CSS Blog Network
This article was originally published by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in June 2019.
The number of armed conflicts in 2018 was slightly higher than 2017 and much higher than ten years ago, but the number of fatalities occurring in these conflicts was below average for the post–Cold War period. A key issue remains internationalized conflicts – civil wars with external parties involved – where a majority of fatalities in 2018 has been recorded.
This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 23 April 2019.
“Cyber warfare has begun and France must be ready to fight it,” Florence Parly, the French minister for the armed forces, declared on Jan. 18. Parly was introducing the new French Military Cyber Strategy, which consists of two separate documents: the Ministerial Policy for Defensive Cyber Warfare (hereafter the Ministerial Policy) and the Public Elements for the Military Cyber Warfare Doctrine (hereafter the Public Elements). Together, these documents outline the French Ministry of Defense’s (ministère des Armées) doctrine on lutte informatique défensive et offensive, or defensive and offensive cyber warfare.
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.
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
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.