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…
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…
The outbreak of COVID-19 initially looked like a gift to autocrats around the world. What better pretext for a state of emergency than a pandemic? It was a golden opportunity to close borders, suppress civil society, and issue decrees left and right (mostly right). Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo…
A mutiny by lower-ranking military officers on August 18 in the West African state of Mali has prompted the condemnation of regional, continental and international organizations. President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was forced over the national media to resign from office after being elected just two years ago. Demonstrations against the government in Bamako, the capital,…
“The Frustrated Indian”, a popular Indian media outlet with over 1.2 million followers on Facebook, is propagating fake news by alleging that the recent military coup in Mali was a Russian-backed regime change effort to spoil China’s Silk Road plans in the Sahel, which represents yet another desperate and discredited effort by the South Asian…
The landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso is a time bomb that’s about to explode as evidenced by the drastic increase in terrorist-related violence there over the past year and its attendant humanitarian consequences, yet both the region and the rest of the world as a whole seem powerless to prevent what the UN…
