The dogs of war – cold, hot, trade, tariffs – bark while the Chinese caravan plies the New Silk Roads. Call it a leitmotif of the young 21st century. At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, President Xi Jinping has just announced a hefty US$60 billion package to complement another US$60 billion pledged…
Federal forces intervened in this geographically expansive but sparsely populated region last week in order to restore law and order there after the state’s government challenged the central authorities by provocatively deploying their Liyu counter-insurgency forces to the federal city of Dire Dawa. Former Somali Regional President Abdi Mohamoud Omar’s heavy-handed tactics against the previously…
Financial injections by Qatar and possibly China may resolve Turkey’s immediate economic crisis, aggravated by a politics-driven trade war with the United States, but are unlikely to resolve the country’s structural problems, fuelled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s counterintuitive interest rate theories. The latest crisis in Turkey’s boom-bust economy raises questions about a development model…
The alliance of the UAE and Egypt is expanding its zone of influence in the Horn of Africa, including the establishment of Ethiopian-Eritrean relations. There is a noticeable Emirati influence in Ethiopia, where they compete with the Qatar-Turkey alliance. Saudi Arabia, being a rival of the UAE and Egypt, supports them in the region against…
Ethiopia’s proposed mediating the lingering dispute between its Eritrean and Djiboutian neighbors as it takes the lead in pioneering peace in the Horn of Africa. The brief 2008 border conflict between these two tiny, impoverished, but strategically positioned Red Sea states had previously seen the UN-mandated intervention of Qatari peacekeepers along their disputed frontier, but…
The Pakistani Navy commenced Regional Maritime Security Patrols (RMSP) in the northwestern corner of the Indian Ocean last month that have since seen the country’s ships pay visits to Saudi Arabia and Oman, thereby broadening the scope of Pakistani influence in the emerging Multipolar World Order. The patrols are fully in line with international law…
