Browsing: Opinions

Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund and Senegal announced a new loan programme worth $2.2bn. This came after a previous deal was suspended following the discovery in July 2024 of concealed debt equivalent to approximately 25 percent of the country’s GDP, which brought public debt to over 130 percent of GDP, one of the…

It is increasingly difficult to regard what is happening in the West Bank as merely a series of measures that the Israeli government justifies on security grounds or as part of counterterrorism operations. Taken together, the cumulative pattern and expanding scope of these measures point to a broader political and territorial trajectory: one aimed at…

This week, Botswana is marking 60 years of independence from Britain with Diamond Jubilee celebrations across the country. The anniversary underscores the scale of the country’s transformation. In 1966, the former Bechuanaland Protectorate was among the world’s poorest countries, with barely 12 kilometres of paved road, just 22 university graduates and about 100 secondary-school graduates.

A shift is taking place in Washington. Senate Democrats are moving to sanction individuals and entities involved in Israel’s E1 settlement project, one of the most consequential efforts to reshape the occupied West Bank. The timing is significant. Reports that the project may have been put on hold raise the question of whether the pause…

The school year started in occupied East Jerusalem with the news that 45,000 Palestinian children are now studying a curriculum put together by the Israeli authorities. That is more than a third of the Palestinian students in the occupied territory and almost double the number from the previous year.

It was hardly surprising that Tehran chose the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York as the platform for its latest offer. After nearly seven months of war with the United States, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi returned with a plan that, on its face, says the waterway through which roughly a fifth of…

The Strait of Hormuz remains the most perilous choke point on the global map as Iran continues to disrupt traffic by attacking vessels. A recent proposal by the Islamic Republic to open the waterway within seven days raised hopes that the situation could go back to normal. United States President Donald Trump, however, rejected the…

In a world torn apart by geopolitical bullying and geoeconomic warfare, great-power conflict and inequality that concentrates wealth and statecraft in the hands of a few, the Bandung Conference is gaining renewed relevance.

Basal human desires never change: to be positively unique, sexually desired, to live in luxury, to be popular, to hold power, and finally, to achieve immortality. The idea of eternal life can be found in almost every religious text, and even the world’s oldest surviving literary epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contains poems detailing Gilgamesh’s…

Amid the worsening global energy crisis triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran, European countries, desperate for alternative energy supplies, trade routes and partnerships, have looked across the Mediterranean for solutions.