The Yellow Vests against globalization In 2018, France was shaken by a vast popular movement, the “Yellow Vests”. Starting as a protest against the increase in gasoline prices, it very quickly appeared as a protest against the sociological effects of trade globalization: disappearance of the Western middle classes, relegation to under-equipped countryside [1]. Two weeks after…
Togo’s Growing Geostrategic Significance Most people across the world have never heard of the narrow West African state of Togo, or if they have, then they regard it as an impoverished and geostrategically insignificant country. While it’s true that Togo is among the poorest nations in the world, its geostrategic profile is rapidly raising as…
A strange thing happened on Friday outside Geneva, not a city you would nowadays associate with progress in the Middle East. The internationally favoured candidates for an interim government in Libya failed to get the votes of delegates at UN-backed talks. Instead, a group of relatively less well-known leaders who, according to some, are closer to the…
Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron has been trying to make Islamic radicalism his number one enemy. The isolationism practiced by some of the most radical Islamic immigrant communities began to worry Paris about the risk of possible separatist riots in order to form areas within French territory where French law does not prevail. However, this…
Twitter caused a stir by complying with the Indian government’s request to temporarily “withhold” access to dozens of accounts for users within the country in response to claims that they were “inciting violence” during the ongoing farmers’ protests, which prompts some very important ethical questions that have a few disturbing implications for the freedoms of…
On the afternoon of 3 January, the French military deployed a Reaper drone over the village of Bounti in central Mali. The drone dropped three bombs on a dwelling in an open area outside the village, killing dozens of rebel fighters, the French military said. Hours after the attack, however, several witnesses from Bounti said…
