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a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.

A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf. Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg

While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

before 2012, Beijing didn’t even have an embassy in the Maldivian capital of Malé, given the smidgeon of diplomatic importance it assigned to the small atoll. Yet today, the country is awash with Chinese tourists, as well as large streams of Chinese foreign investment

$830 million upgrade of the airport, including a 1.3-mile bridge to link the airport island with the capital, which is a $400 million project

geo-economic clout

China has signed a free trade agreement with the Maldives and has “leased the uninhabited island Feydhoo Finolhu for tourism use for 50 years,”

hard economic power

“debt-for-leverage model is based on providing Chinese financial support for infrastructure projects in exchange for access to the natural resources of the beneficiary nation,”

70 percent of the total Maldivian debt, and $92 million a year in payments to China, roughly 10 percent of the entire budget

often Belt and Road projects do not always serve economic but rather geo-strategic, grand motives

In Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, the Chinese have been busy building ports, which they say are only for civilian use. While it is premature to see a conspiratorial chain of Chinese military facilities, it is also difficult to conclude that they are unrelated to Chinese maritime ambitions

a state of emergency and arrest Supreme Court judges last month after they ruled for the release of opposition politicians

Yameen’s actions have also drawn ire from India, the traditional peacekeeper in the region, though it has yet to take any direct action in the country, despite former President Mohamed Nasheed’s call for Indian troops to help stabilize the conflict-wracked island

Japanese charges — complete with a video — that Maldivian tankers have been secretly transferring goods to North Korean-flagged ships in grotesque violation of U.N. Security Council sanctions

Israel’s two gas export deals — with Egypt and Jordan — were signed with the two Arab countries with which the Jewish state already had peace treaties, and even then relations are still fraught at times. Meanwhile, hopes that natural gas pipelines and projects could soothe years of tensions between Israel and Turkey have apparently evaporated.

Mediation was at the top of the agenda during Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent visit to Lebanon, as it has been for U.S. officials since 2012, but with little success. A senior U.S. diplomat tried again Wednesday but found little Lebanese appetite for U.S. proposals. While Israel wants continued U.S. mediation in the spat, Lebanon and especially Hezbollah see Washington as too pro-Israel to play that role, especially after the Donald Trump administration’s controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the United States is “not an honest broker.”

Lebanon’s decision this month to award an exploration concession to three international firms — France’s Total, Italy’s Eni, and Russia’s Novatek — to drill in a promising block off the Lebanese coast has ignited fresh tensions between Beirut and Jerusalem.

“Politics drives energy relations, not vice versa,”

This month — as it did in 2014 — a Turkish ship intercepted a drilling vessel in Cypriot waters; Ankara, which recognizes the Turkish north of the divided island, refuses to cede those waters to Greek Cyprus and angrily warned it could take further action if development continues. The Turkish Foreign Ministry said it is “determined to take the necessary steps” to support the northern half of the island in its dispute with Greek Cypriots, who Ankara said are “irresponsibly jeopardizing the security and stability of the Eastern Mediterranean region.”

“Shared interest in [energy resources] might provide an incentive for cooperation among countries of the region that already enjoy more or less good relations,” Sukkarieh says. “But it is equally conceivable that they could fuel rivalries as well, like we are seeing lately with Turkey.”

Economic power, location, and access to resources determine how communities can respond to climate impacts. But these factors are shaped by existing global injustices: the history of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism that enriched some countries at the expense of others. Global warming has exacerbated these inequalities, and the climate crisis will lead to new divisions between those who can mitigate its impact and those who cannot.

The climate crisis is the result of the relentless pursuit of private interests by both multinational corporations and powerful countries: Fossil fuel companies seek profit, governments seek energy security, and private investors seek financial security. These pursuits have contributed to the campaigns of climate denialism that have slowed the international response to climate crisis, and that continue to fuel resource and land grabbing in many parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

when short-term shareholder value faces off against the public good—and it often does—the former tends to win out. This mismatch of incentives is itself a fundamental cause of the climate crisis

to mitigate climate change effectively and fairly, the international community needs to broadly redistribute funds across states to respond to inequalities in resilience capacity and the unjust system underpinning them

When refugee flows from non-European countries increased in the second half of the 20th century, many Western powers shifted policy. While some refugees were accepted and resettled, many others were warehoused, detained, or subject to refoulement—forcible return—in violation of the U.N. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has so far refused to grant refugee status—and the protection that comes with it—to the 21.5 million people fleeing their homes as a result of sudden onset weather hazards every year, instead designating them as “environmental migrants.”

climate reparations are better understood as a systemic approach to redistributing resources and changing policies and institutions that have perpetuated harm—rather than a discrete exchange of money or of apologies for past wrongdoing

two distinct but interconnected issues: climate change mitigation, which would aim to minimize displacement; and just climate migration policy, which would respond to the displacement that governments have failed to prevent

The continuation of this status quo will make climate colonialism a near certainty, especially considering recent responses to migration in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Rich Western countries have already responded punitively to migration, holding thousands of migrants in detention centers under horrific conditions and responding with indifference or violence to attempted suicides and protests by the incarcerated for better treatment. Since 2015, European countries have reacted aggressively to the plight of asylum seekers; there is no indication that their response to climate refugees would be any more humane.

A reparatory approach to the climate crisis would require an overhaul of the existing international refugee regime. With this approach, the international community would reject the framing of refugee policy as rescue and rethink the framework that allows states to confine refugees in camps with international approval

In the context of the climate crisis, the West is responsible for more than secondary harms experienced within the international refugee regime. A reparatory approach seeks to understand which harms were committed and how through structural change, those harms can be addressed. A historically informed response to climate migration would force Western states to grapple with their role in creating the climate crisis and rendering parts of the world uninhabitable.

A failure to admit more refugees will accelerate the worst political effects of the climate crisis: fueling the transition of eco-fascism from fringe extremism to ruling ideology. The recognition of rights to movement and resettlement, and a steady liberalization of rich-country border policies fit under a reparatory framework, especially when paired with more sensible mitigation policies. However extreme this renegotiation of state sovereignty and citizenship may seem, it’s nowhere near as extreme as the logical conclusion of the status quo’s violent alternative: mass famine, region-scale armed conflict, and widespread displacement.

the abundance of guano deposited by resting gannets and guillemots—along with Rockall’s almost vertical cliffs must have put off most sailors from landing, because it wasn’t set foot upon until 1811 when Lieutenant Basil Hall of the HMS Endymion led a small crew in two longboats to its summit. After having mistaken the islet for a ship under sail, an expedition was mounted as, Hall later wrote, “we had nothing better on our hands.” The trip was a waking nightmare. First came the difficult landing and ascent, complicated by a high swell and Rockall’s slippery cliffs: one false step, Hall wrote, “might have sent the explorer to investigate the secrets of the deep.” By some miracle, the crew clambered up to the summit, only for a dense fog to descend. Frightened about losing their ship, Hall and his men hopped back onto their boats as fast as the rising swell would allow. After several hours rowing through dense mist, they made it back to the Endymion.

though the United Kingdom maintains Rockall is its territory, it has given up using the islet to further its EEZ into the North Atlantic. Typically, a country’s EEZ is calculated to extend 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from its claimed territory. In 1997, however, the United Kingdom unilaterally decided to pull back the starting point for this calculation from Rockall to St. Kilda, an archipelago around 180 kilometers off the Scottish mainland.

The United Kingdom’s annexation also provoked a spree of visits from a cavalcade of nationalists and adventurers who considered the rock their personal ultima Thule. In 1975, the Dublin rock climber Willie Dick almost drowned attempting to plant the Irish tricolor on the summit, an act that grew out of the simmering outrage among Irish nationalists at Rockall’s incorporation into Inverness-shire, Scotland, three years earlier. A decade later, British Special Air Service (SAS) veteran Tom McClean sought to reaffirm British sovereignty over Rockall by becoming the first man to live on the rock. He spent 40 days huddled in a plywood box.

The Royal Navy wouldn’t return in force until 1955—this time with a helicopter, four marines, and a plaque declaring Rockall British territory to prevent it from being used as a base for the Soviet Union to spy on the United Kingdom’s missile tests.

The Irish government, however, refuses to recognize the United Kingdom’s title over Rockall. This means, in turn, that the waters around Rockall are not British territory at all, but just the far reaches of the United Kingdom’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Since both nations are currently members of the European Union, Irish trawlermen are entitled to fish in the United Kingdom’s EEZ under the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy. In Dublin’s eyes, therefore, Rockall should have as much bearing on fishing rights as an iceberg or a shipwreck.

activists from Greenpeace in 1997, who rechristened Rockall the Republic of Waveland in protest of oil and gas exploration in its surrounding waters; a group of Belgian ham radio operators in 2011 who became so violently seasick during their trip to the island that they had to return to Scotland the next day; and Englishman Nick Hancock, who holds the world occupation record of 45 days for his stay on the islet.

The latest version of the Political Declaration on withdrawal seeks to preserve the status quo of fishing rights until a new agreement on access is reached between London and Brussels by July 2020, a deal the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation has endorsed provided no further concessions are made in permitting its European Union rivals to fish in British waters. However, because the federation’s members consider Rockall’s waters United Kingdom territory, and therefore never subject to the Common Fisheries Policy, access to the outcrop is likely to become an object of intense negotiation.

As the United Kingdom’s withdrawal date nears, few can predict whether Brexit will lead to new opportunities for British trawlermen no longer bound by the Common Fisheries Policy or clashes with their European counterparts over who can fish where, as occurred last summer when French boats rammed their British counterparts in a row over scallop stocks in the Baie de la Seine.

“The Japanese are particularly interested in Rockall,” Symmons says. Japan, too, claims ownership of an isolated rocky outcrop hundreds of kilometers from shore. While the largest islet in the Okinotorishima reef is no larger than a double bed, the Japanese government has spent an estimated US $600-million literally shoring up its island status with concrete barriers and titanium netting. Unlike the United Kingdom, though, Japan continues to claim a 200-nautical-mile EEZ around the formation, “much to the displeasure of the Chinese, [who] of course cite the UNCLOS convention,”

future horse-trading over the territoriality of a granite outcrop in the North Atlantic could, therefore, set a valuable precedent in the ongoing tussle over an artificially sheltered atoll in the western Pacific

Still less does anyone in Washington seem to understand that "Gitmo" itself was always an absurd colonial anomaly of the kind Americans used to denounce. Nor does there seem any will to undo the creation of an even more scandalous, though militarily more useful, colony in the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Washington's instinct is to treat China as a potential partner in the domination of the world

Because Europe is divided into many different states, and no doubt because many American politicians and policy-makers find European attitudes annoying, American policy does not recognise that collectively Europe has a bigger economy than the United States and far bigger than China (even if China's growth has been spectacular).

No one questions Barack Obama's personal goodwill, still less his political intelligence. But on the basis of his first nine months in office, his commitment to a serious reassessment of the limitations of American power - let alone to an acknowledgment of the implications of the country's relative decline - is not yet clear.

The continent averages less than one intensive care bed and one ventilator per 100,000 people, Reuters found.

Donations have poured in from a foundation set up by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, and the World Bank is helping procure more than $1 billion worth of equipment for Africa.

even in a best-case scenario, Africa could need at least 111,000 more intensive care beds and ventilators - more than 10 times the number it has at present.

Tanzania, publicly criticised by the WHO for not restricting large gatherings, has sometimes gone for days without updating its coronavirus figures and has refused to tell donors anything about its public health resources

In Madagascar, where the president is pushing a botanically-based remedy untested in an international clinical trial, the health ministry took five weeks to respond to Reuters questions about the number of ventilators in the country.

The WHO does not have the funds to carry out detailed surveys on a regular basis, Yao said. "Information is critical for us to better help," he told Reuters. "It's difficult to anticipate their overall needs if you don't have accurate information."

around 685 tests have been carried out per million people - far below the 37,000 per million in Italy or 22,000 in the United States.

South Africa accounts for 30% of Africa’s tests, although it has less than 5% of the population. Nigeria, which has 15% of the population, has carried out just 2% of testing; it began by testing strategically then broadened it out, Health Minister Osagie Ehanire said. Chad and Burundi have carried out fewer than 500 tests each. Chad said it didn’t have enough testing kits and staff after many of them had fallen ill; Burundi did not respond. Tanzania carried out 652 tests and identified 480 cases.

the World Bank is helping more than 30 African nations source medical supplies. South Sudan recently received a donation of five ventilators, bringing its total to nine. But the new ventilators have yet to be plugged in because the isolation centre is being expanded

Intensive care beds are expensive, difficult to run, and very unevenly distributed. Chad, an oil-rich but impoverished nation of 15 million people, has only 10, whereas the island nation of Mauritius, a financial hub home to 1.2 million, has 121.

The continent’s three giants - Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt - have 1,920 intensive care beds between them for more than 400 million people

Kenya has 518 beds in its public and private facilities, but 94% are already occupied by non-COVID-19 patients

Under a best-case scenario - what Imperial College researcher Charlie Whittaker described as a complete lockdown for an indefinite time - at least 121,000 critical care beds will be needed at the peak of the pandemic on the continent, Reuters found. That compares with 9,800 at present

Africa has no history of building ventilators. South Africa’s state-owned defence company Denel plans to begin making them, and institutions in Kenya and Senegal have developed prototypes. But authorities in Senegal say they’ve only certified imports before; it could take months to get a prototype certified and mass-produced.

In many nations like Nigeria, South Sudan and Zimbabwe, electricity is extremely unreliable and hospitals depend on diesel-powered generators. Some health facilities in poorer, often rural, areas are unable to pay for the constant refueling and maintenance they need.

Continent-wide, one doctor serves an average of 80,000 people, World Bank data shows. There are more in wealthy Mauritius - 2 doctors per 1,000 - but countries like Liberia, Malawi or Burundi have far fewer.

only nine countries have one or more physicians qualified to administer anaesthetics per 100,000 people, according to the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists. Most have staffing levels comparable to Afghanistan or Haiti.

The Africa CDC, set up by the African Union in 2017, worked with the WHO to rapidly roll out testing. In January, only South Africa and Senegal could test for the new coronavirus, but now all African countries can perform tests apart from tiny Lesotho and the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.

Private hospitals are generally better staffed, but their revenues have dropped by an average of 40% since March, mostly due to a decline in elective surgeries and regular outpatient chronic treatment, said the Africa Healthcare Federation, an umbrella organisation for the private healthcare sector. Private hospitals are also having to spend more on protective equipment, and private insurance companies are delaying settling claims in many countries, said Dr. Amit Thakker, the head of the federation.

Since 2001, Australia has intermittently blocked boats from Asia and detained asylum-seekers on Christmas Island, a tiny Australian territory, or sent them to Papua New Guinea and Nauru, an island nation of 10,000 people. Australia pays detention costs.

Cameroonians hoping to follow Nkeze’s path face mounting obstacles. Ecuador, the main gateway from Europe, began requiring visas for Cameroonians and 10 other nationalities in August, including six in Africa. Under heavy pressure from Trump, Mexico is bottling up Cameroonians and other U.S.-bound asylum-seekers near its southern border with Guatemala.

“There’s this race to the bottom around the world, and governments are looking to each other and trying to figure out what’s the harshest policy they can get away with,” said David FitzGerald, a sociology professor at University of California at San Diego and author of Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum-seekers.

“They essentially want you to bring a note from your torturer before they are willing to let you stay in the U.S,”

a wide array of initiatives have emerged as a direct response to China’s Belt and Road to undermine and dilute China’s infrastructural prowess: the U.S. International Finance and Development Corporation, the EU’s “Asia Connectivity Initiative,” the EU-Japan “Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure,” the U.S.-Japan-Australia “Blue Dot Network,” the India-Japan “connectivity corridors” and myriad other coalitions. None of these existed even three years ago. Roads have always been the pathways of conquest; now they are the battlefield of competitive connectivity. 

A repeat of the Cold War would surely not play out as favorably for the U.S. as the last one. America is politically polarized and is the world’s largest debtor nation. Its most recent major wars have been disasters and its military needs time to rebuild and adjust to new adversaries and tactics. And many of its erstwhile allies from Europe to Asia are far more vested in China than America is and don’t trust it to lead a consensus-based global coalition.

Bogging down the adversary while moving stealthily towards one’s objective has been an axiom of Chinese diplomacy for generations. But there is little stealth anymore in China’s land grabs, island-building and wolf-warrior diplomacy

With China’s suppression of information about the coronavirus painting it into a corner, Beijing no longer feels it has anything to lose and is going for broke: moving on Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Senkaku Islands, India’s borders and other disputes while the rest of the world is off-kilter, girding itself for a new Cold War with America. China’s leadership has convinced itself that West-leaning powers seek to encircle it militarily, splinter it internally and destabilize the Communist Party. This is the classical psychological spiral at the heart of any security dilemma in which each action taken by one side elevates the perceived insecurity of the other. 

in dozens of visits to Beijing, I have found my interlocutors unable to grasp this basic psychological fact. While many societies admire China’s success and are grateful for China’s role in their development, none want to be like China, nor be subservient to it. It’s an argument that’s fallen on deaf ears in Washington, too. And as with America’s experience of benevolent nation-building, China’s policy of intimidating neighbors into feebly muting their own interests has predictably backfired

What the U.S. and Europe do have in their favor is that they are territorially secure while China is not. China has 14 neighbors, all of which harbor deep suspicions of its motives even as many (especially Russia) cooperate with it.

American strategists have been far more fixated on China’s presence in Africa and South America rather than developing a comprehensive strategy for reassuring China’s neighbors and supporting their own efforts to stand up to it.

Despite the immense economic leverage China has accrued vis-a-vis the many states along its perimeter, it is the complexity of having so many neighbors that constrains China more than its increasingly sophisticated military arsenal suggests. Maintaining global influence is much harder when you are fighting a 14-front war in your own neighborhood. 

From Malabar to Pearl Harbor, the U.S., Japan, Australia, India and numerous other countries have been deepening their coordination in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain. The “quad” coalition features joint strategic patrols and hardware support for the navies of Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia in the South China Sea. This summer, ASEAN foreign ministers finally graduated from their usually limp communiques watered down by Chinese pressure and reaffirmed that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea must be the basis for arbitrating maritime disputes. 

Boundary agreements are rarely perceived as fair by both sides, yet such settlements have the virtue of enabling counties to mature towards functional cooperation.  

Precisely because the U.S. and EU have imposed such stiff restrictions on Chinese investment, China has redirected its outbound capital portfolio ever more towards its more proximate Asian domain. And in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, once fast-growing countries face capital outflows and weak global demand amid ruptured supply chains. The West may be squeezing China out of some markets, but China’s balloon is inflating across Asia as it lowers tariffs on all its Belt and Road trading partners

Laos and Cambodia, two of Asia’s poorest countries, have become all but wholly owned subsidiaries of China, even as China’s Mekong River dams have ravaged their agriculture through volatile water flows and chemical pesticides. With stronger technical and diplomatic assistance, these countries could demand that Chinese investments reinforce their sustainability and local businesses. 

It was always going to be an uphill battle for China to be perceived as a benevolent superpower. Unlike America or the European Union, China is wholly unconvincing as a multiethnic empire. It systematically squelches diverse identities rather than elevating them. Furthermore, though China is an ancient and rich civilization, it coexists with other Asian civilizations with equally respectable glory. None will ever bow to the others, as Japan learned the hard way in the 20th century. Every time China gains an inch of territory, it loses a yard of credibility. The essence of geopolitical stability is equilibrium, and the pathway to it follows the logic of reciprocity. 

China’s assertiveness signals neither an inevitable new Cold War nor a new unipolar hegemony. Rather, it is one phase in Asia’s collective story and the global shift towards multipolarity.

Never has Eurasia been ruled by a single hegemon. The Mongols came closest 700 years ago, but the 14th-century Black Death fractured its disparate khanates, and the Silk Road fell idle. Today again, a pandemic has emerged from China, but rather than shut down the Silk Road, we should build many more of them among dozens of Eurasian nations rather than in and out of China alone. All roads need not lead to Beijing.

data from Global Forest Watch shows that Brazil, DRC and Indonesia were among the top five countries for primary forest loss in 2021, with 11.1m hectares of tree cover lost in the tropics overall last year.

In the eight centuries of Murano glassmaking, the use of natural gas is relatively new, adopted only in the 1950s.

But environmental regulations adopted in the interim prevent going back to wood. Local emissions would far exceed the legal threshold, explained Francesco Gonella, a physicist who specializes in artistic glass. “You may have a wood-powered stove up on a mountain, but you can’t have hundreds of wood-powered furnaces going at 1100 degrees Celsius,”

The glassmaking industry is responsible for only a tiny fraction of Italy’s emissions. But the work is energy-intensive. In a normal year, the Murano factories guzzle more than 13 million cubic meters of natural gas, according to a market insider speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by his company to talk. That’s as much as a town of 30,000 people would typically use in domestic heating. Yet Murano is an island of 5,000.

The range and depth of those colors, along with the level of artistry, help authentic Murano glass stand out from mass-produced versions from China.

“Murano’s is an unlucky sector,” said Gonella, the physicist. “It finds itself dealing with problems of different natures: commercial, because China rolls out counterfeit glass; environmental; and now the blow delivered by bills that are unsustainable for many.”

Electric furnaces can’t provide the kind of heat or artistic control they need. The sector has been looking into hydrogen as an alternative fuel. But that would require building a whole new network of pipes, designed to withstand corrosion from the hydrogen running through them.

“we’ll need a massive investment in local renewable technologies that won’t require the massive costs of importing power from the outside. Geothermic, absolutely, all around the island, and on it. Wind farms, off the lagoon, catching wind at dawn and dusk. And solar. All of these factories also need to be covered in solar panels.”

Mattia Rossi, 43, shuttered his family business this month because of financial problems made worse by skyrocketing bills.“If I’m shelling out 5,000 euros for the electric bill one month and 15 [thousand] the next, I won’t be able to raise the price by 30 to 40 percent. My goblet would no longer cost 80, but 150 euros. People just won’t buy it then. Because glass is a beautiful thing, but it’s not bread and milk. It’s unnecessary.”

not legally binding

Israel has long said there first must be a Mideast peace agreement before the establishment of a Mideast zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The region's Muslim nations argue that Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal presents the greatest threat to peace in the region

While the United States voted against the resolution, it voted in favor of two paragraphs in it that were put to separate votes. Both support universal adherence to the NPT, and call on those countries that aren't parties to ratify it "at the earliest date." The only "no" votes on those paragraphs were Israel and India.

this combination of irredentist cartography and rhetoric nonetheless offers some insight into Turkey’s current foreign and domestic policies and Ankara’s self-image. The maps, in particular, reveal the continued relevance of Turkish nationalism, a long-standing element of the country’s statecraft, now reinvigorated with some revised history and an added dose of religion

while countries like Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary brought disaster on themselves by trying to forcibly rewrite their postwar borders, Turkey — under Ataturk and his successor — wisely resisted this urge

Erdogan, by contrast, has given voice to an alternative narrative in which Ataturk’s willingness in the Treaty of Lausanne to abandon territories such as Mosul and the now-Greek islands in the Aegean was not an act of eminent pragmatism but rather a betrayal. The suggestion, against all evidence, is that better statesmen, or perhaps a more patriotic one, could have gotten more.

Criticism of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy is now as likely to come from the Arab world as anywhere else

Government rhetoric has been quick to invoke the heroism of Turkey’s war of independence in describing the popular resistance to the country’s July 15 coup attempt. And alongside the Ottomans, Erdogan routinely references the Seljuks, a Turkic group that preceded the Ottomans in the Middle East by several centuries, and even found a place for more obscure pre-Islamic Turkic peoples like the Gokturks, Avars, and Karakhanids that first gained fame in Ataturk’s 1930s propaganda

The Sultan Murad Brigade, comprising predominantly ethnic Turkmens, has been one of Ankara’s military assets inside Syria against both Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the PKK. Meanwhile, the Turkmen population living around Mosul and its surrounding area has been a concern and an asset for Ankara in Iraq. Turkish special forces have worked with the Iraqi Turkmen Front since at least 2003 in order to expand Turkish influence and counter the PKK in northern Iraq.

Turkish minorities in northern Greece and Cyprus have played a similar role. That is, their well-being has been a subject of genuine concern for Turkish nationalists but also a potential point of leverage with Athens to be used as needed

Erdogan has also emphasized a new element to Turkey’s communitarian foreign-policy agenda: Sunni sectarianism

Erdogan’s new sectarianism is evident in Mosul, where Turkey has warned of the risks to Sunnis should Shiite militias take control of the city. But the policy’s influence is clearest in Syria, where Turkey has been supporting Sunni rebels aiming to topple the Assad regime (including those now struggling to hold the city of Aleppo). In both Iraq and Syria, however, Turkey’s sectarianism has not been allowed to trump pragmatism. Ankara has been keen to maintain a mutually beneficial economic relationship with Iran despite backing opposite sides in Syria and in the past year has also expressed its willingness to make peace with Assad if circumstances require it.

the points at which Turkey has proved susceptible to irredentism in the past have all come at moments of change and uncertainty similar to what the Middle East is experiencing today. In 1939, Ankara annexed the province of Hatay, then under French control, by taking advantage of the crisis in Europe on the eve of World War II

Ankara is all too aware of the fact that the power to do so remains the only rationale for foreign intervention that matters

while Sri Lankan Christian leaders preach calm as their youth are tempted toward radicalization, the hope of transformation hangs in the balance

While much has been written about Chinese overfishing, it’s only recently become possible to document its vast extent, thanks to new satellite technologies such as those providing data to Global Fishing Watch. The same tracking technology that is used to prevent vessels from hiding or circumventing sanctions shows that China’s fishing fleet appears engaged, often illegally, in the effort to haul in as much seafood as it can, as fast as it can, in as many places as it can—with little regard for how its practices affect malnourished people or diminish the stocks of their fish.

China’s yearly bill for fisheries subsidies—of which 94 percent covers shipping fuel—comes to $5.9 billion. That’s about $347,000 per vessel per year, far more than any other major fishing country. European Union vessels, also considered highly subsidized, receive only about $23,000 a year

its record contains little in the way of sustainable fishing. Its own coastline, once among the richest in the world, has been more overfished by its 300,000-strong domestic coastal fleet than the waters of almost any other nation, with less than 15 percent of the original fish biomass remaining

Some 250 Chinese vessels fish for squid just outside Argentina’s 200-mile EEZ, sometimes dashing into Argentina’s waters illegally. When a Chinese jigger intruded in 2018, an Argentine warship pursuing it was nearly rammed by three other Chinese jiggers. “It’s literally a war,” said Milko Schvartzman, a former Greenpeace campaign manager and fisheries expert who estimates the illegal Argentinian fishery at $1 billion a year. “I have no doubt this will end in tragedy.”

China’s South Atlantic fishing fleet is based in Montevideo, the capital and main port of Uruguay, Argentina’s northern neighbor. Uruguay seems to have given China and its fishing fleet a free hand

China’s 1.4 billion people not only consume 38 percent of global fish production, but indulge in one of the highest per-capita consumption rates of fish and seafood, both wild and farmed, in the world—37.8 kilograms per person per year, up from only 7 kilograms per person per year in 1985, according to figures provided by China to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Europeans, in particular, are also involved in a lot of illegal fishing, said Vanya Vulperhorst, director of Oceana’s campaign against illegal fishing, often using boats with non-European flags to get around the rules. The illegal market in Mediterranean bluefin tuna, for example, is twice the size of the legal one, according to Europol.

In Mozambique, the Chinese were more successful. In 2017, they effectively took over the port of Beira, doubling its capacity so it could accommodate over 100 trawlers

The Mozambican Channel, between Madagascar and Mozambique, had been relatively unfished, and the Chinese fleet has been able to catch over 60,000 tons a year of large, high-quality bottomfish like seabream and groupers, all of which go to China. “They pay the government a pittance for the right to fish,” Failler said. “The locals now complain they aren’t catching anything anymore.”

in northwest Africa, the Chinese built around 20 fishmeal plants to process sardinella, a once-abundant and highly nutritious mackerel-sized fish, into feed for aquaculture and poultry. That industry has created a similar situation as in North Korea: During the winter dry season, smoked sardinella constituted the main source of affordable protein for the region, one of the poorest in the world. In Gambia, Chinese companies operate three fishmeal plants built five years ago and suck up so much sardinella that the local supply is reduced to a trickle. “It’s devastating,” said Mustapha Manneh, a Gambian journalist. “Gambians depend on this fish for their daily meal.” In Kartong, where he lives, he says the price has risen five-fold. Further inland in Koina, where the country reaches into the arid Sahel region, sardinella prices have risen tenfold. Fishing in the Gambia river instead can’t compensate for the loss of sardinella. “It is dangerous because there are so many hippos,” Manneh said. “The destruction cannot be overemphasized.”

90 percent of fishmeal is made from perfectly edible fish like sardinella

Half the global catch, much of it taken from or near the waters of poor countries, is then turned into fishmeal to grow fish like salmon, which are consumed in rich countries.

China has been paying fishermen to cast their nets around the Paracel Islands since the 1970s and the Spratlys since the 1980s

China is the only country with a strategic fishing fleet. Of the crew on the vessels operating in the South China Sea, Poling said “either they’re fishers paid to go fish somewhere, and that’s the only reason they do it, or they are officially in the militia, which means they never fish—they just use fishing boats to monitor other fleets, run supplies, or ram other boats.” Pauly, the fisheries scientist, said that “no one else does this except in war.”

There, the Chinese not only make up 40 percent of the foreign fleet, but have also drawn attention with the high number of dead crew members they have been reported to bring in—about one a month. “Conditions on their boats are horrible, some of the worst in the world,” Schvartzman said. “Sometimes they dump the bodies at sea, but usually they don’t because the crew would rebel.”

At the World Trade Organization, talks are underway to reduce fishing subsidies, with an agreement due by the end of the year

he thinks the current predicament says more about the continuities with colonial history than it does about some ruptured future. For some people in the world, the catastrophe has already happened. 

"I come from a part of the world where we didn't have very rosy expectations of the world or the future," says Ghosh. "We knew there would be a lot of upheavals, and we witnessed these upheavals at first hand, so in that sense I think Westerners had a belief in stability and the promise of the future that I didn't share."

in the Eastern hemisphere, the issue of historical injustice is central to the issue of climate change. "If you go to any Indonesian, or Indian, or Chinese, even people who are perfectly well aware of the climate threat, and say to them: 'why don't you immediately cut all your emissions?' What will you hear? The answer is always profoundly political, it's: 'The West made this problem, let them give everything up first. This is the terrible dilemma in which we're caught."

Ghosh thinks it's no coincidence that the constraints of the bourgeois novel began to form at the same time as the West began to use fossil fuels to project its power around the world.

"Climate change is absolutely an aspect of empire," he says. "The British Empire was essentially built on fossil fuels: It was the British mastery of coal that gave it a huge military advantage over the rest of the world."

"If renewables really were adopted at scale, it would completely shake up the global political order." He argues that oil and gas have to flow through maritime chokepoints controlled by the US, Australia, Britain and Canada, giving them a complete geopolitical advantage.

a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.  "The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they've already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," says Ghosh. "And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive."

"We're always told that rich countries will adapt better: I don't think that's actually true. I think countries with very complex systems, like the United States and in Europe, are in many ways much more fragile. Just consider food distribution."