, known by these societies. In Iraq, the current war is waged between, on the one hand, the Kurdish forces, and the Iraqi army, both supported in a way or another by the Iranian forces and air strikes delivered by the US-led coalition (Rowan Scarborough, “Iranian Quds force aiding Iraqi Shiites with Obama administration’s blessing”, The Washington Times, September 20, 2014) and the aggressor, the Islamic State, on the other (Valantin, “Environment, Climate Change, War and the State”, The Red Team Analysis Society, March 16, 2015). It is in itself politically quite …

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The Warming Arctic, a Hyper Strategic Crisis

Adapting a famous battle between the Teutonic knights and the Russian army during the thirteenth century in his 1938 movie, “Alexandre Nevski”, Sergei Eisenstein directs one of the most famous war scene in the movie’s history: he shows the terrible armoured Teutonic Knights charging the Russian ragtag army over a frozen lake. However, such is the weight of the Knights’ armours, that, after some fights, the ice of Lake Peipous breaks up and all the Knights drown, giving the victory to the Russians. This could be a metaphor for what might happen in the Arctic during the decades to come, with an important nuance: there might be no winner in the end. Because of climate change, the Arctic is warming …

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The Persian Gulf, between Power and Collapse

A tale of two cities: Warsaw, Teheran At the international United Nations conference on climate change in Warsaw, Poland, started on the 12th of November, the Philippine diplomat begged for the negotiators to find an international binding accord on climate, one day after a monster storm left a trail of mass destruction in his country. At the end of tense negotiations, it was established that each country should define national contributions for this global effort, which will be discussed during further negotiations. At the very same time, in Geneva, a historic deal was struck between Iran, the five permanent members of the UN security council and Germany, about Iran nuclear program: Teheran promised to suspend it, in exchange of a …

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The Red (team) Analysis Weekly No119, 26 September 2013

Horizon Scanning for National Security – Batman’s Gotham City with an international twist? The world is being profoundly reshaped: China’s global land grab, the battle for the Arctic and the importance of extreme environments for resources, a fast changing unsettled Middle-East, the importance of Central Asia, the return of a pre-World War I type of capitalist world, …

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