With Spain next on the list of eurozone countries on the brink of financial abyss, nerves about the future of the great European experiment are at an all-time high. The narrative of the euro’s crisis seems self-fulfilling as  markets move from one financially challenged euro country to the next, and after the Irish bailout, Portugal [...]

  Last week, ISN Insights looked at: Japanese defense policy in a piece by Axel Berkofsky NATO’s new strategic concept in an article by Timo Noetzel and Adrian Oroz Egypt’s elections, held yesterday, in a piece by Issandr El Amrani ‘Bailout capitalism‘ in the aftermath of the financial crisis in an article by Dean Baker [...]

Merely a decade ago, close to 20,000 Jews called Venezuela their home. Yet in these past ten years, during President Hugo Chavez extended tenure, their number has dropped to less than 9,000. This exodus intensified between 2008-2010, with over 5,000 leaving the country, mostly heading to Miami in the US. If someone were to rank [...]

After Tuesday’s incident, in which North Korea reportedly shot 170 rounds of artillery on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong killing two civilians and two marines, tensions have been at an all-time high in East Asia. Increasingly unpredictable and volatile in its behavior, the Kim regime seems to have embraced a whole new level of [...]

We have all heard about Blackwater and American, English and South-African modern-day “mercenaries” serving in Iraq, protecting targets in the Green Zone and in the Red Zone. But few of us have heard of the thousands of private military contractors (PMCs) that come from developing countries, such as Uganda or Honduras. According to some estimates, [...]