Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev on Sunday announced Moscow’s intention to preserve geographical spheres “of privileged interest” on or near its borders as part of a five point foreign policy statement in a television interview.
The announcement, in the wake of the recent conflict in Georgia, is likely to raise the political temperature in neighbouring states, especially [...]

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Many military officers are pushing back against Defense Secretary Gates’ focus on preparing for more ‘asymmetric’ fighting rather than for a large, conventional conflict.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. is not a fighter pilot, wing commander or war planner. But he is waging what many officers consider a crucial battle: ensuring that the [...]

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Corporate-led, finance-driven globalisation has successfully transferred wealth from labour to capital. This has resulted in inequality and exclusion on a massive scale which, combined with the pressure on water and other environmental resources, is likely to fuel new conflicts.
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By Peter Zeihan
As students of geopolitics, we at Stratfor tend not to get overexcited when this or that plan for regional peace is tabled. Many of the world’s conflicts are geographic in nature, and changes in government or policy only rarely supersede the hard topography that we see as the dominant sculptor of the international [...]

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As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.
The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing environmental stress. Climate change, water scarcity [...]

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Since the late 1990s, there has been a flood of research on natural resources and civil war. This article reviews 14 recent cross-national econometric studies, and many qualitative studies, that cast light on the relationship between natural resources and civil war. It suggests that collectively they imply four underlying regularities: first, oil increases the likelihood [...]

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WHEN Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, was asked to ponder the future of the world before an audience of powerful businessmen and politicians, at a meeting in Switzerland earlier this year, he could have chosen any topic he liked. What he focused on was both a hoary old favourite, and a newly popular preoccupation, of [...]

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