India’s 2022 Arctic Policy has been framed as an expression of the Hindu philosopher, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’s, “the world is but one family.” The Government of India identified “Science and Research” and “Climate and Environmental Protection” as its first two strategic priorities. Meanwhile, earlier this year in May, in the joint statement of the Third India-Nordic Summit, “cooperation in the Arctic” was emphasised, mirroring the Arctic Policy’s signal of willingness to colla

History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The Falkland Islands are on the verge of becoming a geopolitical flashpoint once again, echoing the tensions of the early 1980s. The catalyst this time is not an invading army but oil. Following the discovery of the Sea Lion offshore oil field in 2010 and the long-awaited Final Investment Decision at the end of 2025, the project is set to become the largest offshore oil development in the South Atlantic outside Brazil. For

On July 14th 2026, under the scorching Parisian sun, French military troops marched down the historical Champs Elysées. Unusually, this year the military parade was opened by the thirty five countries making up the Coalition of the Willing, flying over and marching down the avenue in front of their respective leaders. What followed was one the biggest parades ever witnessed on Bastille Day, with 6.700 troops, 98 aircrafts, 31 helicopters and 315 vehicles mobilised, simultaneo

The Nazi Party came to power in 1933 in a Germany devastated by the Treaty of Versailles and Great Depression, and paralysed by a huge unemployment crisis of over 6 million. Six years later it was arguably the greatest power in Europe, tearing across the continent in relentless pursuit of ‘Lebensraum’. What happened in between might therefore be chalked up to nothing less than an economic miracle. It was not. When defining economic success on the regime’s own terms, namely au

In Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the film’s titular subject, Donald Trump, has his political mythology, by turns, dissected and distilled into a brutal education in winning; attack first, concede nothing, and, above all, declare victory even when facts may indicate the opposite. The film’s dramatisation of Trump’s rise under the impervious tutelage of McCarthy-allied lawyer Roy Cohn presents deal brokering as more a matter of domination than negotiation. Cohn’s lessons are in

“Oh no, we shouldn’t talk about politics. It’s not worth getting involved”. That is the reply of an Ama (Granny) to a question about the “Nine-in-One” local elections taking place in November later this year. You can understand where Ama is coming from – she has lived through a prolonged “White Terror” period of martial law, where talking politics could cost one their life. For the young people in the modern, democratic Taiwan, the opposite is now true. “If we allow the KMT

Donald Trump did not engineer the decline of American soft power, though he would probably trademark it if he could. Instead, he is one of its clearest consequences and biggest brands. Long before he entered the White House, faith in the American model was already eroding at home and abroad. Trump emerged from this decline and has spent his presidency accelerating it. After failing to secure a Nobel Peace Prize last year, Trump petulantly wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jon

Long gone are the days of muskets, bayonets, and line infantry. Throughout history, the nature of conflict has consistently evolved. Both World Wars drove major advances and a growing reliance on radio communications, aircraft, and tanks, and ultimately culminated in the birth of the nuclear bomb. The Cold War era saw an increased use of precision guided missiles (PGMs), satellite GPS, and surveillance. Today, artificial intelligence, especially drones, is reshaping moder

In 1916, a twenty-four year-old British soldier arrived at the Battle of the Somme, where over a million men were killed or wounded over just five miles of ground. John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R) Tolkien lost two of his closest friends in the battle, an experience of indiscriminate slaughter that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Echoes of the First World War can be found throughout Tolkien’s later literary work, most famously in The Lord of the Rings - from the corpse-st

The Iran war has reached the European Union’s back yard, with European warships crowding Cyprus’ shores and drone attacks striking RAF Akrotiri last month. While Europe insists this is not a war, the security of this small island member state is the security of the Union. A few hundred kilometres from the Levant, Europe is quietly building a defensive perimeter around Cyprus – whether it admits it or not. The UK has cleared its bases to facilitate US “defensive strikes” on

One of the reasons I became a journalist was to tell the truth. You could say I was under a fog of naivety and idealism, but I think that I truly believed in the best of humanity. Maybe bad things happened for so long because of an ignorant, and simple population, who just didn’t know the truth. Because if people had access to the truth then things would simply change, right? There would be no discrimination, no suffering, no war. Why would we allow it? Surely if people could

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” These were the words of Donald Trump, the self-described “President of Peace”, as he railed against America’s interventions in foreign lands instead of “fixing the roads in this country…fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals.” America First! He promised his voters, vowing to improve the lives of ordinary Americans above all else. And yet, barely a year into his second presidency, a combination of T

Lying recumbent and wrecked, roughly 130 kilometres to the North of the glittering Saudi city of Medina, rests the rusted hull of a century-old Ottoman locomotive. Targeted by British Intelligence Officer T. E. Lawrence and future King Faisal I of Iraq’s small cadre of Arab fighters, the sun-baked cadaver exists as a relic of the First World War guerrilla campaign that buckled the formidable Ottoman Empire’s control over the Hejaz, turning the tide of the theatre’s conflict,

International law was created to act as a check on unrestrained power, yet in practice is only effective at controlling states who are willing to conform, leaving those states whom international law was intended to control practically untouched by it. Out of the ruins of the Second World War came the concept of enforceable international law, followed by the creation of the United Nations and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . International law promise

‘For any government official or despot, power over his own people takes precedence over everything else’- Jean Baudrillard In Terry Gilliam’s Kafkaesque black comedy Brazil (1985), Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat, joins his affluent, ostentatious mother, Ida, in a restaurant. Their meal is served - at which point - sudden explosions blast shrapnel across the room, saturating the air with shouting, screams, and smoke. The restaurant has been subject to a terrorist attack

As this article goes to press, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has reportedly been killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli airstrike. His death marks the most dramatic escalation in U.S.–Iran tensions since the 1979 revolution and introduces a new variable: succession instability at the apex of the Islamic Republic. Yet even this unprecedented development does not make a war with Tehran comparable to Iraq in 2003 or Afghanistan in 2001, both of which share borders with Iran. Ge

With a grim expression and a somber tone of voice Canadian PM Mark Carney spoke at Davos . He spoke not just to the room of elites in front of him but to civilian populations across the world. The conversations that have undoubtedly been taking place behind closed doors for years were now made public: “Let me be clear. We are in a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extr

International sanctions often hurl target states into a form of survival mode. Since invading Ukraine, Russia has faced increasing isolation from Western nations . This isolation has extended beyond politics and economics into the world of international sport. Russian teams and officials have been expelled or suspended from numerous international sporting federations, significantly reducing the country’s presence on the global sporting stage. The 2024 Paris Olympic Games saw

It seems that the era of repetitive politics is over in Japan. Since her inauguration as the first female Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi has set a new path for Japan’s foreign policy. Her first order of action? A diplomatic firestorm with China. In her parliamentary declaration of last November, Takaichi underlined that any attempt of a Chinese blockade against Taiwan will signal an existential threat for Japan, precipitating the need for a collective self-defence st

On 24 October 2025, the pro-reunification, Turkish Cypriot candidate Tufan Erhurman won the elections in Northern Cyprus. He won convincingly, with a whopping 62.8% of the vote. For the past 51 years, the island has been divided between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and a Turkish-occupied zone in the north - the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Many attempts to reunite Cyprus have failed due to disagreements between regional actors, primarily