What’s new? South Sudan’s rulers keep a tight grip on its oil wealth, blocking outside scrutiny and obstructing reforms urgently needed to ease both popular hardships and political tensions. Along with International Monetary Fund support, a peace deal has kickstarted new efforts to fix the country’s broken finances. Why does it …

A group of French senators arrived in Taiwan for a five-day visit Wednesday following a large Chinese show of force with fighter jets near the self-ruled island, and Beijing warned the trip will hurt its ties with France. The group, led by senator Alain Richard, will meet with President Tsai …

If Russia has recently regarded Turkey warily as a result of Turkey’s successful backing of Azerbaijan in its recent war with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh, being on opposite sides in Syria and Libya, Turkey’s supply of arms to Ukraine, and Turkey’s refusal to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in the …

The seemingly warm relations between the Russian leadership and the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement that many in the West consider a terrorist organization, have been a kind of mystery for a rather long time. In 2003, Russia declared the Taliban an “extremist organization,” and banned the movement by a …

It is difficult to speak of European ambitions for international crisis management against the backdrop of the images from Kabul over the past few weeks, which seem to tell a story of the failure of Western interventionist policies. But that discussion is urgently needed. Yes, it will be necessary to …

Even with its physical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria in tatters, the Islamic State is still managing to wage a global insurgency, maintaining an operational presence in at least 20 separate countries. The organization’s global diffusion recently led a group of leading terrorism experts to describe ISIS as an “adhocracy,” …

For much of the Syrian civil war, the southern city of Deraa and the surrounding Houran Plains, an agricultural region near the Jordanian border, were divided between government forces and armed rebels. Fighting raged back and forth, killing thousands. It was not until Russia backed a government offensive in 2018 …

Around the world, states locked in conflict with jihadists are trying to devise policies to reintegrate disillusioned militants into society. In Nigeria, a program targeting defectors from the violent extremist group Boko Haram offers a window into the promise and pitfalls of such efforts. For the past 12 years, Nigeria …

In early May, in a televised address, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, declared martial law in North Kivu and Ituri, two provinces on the country’s eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda, and placed them under military rule. In justifying this draconian measure, Tshisekedi invoked the regular mass …

The transitional government in Sudan announced last month that it will extradite former dictator Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he is wanted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in Sudan’s Darfur region. The move was a sign that the new government …