A New Beginning for European Defence

Image courtesy of European Parliament/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It is time to move past institutional integration and develop practical European security capabilities.

Europe is facing multiple security challenges. Russia aims to undermine the European security order and has shown its willingness to violate other countries’ sovereignty and increase its nuclear power. The Middle East and North Africa are on fire, homegrown terrorism threatens the streets of Europe, and cyber and information warfare are on the rise.

How Civil Wars End

Image courtesy of Almigdad Mojalli/VOA.

This article was originally published by Political Violence @ a Glance on 9 February 2018.

As with most civil wars, the war in Yemen is marked by the influence of outside actors. It began in September 2014, when the Iranian-backed Houthis took over the capital Sana’a, and it might well have ended six months later, when the president fled a Houthi advance on Aden. Instead, Saudi Arabia led a coalition of ten Arab countries—supported by the United States—in an air and ground campaign against the Houthis. Since then, the war has ground on, with a new dimension of fighting opening recently between southern secessionist militias—many of which receive support from the United Arab Emirates—and government forces backed by the Saudi coalition. Since taking office, the Trump administration has increased American air strikes in Yemen six fold.

The Confrontation Between the West and Russia: A Tale of Concentric Circles

Image courtesy of European External Action Service/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)

This article was originally published by the Carnegie Moscow Center on 8 February 2018.

Much like Europeans do not fully grasp the angst generated by prospects of Western-incited regime change in Russia, Russians dismiss far too easily how toxic in the EU is Moscow’s political and financial backing of European extreme right-wing movements. Both are viewed as direct threats to existential interests. So long as that deep-seated mistrust regarding each other’s destructive intent toward one another prevails, channels for cooperation will remain limited, and cooperation at the global level will be ad hoc and transactional.

A Growing Strategic Gap between America and Europe?

Image courtesy of Sgt. Justin Geiger/DVIDS.

This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 8 February 2018.

After last year’s fears that President Donald Trump would undermine NATO unity, we now have a clearer understanding of the administration’s ambition for transatlantic security. An unclassified version of the new U.S National Defense Strategy was released on Jan. 19, and it was generally well-received. Critics have lauded the strategy for clearly hierarchizing among competing priorities while others focused on funding issues, but all recognized the important shift towards prioritizing strategic competition with Russia and China (although the specifics of this competition with Moscow and Beijing are unclear), which consequently degraded the relative importance of fighting terrorism.

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Countries that Experienced Armed Conflicts with Religious Dimensions in 2016

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This graphic maps out the various countries that experienced armed conflicts with religious dimensions in 2016. To find out more about the role of religion in armed conflict, check out Jonas Baumann, Daniel Finnbogason and Isak Svensson’s newest addition to our CSS Policy Perspectives here. For more graphics on peace and conflict, check out the CSS’ collection of graphs and charts on the subject here.