Rohingya Refugees Still Desperate, Five Years after a Genocide

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers

Without access to education, work, healthcare, and citizenship, the Rohingya are calling on the world to act.

The start of the brutal massacre of the Rohingya people in Myanmar marks its anniversary on 25 August. It has been five years since thousands of men and children were piled up by the Myanmar military, many viciously slaughtered or burned to death.

Photo: Abdullah Khin Maung Thein. With permission.

Countless women were gang raped and molested by soldiers as the world watched an endless stream of traumatised and severely injured people flee to the Bangladesh border to escape the carnage behind them. As they walked, thick smoke filled the sky as their villages in northern Rakhine State turned to ash.Read More

The Myanmar Military’s Roadmap to Survival

Posted by & filed under Governance, Regions and Powers

As massive resistance against military rule in Myanmar continues, the besieged military administration lays out three priorities in its strategy to survive.

SAC Chairman Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. Photo: Vadim Savitsky, mil.ru / Wikimedia Commons

As expected, Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC), also known as the military junta, last week extended the country’s state of emergency for another six months. Along with the extension, SAC Chairman Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing delivered a public address outlining the SAC’s challenges and the long list of tasks that it hopes to complete over the next six months.

The speech outlined three main areas of priority for the military junta going forward.

Read More

2021 – A Bad Year for World Peace

Posted by , , and & filed under Conflict Patterns

After a declining trend since 2014 for the number of people killed in armed conflict, approximately 84,000 people died last year.

Asia was the hardest-hit region in 2021, largely due to the escalating violence in Afghanistan. Since the Taliban took control in Afghanistan, the number of deaths has fallen to a lower level. Photo: AP Photo/Rahmat Gul / Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Since 2014, we have seen a global declining trend for the number of people killed in armed conflict, but in 2021 this trend experienced a sharp reversal. New figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at Uppsala University, published in the Journal of Peace Research in June 2022 show that approximately 84,000 people died in conflicts in 2021. The trend of the preceding years was reversed even before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.Read More

Putin’s Next Miscalculation: Russia’s Readiness for a Long War

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

As Russian aggression against Ukraine approaches the half-year mark and combat operations appear to be at a standstill, a new calculus has been developed in the Kremlin: A long war suits Moscow’s interests and can eventually be won.

Photo: the Kremlin

This self-serving proposition follows the failure of two previous war plans: a quick and total victory by several offensives of armored columns and a conquest of Donbas and southern Ukraine by an irresistible push of replenished battalions behind massive artillery barrages.

A fiasco with the long-war vision might take more time to become apparent, but it will be shaped by the same basic miscalculations of Ukraine’s capacity for withstanding brutal attacks, Western commitment to support this costly struggle, the strength of Russia’s sanctions-resilient economy and the irreducible public readiness to follow the course set by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Read More

Ukraine Food Export Agreement: Not Yet Delivering

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

The Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in the reduction of Ukraine’s grain exports by a third.

As part of its attack Russia had taken or damaged Ukrainian ports, threatened merchant ships, struck Ukraine’s rail and road infrastructure and destroyed farms.

The Russian invasion was followed by rapid increases in global food prices which reached record levels during March to May 2022.

The port of Odessa. Photo: George Chernilevsky / Wikimedia Commons

On 22 July 2022 Russia and Ukraine separately signed parallel agreements brokered by the UN and Turkey which allow the export of food crops from Ukraine and fertilizer from Russia. The agreement allows for the ships to be escorted and cargoes monitored and was hailed as a major step toward mitigating the 2022 food crisis which has seen basic stables reach record prices around the world.

It was described by the UN Secretary General as a ‘beacon of hope’ that would help tackle the world food crisis.Read More

Erdogan and Putin Cordially Probe One Another’s Faults and Failures

Posted by & filed under Middle East, Regions and Powers, Ukraine War

The meeting in Sochi, Russia, on August 5 between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was more than just another chapter in the long track record of bargaining and testing the limits of mutual patience between the two leaders.

Erdogan and Putin in 2020. Photo: Kremlin.ru / wikimedia commons

Putin’s war in Ukraine has badly damaged Russia’s international positions, and Erdogan can harvest benefits from transactional maneuvering in the margins of Moscow’s confrontation with the West.

The Turkish president has become an indispensable interlocutor for the Russian leader, who has not received a habitual phone call from French President Emmanuel Macron since late May and only rarely is granted the privilege of a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Erdogan decided not to stay for dinner in Sochi and cancelled the planned joint press conference, which he usually enjoys for dropping a sensationalist remark or two, leaving commentators guessing about the real outcome of the four-hour talks (Kommersant, August 6).Read More

Russia Cherishes Ambitions but Loses Positions in the Middle East

Posted by & filed under Middle East, Ukraine War

The Ukraine war has generated shockwaves far beyond the Donbas battlefields, and the Middle East has absorbed and returned the variegated impacts and, as a result, has attracted increased attention in recent weeks.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin meeting with Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei and President of Iran Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran, Iran. July 2022. Photo: Mehr News Agency / Khamenei.ir / Wikimedia Commons

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to visit Tehran, Iran, on July 19, aiming to counter United States President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia last week.

Biden sought to discharge tensions in the region and encourage cooperation between historic adversaries, and every step in peace promotion narrows Russia’s opportunities to manipulate conflicts in the region. Putin’s agenda is shaped by his vision of the world order’s collapse, accelerated by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and the Middle East is precisely where Moscow must convincingly demonstrate the erosion of US leadership (Kommersant-FM, July 13).Read More

Should Norway Join the EU? Research on Democracy and Peace Suggests So.

Posted by & filed under Governance, Security, Ukraine War

The debate about Norwegian EU membership has gained new life in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Norway has applied for EU-membership on multiple occasions. Charles de Gaulle blocked two applications in the 60s and the Norwegian population voted NO in referendums in 1972 and 1994 despite a clear YES-stance from the government and most members of parliament. The issue has not been seriously considered in the past 28 years.

Democracy in our most powerful ally and security guarantor has been severely eroded since Donald Trump came to power in 2016. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

Insights from research on democracy and conflict give the YES side some persuasive arguments. Based on this research, one can argue that EU membership would improve Norwegian security and contribute to make the world more democratic and less violent.Read More

War and Food Insecurity: New Survey Evidence from Ukraine

Posted by , , and & filed under Security, Ukraine War

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, food insecurity and food prices have become increasingly concerning. However, the focus has largely been on the consequences of war for the international market and food insecurity abroad, leaving less attention to the lack of food among civilians in Ukraine.

Supermarket in Svetlodarsk, Ukraine. Photo: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid

Ukrainians have fled their homes, lost their jobs and income, and faced disruptions of food production and supply chains. In a recent survey in Ukraine, we asked a series of questions to explore food insecurity in more detail. The findings paint a grave picture: one in three Ukrainians are currently food insecure. The findings also indicate that those living in the east, those who are more exposed to attacks, and — not surprisingly — those who are the least well off in the first place are the most endangered by food insecurity.Read More

Russian Assault on World Order Falters and Fails

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers, Security, Ukraine War

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has clearly lost momentum, but the intensity of its multi-prong confrontation with the West keeps rising.

Russian military command announced an “operational pause” in Donbas after the hard battles for Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, implicitly admitting that a regrouping of battalions, which have not been rotated in four months of fighting, is necessary before the push to Slovyansk (Izvestiya, July 7).

This inability to sustain offensive operations contrasts sharply with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s words that “we have not even started anything in earnest” in Ukraine (RIA Novosti, July 8). Putin’s boasting departs only slightly from the usual assurances that the “special military operation” is going perfectly according to plan, which in retrospect appears strategically incomprehensible (Svoboda.org, July 5).

The meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Bali, Indonesia, in early July showed that Moscow has little influence on the world order’s course. Photo: G20

Attempts to pin blame for the war on the collective West also fit the Kremlin’s usually embellished discourse, but the idea that the West-enforced world order has been decisively broken from day one of Russia’s military operation rings more discordant than most harangues about a multipolar world (Kommersant, July 8).Read More