From the War in Gaza to the Great U.S.-China War (2)?

(Art direction: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli – design with DALL-E 2) Given the speed and political density of the historic sequence opened by the war in Gaza, the second article in this new RTAS series only covers the period from 27 October to 20 November 2023. In the first part of this series, we saw how the …

Climate Breakdown: Towards War to Reduce CO2 Emissions?

(Art direction and design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli) “Climate breakdown has begun” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement released on 6 September 2023. Globally, throughout the 2023 Summer, the world has lived through the beginning of the turmoil and havoc that climate change and related temperature rise bring. Repeated heatwaves, related air pollution “with knock-on …

War in Ukraine, Europe, and the Weaponization of Winter – Anthropocene Wars (7)

(Art direction: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli, Photo: durik1980, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, colorised and cropped by RTAS) Since October 2022, the Russian military has regularly launched waves of missiles and drones strikes on the Ukrainian energy infrastructures. (Greg Myre, “Russia strikes, Ukraine repairs, in a battle to survive the winter”, NPR, 25 November 2022). As a …

An Alternative Red Scenario for the war between Ukraine and Russia

(Art direction: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli) The September 2022 Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russia is hailed as very successful. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the “true heroes” who allowed for a “very rapid liberation” of 8000 sq km by 14 September 22 “in the east, notably in the Kharkiv Oblast, and the south, notably in the Kherson oblast”, …

The War between China and the U.S. – The Normative Dimension

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli) The whole world is caught in a battle of giants with the U.S. on the one hand and China on the other. This confrontation takes place at different levels and through all forms and dimensions of power. The escalation towards war is at work. War is not inevitable, it is however …

Understanding the War in Syria – 2013 to 2017/18

In the light of the sometimes relatively long updates being necessary to keep the series on Syria up to date, the whole section on Syria has been reorganized and a starting page for the series introduced. Updates up to October 2013 are being added in the meantime.

Information Warfare and the War in Ukraine

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli on a photo by Francesco Ungaro) The war(*) in Ukraine is hastening changes in international politics in many different ways. The possibility to see the conflict morphing into World War III acts as a convincing spur for continuing efforts at understanding and adapting. Concerned and informed actors are thus trying to …

War in Ukraine, Megadrought and the Coming Global Food Crisis – Anthropocene Wars (3)

The War in Ukraine as a Perfect Storm The war in Ukraine triggers a global whirlwind involving energy and food crisis. The latter is quite singular, because it combines the consequences of the war on the global agricultural system with massive extreme weather events, such as the U.S. midwestern megadrought. War as global disruption Indeed, …

Resources to Follow the War in Ukraine

(Last updated 28 Feb 22 20:50 CET: added access to UN General Assembly Live) At 3:00 GMT Russia launched an attack on Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin dubbed it a “special military operation”. Immediately, part of the international community condemned this attack. What is happening on the ground? How are events unfolding? How is the …

Russia vs the U.S. – The OSCE Istanbul Document

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli) Within the context of the heightened tensions between Russia and the U.S., Russia, on 1st February 2022, through its foreign minister Sergei Lavrov invokes an article of a 1999 agreement (Reuters, 1 February 2022). What is is this agreement and which article does Lavrov use? The 1999 agreement is actually the …

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