Tag Archives: war

War in Libya and its Futures: State of Play – Nationalist Forces (1)

With two primary warring alliances and two rival governments, Libya’s civil war is becoming increasingly polarized. The Islamist/Misratan coalition, or Dawn of Libya, which supports the General National Congress (GNC) in Tripoli, is battling General Haftar and the Nationalist coalition, which supports the Council of Representatives in Tobruk. With this in mind, we shall begin the present state of play with the Nationalist coalition. In this post, we shall specifically evaluate the Petroleum Facilities Guard, the Army of Cyrenaica, the Cyrenaica Protection Force, the Libyan military, al-Saiqa (Special Forces), al-Sawaiq Brigade, and al-Qaqa Brigade. The remaining groups – the Libyan National Army, Zintan Brigades, various tribes and regional forces – shall be presented in the next post. The Council of …

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Ultra-Nationalism and the Far Right in Ukraine (1): Victims and Heroes

Parliamentary election in Ukraine will be held on 26 October 2014. Meanwhile, the road towards full peace in Eastern Ukraine is still uncertain, despite the 5 September Minsk protocol and its 19 September memorandum (OSCE), witness, among others, the battles for Donetsk airport and latest fighting in Luhansk or near Mariupol (OSCE SMM reports). Furthermore, on 2 November, the special status territories of the Donbass, the “self-proclaimed” Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) will vote to elect their respective heads and representatives at the People’s Assemblies (Ria Novosti, 11 October 2014).It is thus all the more important to continue our evaluation of the state of play for the various Ukrainian actors. Ukraine is indeed more than ever poised at …

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Potential Futures for Libya Series – Features of a War

The fall of Muammar Gaddafi and his revolutionary regime in 2011 has ushered in an era of factional violence between city militias, military units, and Islamic and nationalist brigades. According to LibyaBodyCount.org (see detailed bibliographic reference below), 1,741 Libyans have been killed in violent clashes or assassinations from January to September 2014 alone. Although the site’s body …

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Monitoring the War against the Islamic State or against a Terrorist Group?

The war in Syria has now become fully internationalized, after its expected regionalization, notably favoured by the failure to stabilize Iraq after its state was destroyed by the 2003 US-led Iraq war. The two, initially unrelated wars have morphed into a war against one of the fighting actors on the Syrian battlefield, the Islamic State, originally born from the Iraqi …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 171– Al-Qaeda in India

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… Read the 25 September scan → The Weekly is the scan of The Red (Team) Analysis Society and it focuses on national and international security issues. It was started as an experiment with Paper.li as a way to collect ideas, notably through Twitter. Its success and …

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War, Zombies and Strategy

As we saw previously, the “zombie apocalypse” (Valantin, Invasion Z: zombie wars or resource wars?, 2014) chronicled through various novels, movies, TV and Internet series, video games, comic books, is taken quite seriously by major national security organizations, as the US Strategic Command, or the US Centers for Disease control (CDC), which use the zombie culture as training and warning tools for new kinds of emergency and contingency situations. If these organizations use the contemporary zombie culture as a training tool or a support to advocate a new political position, things may be more profound and important than it would seem at first glance. This comes from the fact that zombie stories are very interesting thought experiments about the coming resource …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 170 – China Sees Possibility for World War 3

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… Read the 18 September scan → The Weekly is the scan of The Red (Team) Analysis Society and it focuses on national and international security issues. It was started as an experiment with Paper.li as a way to collect ideas, notably through Twitter. Its success and …

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An Isolated Russia? Think Again!

Since March 2014, the Russian “dispatch of troops to Crimea”, and the contested referendum in Crimea followed by its incorporation into the Russian Federation, “The West”* rhetoric is that Russia is isolated, and that the U.S. and its allies will work to further isolate it (e.g. Zeke J Miller, “Obama: U.S. Working To ‘Isolate Russia’“, Time, 3 March 2014).As the war in Eastern Ukraine seems to be perceived mainly through “Crimean lenses”, this Western policy, added to rounds of sanctions, aim at seeing an increasingly isolated Russian Federation bend to a “Western” vision of what the international order should be. The soon ex-General Secretary of Nato Rasmussen’s statement on Estonian TV according to which “Russia is globally isolated due to its actions in Ukraine” is only one example of similar comments made over …

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Invasion Z: Zombie Wars or Resource Wars?

What are the numerous movies, novels, TV series and video games declining the implacable struggle between human survivors and proliferating populations of zombies really about? These “chronicles” of the worldwide zombie invasion are so pervasive in our twenty-first century global culture, and they have reached a status of such importance that they have even inspired an actual training plan by the US Department of Defence in 2014, as well as a very real military training session in 2012. What is the strategic issue played out through the very complex zombie charade in our contemporary framework, when socio-environmental changes are also strategic changes? In other terms, what are the existential, political, geopolitical and military dimensions of the zombie invasion? Furthermore, is …

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War in Ukraine: Hope, Outrage and Fortitude – The Separatists (2)

(Update 4 April 2022 – For news originating from the two People’s Republic consult: Lugansk Media Centre and Donetsk News Agency). (Update 20 January 2015 – see also the latest articles on ultra-nationalism in Ukraine – 1- victims and heroes; 2- demise or metarmophosis and 3- parties and battalions – which contribute to explain current interactions, and foresaw the increased likelihood to see the conflict being rekindled for a while. What is below is still important and relevant to be able to understand the current situation as well as its possible evolution). (Photograph by Andrew Butko – CC BY-SA 4.0) In the framework of our analysis on Ukraine, this article is the second part of our focus on the separatists, the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic …

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