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 …
Continue reading “Potential Futures for Libya Series – Features of a War”
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 …
Continue reading “Monitoring the War against the Islamic State or against a Terrorist Group?”
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 …
Continue reading “The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 171– Al-Qaeda in India”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 170 – China Sees Possibility for World War 3”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Invasion Z: Zombie Wars or Resource Wars?”
(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 …
Continue reading “War in Ukraine: Hope, Outrage and Fortitude – The Separatists (2)”
The war in Eastern Ukraine has killed from 15 April to 20 June an estimated number of “423 people, including servicemen and civilians,” (UN HCHR statement, 24 June 2014), which, compared with our own estimate of 99 deaths up to May 15 shows the rising violence of the ongoing fighting. Refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDPs) from the East now reach “nearly 34,600″ people, with nearly half of the displacements – estimated to 15,200 within the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – taking place “over the last two weeks”, i.e. after 6 June 2014. Russia estimates that it now hosts 16,700 Ukrainian refugees on its territory, notably in the region of Rostov (Ria Novosti, 27 June; 14,000 on 25 June 2014, Itar-Tass). This, again, shows an intensification …
Continue reading “War and Peace in Ukraine: The Separatists (1)”
Editorial – Information Wars – Information or more broadly belief-based wars seem to multiply right now, relayed by many official declarations, articles and analyses, although fortunately not all. This is a worrying phenomenon because it leads to direct polarization (enhancing feelings of threat, fear, “all because of an evil other that must be fought”) and to inaccurate analyses, which in turn also fuel polarization. Information wars: propaganda, biases and conspiracy theories We can see this phenomenon at work regarding Ukraine, Iraq, or, in a lesser way because the spotlight is not right now directed at this issue, China and the various disputes in the East and South China Seas. In Iraq, the way the al-Maliki government accuses Saudi Arabia to support ISIS, when actually a more …
Continue reading “The Red Team Analysis Weekly 157 – Information Wars”
