U.S. efforts to uproot al-Qaeda’s Yemeni franchise often overlooked the country’s mercurial politics. As part of our series The Legacy of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”, Peter Salisbury explains that the sectarianism the group espoused is still rife on all sides of Yemen’s war. In early 2014, I found …

This Emerging Insights paper analyses Moscow’s ambitions for its ‘pivot to the East’, assesses its progress and evaluates the impact of the Indo-Pacific concept on Russian strategy. Russia’s ‘turn to the East’ (povorot na vostok) has been underway for around a decade. Before 2014, the ‘Pivot’ was principally concerned with …

Russia’s cautious accommodation of the Taliban shows it will likely combine diplomacy with deterrence in the coming months. Since Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul on 15 August, Russia has cautiously accommodated the Taliban’s seizure of power. Diplomats, such as Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan Dmitry Zhirnov and President Vladimir Putin’s …