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Several factors contribute to the ongoing violence in this region. Over recent years, the area has seen an increase in militias and community-based armed groups whose goal is to protect the community. At the same time there has been a proliferation of small arms and light weapons.

since the 1980s, there has been conflict between the Fulani and Daoussahaq on the border between Mali and Niger, caused partly by competition for access to natural resources and criminal activities such as cattle rustling.

Climate change and demographic pressure has disrupted the livelihoods of many and caused considerable tension between farmers, pastoralists and fishermen

Trust and confidence in traditional mechanisms of conflict management have also eroded

The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara exploits the Fulani's frustrations and desire for revenge by supporting them against the Daoussahaq. The Daoussahaq rely on the support of the Movement for the Salvation of Azawad - a militia mainly composed of Daoussahaq - which appears to benefit from France, Mali and Niger's help in the fight against terrorism.

Violent extremist groups also play the role of arbitrators between rival groups in Tenenkou in central Mali, Gabero in the Gao region, and in Oudalan, Burkina Faso.

n central Mali, issues such as the one linked to the competition for Koubi chieftaincy which was pending in court since 1999 were resolved by Katiba Macina.

Terrorist groups can be antagonists, mediators or suppressors of violence through the influence and control they exert in the areas where they operate. How groups succeed in restructuring social and economic life, and how they enforce solutions through direct threats, violence, fear or religious principles (e.g. through the idea that the land belongs to God alone) should be analysed.

To attribute the increase in violence solely to the exploitation of community conflicts by terrorists means potentially losing sight of the structural dynamics that underpin such violence. Incorrect labelling and understanding of local conflicts could exacerbate the situation. To restore peace and social cohesion in the long term, the root causes of local conflicts must be addressed.

governments still harass, expel, and attempt to exterminate minority groups in the name of the nation-state ideal, and sovereignty still gives them carte blanche to do so

insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing

the issue isn’t limited to the Kurds. In the news this week are Rohingya refugees stuck between two countries that don’t want them, Uighurs forced into detention camps, and Catalan protests for independence. History offers even more parallels, from the United States repeatedly breaking treaties with Native Americans to World War II, in which the United States was willing to go to war to protect the territorial integrity of France along with the people in it but was not willing to accept refugees fleeing the Holocaust. The nation-state system is designed to protect itself and its members, rather than people

nonstate groups are at a particular disadvantage. Though they may hold de facto territory, they don’t hold it legally; they have no international rights to a military or to self-defense. They have no seat in international or supranational organizations, leaving them outside global decision-making and with no recourse in attempting to hold states accountable for their actions. Their leaders are not accorded head of state status, and they have no official diplomats. Since even the most generous autonomy statutes don’t confer the protections of statehood, separatist groups are often willing to risk high losses to win independence, fueling conflicts

States remain reluctant to break the collective agreement on the legitimacy of sovereignty. They are similarly reticent about adding more states to their exclusive club, in part because it might suggest to dissidents within their own area that renegotiation of borders is possible

While interstate conflicts have fallen over the past 50 years, intrastate fighting has soared. These wars disrupt trade and world politics, weaken countries, and raise uncertainty in neighboring states. On the other hand, states have proved themselves adept at using substate actors to further their own interests within foreign countries while evading responsibility for it, from the United States arming the Contras in Nicaragua to Sudan and Chad supporting each other’s rebel movements.

it remains difficult to garner international recognition for a new state. That leaves mediators attempting to convince vulnerable groups to settle for something less, in the face of all evidence that a recognized state is their best chance for security and self-determination.

Substate groups are not the only example that the system is failing. Nonstate actors from terrorist groups to multinational corporations have increasing impacts on global politics, and traditional geopolitical theory does not do a great job of dealing with them. Even for bilateral issues, the nation-state is not always the most useful unit of analysis.

Russian elites attempted to tip the scales of U.S. leadership in order to win more modern spoils: unfettered soft power in their region, access to trade, and, notably, the ability to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty without consequences.

the United States—and other nation-states—has little or no control over multinational corporations, with their complex legal structures and tenuous ties to geography

we need to recognize both the rights of substate groups and the legal responsibilities of extrastate entities and create mechanisms in the international system to include them in the halls of power

The US has a key Cold War-era air base at Thule, used for surveillance of space using a massive radar. It is the US military's northernmost base, there to provide early warning of a missile attack on North America.

"Despite the Arctic nations' shared ambition to keep the region free of security policy disagreements, the military focus on the Arctic is growing. A power game is unfolding between great powers Russia, the United States and China that deepens tensions in the region."

There are competing territorial claims at the UN from Denmark, Russia, the US and Canada in the North Pole region, where energy and mineral resources are becoming more accessible.

in August Denmark sent a large support ship to Greenlandic waters for the first time. The Absalon, and sister ship Esbern Snare, are the biggest Danish naval vessels.

Greenland's population is about 56,000 and for decades the territory has been economically dependent on Denmark.The Self Rule Act of 2009 granted Greenland far-reaching autonomy, though Denmark retains control over foreign affairs, defence, security and immigration.Fisheries account for more than 90% of Greenland's exports, most of which go to Denmark, and prawn is the main species caught.

Denmark is helping Greenland to build three big international airports, one of them in the capital Nuuk. A Chinese bid for the airport project was rejected.

greater awareness of the potential impact of natural as well as man-made shocks will accelerate tendencies not toward deglobalization but rather toward reglobalization: a reshuffling of supply chains and at least a partial reduction in the concentration of capacity inside China

The disruption caused by the pandemic creates an opportunity for U.S. policymakers to reassess and recalibrate their generally laissez-faire approach to globalization.

Another reason for attempting to shift existing supply chains and, in particular, for trying to preserve and expand domestic manufacturing capacity is that doing so could help boost the overall productivity, international competitiveness, and long-term growth prospects of the U.S. economy. That, in turn, would generate more of the aggregate resources necessary to sustain a protracted strategic competition with China, while at the same time enhancing the well-being of many American workers.

Even if the value-added from the final assembly of consumer goods is relatively small, from a strategic standpoint it would be preferable if the resulting gains accrued to the economies of U.S. friends and allies rather than to China. The physical relocation of some portion of existing supply chains could also help slow China’s efforts to extract sensitive technology through industrial espionage or coerced joint ventures.

Even a largely market-driven dispersion of supply chains and a lesser degree of concentration in China should help to reduce risks and increase resilience.

To the extent feasible, the United States should seek to source imports of critical goods from a trusted production network of facilities in friendly or allied countries, at least some of them located far from China.

During World War II and the opening stages of the Cold War, the federal government used the tax code in a focused fashion, extending the so-called rapid tax amortization privilege to promote expansion in sectors where resource requirement calculations revealed gaps that could stall defense mobilization. In the 1950s, federal agencies also used procurement guarantees to encourage the maintenance of capacity above anticipated market demand for certain minerals and machine tools by promising to buy a portion of the resulting output. Some of these were then placed in stockpiles for possible future use.

The U.S. government could use similar tools today if, for example, it wanted to expand the nation’s ability to manufacture personal protective equipment and ventilators, items that might be needed to combat the next pandemic.

Globalization is not an unstoppable natural force, propelled solely by technological progress and autonomous market forces; instead it is a man-made phenomenon with contours shaped by the choices of states as well as firms.

China’s emergence as an irresistibly attractive manufacturing platform was partly due to the sheer size of its working-age population and the falling costs of communication and transportation, but also due to deliberate government policies designed to aid in the acquisition of foreign intellectual property while keeping the cost of land, labor, and capital low and exchange rates favorable.

the migration of manufacturing capacity from the advanced industrial countries reflected not only the profit and loss calculations of individual companies but also the permissive policies of Western governments that concluded in effect (in the U.S. case) that what was good for Apple or 3M was good for the United States.

if it results in excessive dependence, an addiction to low costs can create serious commercial and strategic risks

There are obvious dangers here. Sharpened tools of trade and industrial policy can be abused by irresponsible leaders seeking to pander to voters and pay off supporters, or they may be captured and exploited by special interests.

In broad terms the Green New Deal (GND) demands that we address first the global; second the differential impact of both historic and current climate change on different nations; and third, that we recognise the vital role of the state. It means wealth transfers to poor countries suffering the consequences of centuries of industrialisation in rich countries, and self-sufficiency in the provision of human needs, goods and services for their citizens. 

what can we, as citizens, do to prevent the restoration of a global financial system governed by volatile markets (the largest of which is the foreign exchange market), dominated by the US dollar and built on government debt? And what might it take to ensure that that system is governed by public, not private interests? 

Right now, the international system is scarcely a matter of public discourse. It is discussed in elite, niche, academic circles, but not sufficiently in trades unions, student groups, religious or community spaces. Instead, our collective focus has been relentlessly on domestic issues. That must change.

Both Corbyn and Sanders offered sound analysis, deep compassion and sincere solidarity to the victims of globalisation and climate breakdown. But they focused on domestic issues – health systems, affordable housing, nationalisation of the railways, kindness to the poor and homeless – and ignored the globalised financial infrastructure that makes reform of these sectors virtually impossible. 

to keep a nation’s monetary system in balance, we need ultimately to raise tax revenues to repay the initial finance – and not remain locked into a trillion-dollar government debt market. 

we cannot generate sufficient tax revenues in a world where money crosses borders more easily than people fleeing conflict. A world which enables Big Pharma and Silicon Valley companies to dodge taxes and lodge profits in tax havens. And we cannot fix health systems – or prevent climate collapse –  if globalised corporations outcompete local producers and manufacturers because the latter enjoy the massive tax breaks. 

As citizens we would not feel so powerless if we understood that the private, globalised financial system depends utterly on public, taxpayer-backed resources. Just look at the current crisis unfolding. Global markets, which we are often told are best left to their own devices, we discover with every crisis, are slavishly dependent on the largesse of publicly backed central banks, and in particular on the Federal Reserve.

Countries that lack a well-developed tax collection system lack the collateral needed for a strong central bank and sound currency. 

as taxpayers, we should set the conditions: that public resources should only be made available on terms that ensure the finance system is transformed into the role of servant, not master of the economy

Operators of hyperscale data centers, those with more than 5,000 servers, are migrating to places where water is plentiful, such as Norway, but also to drought-prone places like Italy and Spain where energy is cheaper—and where extreme heat is becoming the norm.

A survey conducted last year by the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm, found that only 39% of data centers even tracked their water use, a 12 percentage-point drop from 2021. Tech companies in the past have refused to disclose information about individual centers’ energy and water consumption, claiming that such data was a trade secret.

Over the last couple of years, Google, Meta and Microsoft have started publishing their total water use across their operations, but they don’t break the number down by business unit nor use standardized metrics. Bluefield Research has estimated data centers use more than a billion liters of water per day, including water used in energy generation.

Operators often use shell companies to apply for planning permissions, and a data center can look like any large warehouse or factory from the outside.

Arman Shehabi, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California best known for a landmark paper on energy consumption at data centers, thinks the facilities could contribute to scarcity as droughts become longer and more intense. Part of the problem, he says, is that data center operators “are generally the last ones to the table to ask,” straining the system by asking for access to scarce water after agricultural interests and local communities have already come up with a plan. “Everybody is going to feel that,” he says.

Companies say data centers are getting more energy-efficient, but the increase in overall demand for computing power is outpacing such gains.

The specialized chips required for AI—broadly known as accelerators—emit so much more heat than general-purpose chips do that data center operators are having to rethink their cooling systems entirely

over time data centers will need to radically change the way they dissipate heat. The gold standard, he says, is a process called immersive cooling, in which servers are bathed in a special fluid that transfers heat from the chips. For now, operators are likely to opt for a hybrid model, wherein a high-performance section of the data center will be liquid-cooled while the rest will continue to use air conditioning

Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft have all made water stewardship pledges, promising to use more nonpotable and recycled water and to replenish more water than they consume operationally by 2030. This is the equivalent to offsetting carbon by planting trees—something that looks good on paper but may not directly benefit the communities affected by data centers, because water may be replenished only in places where it’s easy to do so.

degrowth has come under severe criticism from pundits, mainstream economists, and the jet-setting Davos elite

austerity is always imposed for the sake of growth. We have been convinced, for half a century now, that cutting public services is good for us because it will increase competitiveness, balance the budget, and eventually lead to growth. Degrowth, by contrast, is the argument that we can, and should, move away from an economy that exclusively depends on economic growth.

While austerity increases inequality by curbing public services and benefitting the rich through tax cuts and privatisation of government services, degrowth policies focus on democratising production, curbing the wealth and overconsumption of the rich, expanding public services, and increasing equality within and between societies.

Recessions make inequality worse, degrowth is about making sure everyone has their needs met. Recessions often cause bold policies for sustainability to be abandoned for the sake of restarting growth, while degrowth is explicitly for a rapid and decisive transformation.

Because profits are based on making labour and nature as cheap as possible, the very basis of profit is always at risk, for example, through labour shortages or supply bottlenecks. Thus, constant economic expansion will also see constant crises.

As argued by Naomi Klein in the book Shock Doctrine, crises are often taken advantage of by the owners of capital because they make it possible to thrash social and ecological legislation, thus lowering the costs of wages and resources, and further generating windfall profits through inflation.

infrastructure projects which will lock in fossil fuel use for decades continue to be built and expanded, while banks, energy companies and multinationals that are involved in polluting and carbon-intensive industries are bailed out with public money and given lucrative government contracts

A recent UN report found that nine out of 10 countries worldwide have fallen behind on life expectancy, education and living standards. For decades, international organisations have promised to fight global inequality and poverty with growth – but the results are anything but promising.

guarantee access to “universal basic services” like housing, food, healthcare, mobility, and childcare to the general population, by taking them out of the market.

Germany’s three-month experiment with a $9 monthly ticket for all regional and city public transport could serve as an example. It not only reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 1.8 million tonnes – equivalent to powering about 350,000 homes for a year – but it also helped mitigate the effects of high inflation rates, increased freedom of mobility for all, and was quite popular with the public.

a 2020 research paper on energy sufficiency found that it is possible to provide a decent life to the entire global population at 40 percent of current energy use, despite population growth until 2050.

reducing the excess energy and resource use of the rich and making designs more efficient within the framework of a truly circular economy have huge potential to reduce demand

many people would likely possess fewer material objects – but most would have access to better services and society would be more sustainable, just, convivial, and fulfilling

“Things like climate change, earthquakes, drought — they are of course realities of our lives,” Durusu-Tanrıöver said. “But there are human actions that can be taken to foresee what will happen and behave accordingly.

In the half-century leading up to empire’s collapse, the scientists found, the rings inside the tree trunks gradually start to get narrower — suggesting that water shortages were limiting the junipers’ growth. Chemical analyses of the kind of carbon captured in the wood also showed how drought altered the trees at the cellular level.

cuneiform tablets from that time in which Hittite officials fretted over rising food prices and asked for grain to be sent to their cities. But Manning said the empire — which was known for its elaborate water infrastructure projects and massive grain silos in major cities — should have been able to survive this “low frequency” drought.

between 1198 and 1196 B.C., the region was struck by three of the driest years in the entire 1,000-year-long tree ring record. The abrupt spurt of intensely dry weather may have been more than the Hittites could bear. Within a generation, the empire had dissolved.

“Very few societies ever plan for more than one or two disasters happening consecutively.”

“But I think it’s naive to believe that three years of drought would bring down the storerooms of the Hittite empire,” Weiss said. He argues that the longer-term drying trend, which has been documented in other studies, was probably more significant.

“What’s a crisis for some becomes almost an opportunity for others,” Manning said. “You have adaptation and resilience in the form of new states and new economies emerging.”

Durusu-Tanrıöver blames an unsustainable economy and centralized political system. The intensive agricultural practices required to support the capital city probably exhausted the region’s water resources and weakened surrounding ecosystems

parallels to modern urban areas, which are both major sources of planet-warming pollution and especially vulnerable to climate change impacts like extreme heat.

Only half of 1 percent of the world’s water supply is fresh water in liquid form. The rest is saltwater or frozen into glaciers.

its biggest use, globally, is for food production

“It’s much more useful and easier to live with if the water all comes regularly and without these extremes. But more and more, that’s not the case.”

If surface water is in short supply, people often turn to groundwater, which can be rapidly depleted. In India, nearly 60 percent of the population makes a living from farming. For decades, the government supported farmers by subsidizing the cost of diesel to run water pumps and tractors and by purchasing wheat and rice at an artificially high price. Water demand to irrigate rice and wheat fields is contributing to groundwater depletion in the northern region of Punjab.

“More people demand more water, but also each person demands more water as they get wealthier,” Iceland said. “So as you get wealthier, you move from a more grain and vegetable-oriented diet to a more meat-oriented diet.”

Growing and feeding a cow to create one pound of beef requires as much as 1,800 gallons of water, by some estimates. Calorie-for-calorie, that’s almost eight times as much water as vegetables and 20 times as much water as cereals like wheat and corn.

Water-intensive crops like sugar cane and cotton could also drive demand in sub-Saharan Africa, where water use is expected to double over the next 20 years. Many areas still lack infrastructure to reliably deliver water for irrigation. As those pipelines are built, more farmers will have access to water, which will further strain surface water supplies. Inefficient water use and unsustainable management could lower gross domestic product in the region by 6 percent, according to WRI.

One Saudi company is growing alfalfa in the Arizona desert, pulling from the area’s groundwater supplies. That alfalfa is then shipped overseas to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia, where industrial-scale farming of forage crops has been banned to conserve the nation’s water.

Water is also integral to mining lithium and other minerals used in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy infrastructure. These critical minerals are often found in arid places like Chile, which is already water-stressed and is projected to use 20 percent more water by 2050, according to WRI.

Since farming accounts for the most water use globally, experts say that micro-sprinklers and drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation are an important solution.

reducing meat and dairy consumption can decrease individual water footprints. Reducing food waste could also help reduce water use. In the United States, more than a third of food ends up in the landfill. The biggest single contributor to food waste is throwing away food at home.

Libya and Algeria export much of their natural gas and oil to the EU. A third of Italy’s natural gas comes from Algeria, so it is clearly in Europe’s self-interest to prevent northern Mali from becoming the launchpad for attacks

stabilizing Mali is probably doable

Although few Europeans are aware, the EU is already present in Africa. The EU is training security forces in Niger, while the U.K., for example, is working with Mauritania on counterterrorism. An EU naval force has been in action to crush piracy off the Somali coast, while the EU is also training Somali troops in Uganda and paying for African peacekeepers in Somalia. U.K. Foreign Minister William Hague described the EU's involvement in Somalia as a model for Mali, in a BBC radio interview this morning. He added: What we don’t want in these countries like Mali is the 20 years of being a failed state that preceded all of that in Somalia.

optimistic scenario is that, having been slow off the mark, the EU, or at least European countries acting together in one combination or another, is now ready to help in Mali, recognizing that, as the U.S. pivots to Asia, Europe will need to do more to secure its own interests in Africa and the Middle East.

That does not mean we have to either capitulate or bomb Iran.

all states intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, when caught, usually hold capability and bargain with it

The deal’s primary concession is to permit Iran to have a national uranium-enrichment capability, which the JCPOA will allow to grow over time. Iran will never have been forced to abandon enrichment

Iran will add hundreds more significant quantities (bombs’ worth) of unseparated plutonium, annu-ally, to the global stockpile of spent fuel. For now, most of that spent fuelwill return to Russia, but reprocessing, while easier to detect than enrichment, is not barred by the NPT – and Russia is no longer a reliable international partner for the West.

access to military sites rests on voluntary agreements.

blithe assertions of the United States’ (or another intel-ligence community’s) ability to detect violations ignore the fact that acting on information gained from covert or national-technical means relies on the credibility of the nation declassifying and leaking intelligence. As such, this information is prone to multilateral challenge from states that did not share in its collection. The United States attempted this kind of counter-prolifera-tion with flawed intelligence about Iraq, and failed to convince

the deal’s sequencing and mixing of voluntary and binding measures risks encouraging proliferation, in Iran and elsewhere in the region

the deal has produced uncertainty whether or not it is actually implemented

Compared with other risks to human life and well-being, contemporary international terrorism remains a minor problem

The Islamic State killed 31 people in Brussels on Tuesday, but more than half a billion people in Europe were just fine on that day. So when the British government raised the “threat level” and told its citizens to avoid “all but essential travel” to Belgium following Tuesday’s attacks, it is demonstrating a decidedly non-Churchillian panic. Needless to say, that is precisely what groups like the Islamic State want to provoke.

the same toxic blend of media and politics that brought us Donald Trump’s candidacy makes it nearly impossible to have a rational assessment of terrorism

Newspapers, radio, cable news channels, and assorted websites all live for events like this, and they know that hyping the danger will keep people reading, listening, and watching. The Islamic State and its partners really couldn’t ask for a better ally, because overheated media coverage makes weak groups seem more powerful than they really are and helps convince the public they are at greater risk than is in fact the case. As long as media coverage continues to provide the Islamic State et al. with such free and effective publicity, why should these groups ever abandon such tactics?

The Islamic State wouldn’t have to use terrorism if it were strong enough to advance its cause through normal means or if its message were attractive enough to command the loyalty of more than a miniscule fraction of the world’s population (or the world’s Muslims, for that matter). Because it lacks abundant resources and its message is toxic to most people, the Islamic State has to rely on suicide attacks, beheadings, and violent videos to try to scare us into doing something stupid. The Islamic State cannot conquer Europe and impose its weird version of Islam on the more than 500 million people who live there; the most it can hope for is to get European countries to do self-destructive things to themselves in response. Similarly, neither al Qaeda, the Islamic State, nor other extremists could destroy the U.S. economy, undermine the U.S. military, or weaken American resolve directly; but they did achieve some of their goals when they provoked us into invading Iraq and when they convinced two presidents to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the bottomless pit in Afghanistan.

Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it

At the moment, the challenge of contemporary terrorism seems to be bringing out not the best in the West — but the worst. Instead of resolution and grit, we get bluster and hyperbole. Instead of measured threat assessments, patient and careful strategizing, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be achieved, we get symbolic gestures, the abandonment of our own principles, and political posturing.

how would a grown-up like Marshall or Dwight D. Eisenhower respond to this danger? No doubt they’d see it as a serious problem, but anyone who had witnessed the carnage of a world war would not be cowed by intermittent acts of extremist violence, no matter how shocking they are to our sensibilities. They’d use the bully pulpit to shame the fearmongers on Fox and CNN, and they’d never miss an opportunity to remind us that the danger is not, in fact, that great and that we should not, and cannot, live our lives in fear of every shadow and in thrall to monsters of our own imaginings. They would encourage us to live our daily lives as we always have, confident that our societies possess a strength and resilience that will easily outlast the weak and timorous groups that are trying to disrupt us. And then, this summer, they’d take a European vacation.

Here lies the real risk of Europe’s energy situation: So long as it continues to buy Russian oil and gas, it is sending massive amounts of cash to a neighboring dictator.  By keeping the taps on, Putin consolidates his power as Russian dictator.

Diversifying away from fossil fuels would bring security benefits (in addition to some obvious environmental ones), in part by reducing the money sent to petrostates like Russia.

According to the CCVI’s sub-national calculations, of the 50 cities studied, five present an ‘extreme risk’ – Dhaka in Bangladesh; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Manila in the Philippines and Thailand’s Bangkok – while only two London and Paris were classified as ‘low risk.’ Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta, which encompasses the cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan and Foshan and make up China’s manufacturing heartland, are among the most exposed to physical risks from extreme climate-related events.