Shortly before the holidays, on Dec. 19, 2018, US President Donald Trump claimed victory over the Islamic State (IS) and ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from the northeast of Syria. Experts and observers mostly agreed that the true beneficiaries of this decision were Turkey on the one side and the current Syrian government …

The White House has announced that US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un will hold their second summit meeting at the end of February. Optimists expect that Kim Jong-un will follow through with his stated willingness to denuclearize and commit to a verifiable, irreversible nuclear dismantling. Pessimists are afraid that we …

For the first ten months of 2018, the war in Ukraine continued to simmer without making front-page news abroad. Neither the Russianbacked separatists nor Ukrainian forces escalated the fighting beyond limited but often deadly violations of the Minsk II agreement along the Eastern Ukrainian frontline. The situation changed on Nov. 25, when Russian coast guard …

France’s former minister of defense and current minister of foreign affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, takes very seriously the threats currently destabilizing the Sahel, especially since the intervention in Mali by French troops in January 2013. He co-organizes the annual Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa. At the most recent forum, on Nov. …

Africa is the cradle of humanity and simultaneously the world’s youngest continent. It is home to more than 1.3 billion people (including North Africa), a number that continues to increase by roughly 50 million each year. According to UN projections, the population is set to almost double to roughly 2.5 billion people by mid-century. In …

On Dec. 21, 2018, the declaration of war came from an unexpected source: “A so-called Islamic State has appeared in our country,” it said. “We have been observing its dangerous behavior for a time in the hope that it would change, but this has not taken place.” The speaker was Ali Rage, leader of Al …

A growing security threat at Europe’s southern borders has remained unacknowledged for almost a century. It has never been conceived in military terms and, I believe, rightfully so. But it has been depoliticized as merely a matter of economic expediency – the intake, first, of a cheap and much needed low-skilled labor force and, then, …

The difference in numbers is striking. Whereas $7.87 billion was spent on the 16 peacekeeping operations organized by the United Nations, global arms sales reached almost $400 billion. For the third year in a row, the United States along with Russia, China, Great Britain, France and Germany earned almost fifty times more in arms revenues …

As a comparative measure, military spending is frequently used in both scholarly and political debates. Assessing the balance of power, level of armaments as well as arms races and arms control issues all require comparisons. While military spending refers to the input rather than the output dimension of military capabilities, it is nonetheless often regarded …

Several weeks ago, Mullah Abdul Manan Akhund, a powerful Taliban commander from the southern Afghan province of Helmand, was struck down by an American drone strike and his death celebrated. Many observers, including journalists and politicians from Afghanistan and elsewhere, flooded networks like Twitter with exclamations of joy over the attack.

The death of Mullah …

Unfortunately, the remark attributed to Senator Hiram Johnson remains as valid today as when it was uttered in 1917: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” With the outbreak of armed conflict, information decays into propaganda, thereby becoming an additional weapon of war. That makes the independent work of reporters all the more important …

The security threats we face, not only in Europe but around the world, are increasingly cross-border in nature. Those who seek to harm us pay little heed to the niceties of national boundaries or international law. Successfully tackling these crossborder threats requires a crossborder response. Our work on security in the European Union underscores the …

Almost imperceptibly, the innocuous gadgets that surround us have become alive with threat. Fridges, smart electricity meters, cars, construction cranes – a bigger Internet of Things (IoT) means more hackable things: in other words, more points at which systems can be breached and disrupted.

Not only that, the pace of this change is likely to …

All through December 2018, a hacker by the online handle “Orbit” teased and tantalized his followers, releasing a new heap of hacked emails, chatlogs and home addresses each day. At first, German comedians, YouTube stars, rappers and TV stars were the only ones affected, with the media and public commenting and sharing the information that …

Not so long ago, when it came to cyberspace, states were believed to be powerless entities with no meaningful policy tools at their disposal. The supposed novelty of the cyber domain was thought to render traditional forms of state intervention and strategies useless. Now researchers and policymakers have come to realize that this is not …