CSS Blog NetworkThe CSS Blog features the analyses of CSS experts, entries in the CSS Mediation Perspectives series and graphics produced by the CSS, which cover a range of international relations and security-related issues.
This week’s featured graphic shows the distribution of ceasefires and follow-up arrangements across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East between 1989 and 2018. For more on the role of ceasefires in intra-state peace processes, read Govinda Clayton, Simon J. A. Mason, Valerie Sticher and Claudia Wiehler’s CSS Analyses in Security Policy here.
This week’s featured graphic maps the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Europe as of December 2019. To find out more, click here to read this Strategic Trends 2020 chapter by Henrik Larsen and Linda Maduz on how China’s growing influence in Europe has the potential to create new geoeconomic divides.
Image courtesy of Flickr. President Santos signing the peace agreement with the FARC on 26 September 2016. Less than a week later, the deal was rejected in a plebiscite.
Mediation Perspectives is a regular series of blog contributions by the CSS Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors.
Intrastate conflicts are notoriously difficult to settle. In many regions of the world, from Afghanistan and Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, citizens have grown up during war, only to see their children or even grandchildren born into continued conflict. That is not to say that long-standing enemies never manage to reach a negotiated settlement. In Colombia, after more than half a century of fighting, the government reached a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) in 2016. But implementation is slow, and the state remains at war with the country’s last guerrilla organization, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN).
While support for innovations and the provision of digital technologies for agriculture are declared as being among the Russian government’s policy priorities, those activities are not prioritized in budgeting. This graphic compares the budget support to agriculture in Russia with that of other countries.
For more on the structure of agricultural production, trade development and agri-food policy in Russia, read this issue of the Russian Analytical Digest.
This week’s featured graphic compares the results of two Freedom House reports on political freedom and Internet freedom, which suggest there’s a link between the two.
For more on how Internet freedom is in retreat, read Julian Kamasa’s CSS Analysis in Security Policy here.