Audrey Irvine-Broque | Jessica DempseyJan-Jun, 2023A hamstrung multilateral agreement It was the early morning hours of December 19th, 2022, and government negotiators were still locked in closed-door meetings. Behind those doors was also the document that everyone was here to see: the final draft of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the crowning achievement of the two-week negotiation, and the many weeks and years of meetings that came before that. Under the shadow of the...
Antonio Penedo Picos
Multipolar dispute: between old mistakes and new uncertainties (Part II)
Irene López | Marta Cazorla“Only the dead have seen the end of the war”, said Plato in Menexenus. More than 20 centuries have passed since then and, undeniably, war seems to be an eternal, inextinguishable problem, threatening to rear its ugly head even in civilised Europe, in a post-heroic era we thought was strained by terrorism and so-called hybrid wars but free of the kind of conflicts so typical of the 20th century. The Russian-Ukrainian war, however, is more classic than hybrid, with...
A More Multipolar but not more Democratic International Scenario: The Geopolitical (dis)Order of a World in Reconfiguration
Idoia VillanuevaOct, 2022When we talk about geopolitical reordering, we refer to the collapse of the international order that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the international institutional structure dates back to the end of WWII—think of the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF—it was the end of the Cold War that brought the unipolar hegemony of the United States and its neoliberal economic model. This hegemony has been supported for decades by a combination of what...
Geopolitics and the generative limits of the ungovernable
Rafael HeiberOn decadent realism In a text published shortly before his death [1][1] Bruno Latour, Is Europe's soil changing beneath our feet? Sep 2022, 92-97. Available here: https://geopolitique.eu/en/articles/is-europes-soil-changing-beneath-our-feet/, Bruno Latour questioned Europe’s role in the transition towards a new idea of nation, and thus, of the world. Marked by an armed conflict bringing back fears of a nuclear disaster and by the struggle against extractive regime dragging the...
A geopolitical European Union to what end?
Axel Ruppert“We have now arguably gone further down that path in the past weeks than we did in the previous decade” said Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union (EU) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy one month after Russia started its unprovoked and unjustifiable war in Ukraine [1][1] Josep Borrell (2022): Europe in the Interregnum: our geopolitical awakening after Ukraine. Available at:...
Abolishing Geopolitics and Building a World Without State Violence
Ray AchesonThank you to Nela Porobić for reviewing this article. As Russia’s illegal and brutal war in Ukraine continues to rage, there is some sense of shift in international politics. Some see it as the bloody opening to a “multipolar” world order, in which several “great powers” are staking out spheres of influence and centres of power, to be distributed among the few instead of just the one. Others appear to see it as the logical “end” of the US empire, finally languishing after decades of...
The Geopolitics of Migratory Horror
Jacques RamírezTo Roma Being born is that small geographic accident over which the individual holds no power. However, determines the amenities or obstacles we face in moving around the world. Our lives are determined by different emotional topographies, as the current world is by a set of mobilities, which are radically different for the inhabitants of the global North and South. It is not the same being born in Tamaulipas (Mexico) than it is to do so in Toulouse (France) and, nevertheless,...
Movement and (in)security: from the politics of surveillance to the politics of compassion
María LoisMigration, understood as displacement and the movement of people or groups on a temporary or permanent basis, would seem to be part and parcel of the history of humanity, or rather, of the global history of humanity. We are taught that human beings moved around, even in prehistoric times, and that they moved in search of a better life, whatever the meaning of “better” may have been. It could have meant greater access to food or more favourable living conditions, it could have been...
Multipolar dispute: between old mistakes and new uncertainties
Marta Cazorla | Irene LópezAfter the 2020 pandemic, which exponentially increased the level of uncertainty that we westerners were accustomed to living with, 2022 surprised us with yet another unexpected phenomenon, an occurrence that security-focussed think tanks believed to be a thing of the past: international war. War “like we used to have”, with tanks and armies, bombed out cities and—to the delight of those harbouring nostalgia for the 20th century—the looming threat of nuclear war. A...
International relations and the energy crisis: what has changed since war broke out in ukraine?
Rafael FernándezFifty years ago the Yom Kippur War marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of international energy relations. With more than a hint of déjà vu, we are living in times reminiscent of those critical years: an embargo on Russian oil; Russia’s subsequent response of reducing and then interrupting Europe’s gas supply; the price hikes on both forms of fuel; inflation shock; stagflation; energy saving measures, energy security returning to the forefront of national...