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CSS Blog

Russia´s Engagement in Libya: Mid-2014 to 2018

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This graphic highlights the uptick in Russia’s engagement in Libya from mid-2014 to the end of 2018. If you want to read more about Russia’s re-emergence as a power broker in the MENA region, see Lisa Watanabe’s chapter in Strategic Trends 2019 here.

After Crimea: Does NATO Have the Means to Defend Europe?

Image courtesy of Clayton Lenhardt/DVIDS.

This article was originally published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in April 2019.

Military spending may now figure in public conversation about NATO. But the alliance, at 70 years old, still lacks military capabilities strong enough to protect Europe from Russia

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Regional Stability

“Stabilising” the Middle East: A Historical Perspective

Image courtesy of ErikaWittlieb/Pixabay.

This article was originally published by the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) on 28 March 2019.

The relevance of “continuities” in relation to the history of the region and its inhabitants has been evident throughout most of its millenary past, and from a wide range of different angles. For instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE), a literary product of Mesopotamia, encompasses a number of themes and motifs (including, among others, the flood myth adopted in the narrative of Noah’s ark) later included in the Bible and other religious books.

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CSS Blog

Russian Armed Forces along Deterrence and Deniability

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This graphic maps how Russian armed forces’ capabilities relate to their deniability and the deterrence they provide. It also describes how Russia made use of these capabilities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. To find out what Western planners and strategists have learned from the war in Ukraine, read Niklas Masuhr’s addition to the CSS Analyses in Security Policy series here.

China’s ‘New Type of Security Partnership’ in Asia and Beyond: A challenge to the Alliance System and the ‘Indo-pacific’ Strategy

Image courtesy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

This analysiswas originally published by the Elcano Royal Institute on 26 March 2019.

Since 2013 China has clearly called for the creation of a new security architecture in Asia. The May 2015 white paper on China’s military strategy explicitly advocates promoting ‘the establishment of a regional framework for security and cooperation’. This call was reaffirmed in October 2016 and detailed further in China’s white paper, published in January 2017, on security cooperation in Asia-Pacific. Since then, Chinese officials have repeatedly declared, one way or another, that the region needs to be restructured. On 16 February 2019, at the 55th Munich Security Conference, Politburo member Yang Jiechi declared that ‘China supports security dialogue among the Asia-Pacific countries and efforts to explore a regional security vision and architecture that fits the reality of this region’. 2