To adapt its foreign policy to new challenges, Germany must overcome certain taboos inherited from its history.

The global car market has been shrinking since 2018. This is a key economic sector for Germany whose producers belong to the Top 15 carmakers worldwide. Yet they are running the risk of being outclassed and eventually replaced, given emerging actors in the USA and China.

Although the Central African Republic remains a very weakly connected country with an Internet penetration rate of 14% in 2020, citizens begin to appropriate the use of social networks.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic and the passing of  President Pierre Nkurunziza on June 8, 2020, the election cycle (presidential, legislative, senatorial, communal and hillside elections) have been upheld and went smoothly. Not only has the ruling party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD) remained in power, but it has also consolidated its dominance over an institutional system that had been modified with the 2018 constitutional revision.

The charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order.

This paper analyses the common and divergent interests of Japan and the EU in the Indo-Pacific and identifies the most promising areas for cooperation.

When we look back and think about some of the decisive moments in the West’s attitude towards China, it is rather symbolic that all goes back to Tiananmen Square, 1989.

Baden-Württemberg's economic and social structure offered good starting conditions for center-right parties from the beginning, which the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) initially knew how to use for itself. From 1953 to 2011 the Prime Minister belonged to the CDU. In 2011 the Greens and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) won an election over the CDU for the first time. Winfried Kretschmann was elected the first Green Prime Minister in a German state.

The coming of age of a digital “info sphere” has dramatically changed the nature of military information support strategy. 

Poverty, a major consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, is set to increase exponentially throughout the world, even though it was supposed to disappear in its most extreme form by 2030.

Rich countries have committed $ 12 trillion to tackle COVID-19 at national level. Official development assistance only represents $ 150 billion per year.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led China to develop aggressive communication, with diplomatic missions using social media extensively to spread a positive image of Chinese achievements and to criticize Western countries.

Russia is an outlier in the international consensus on climate change.

While migration from Africa is the priority of European policies for the control of the European Union’s external borders, African migration dynamics are above all regional. Sub-Saharan migration is poorly connected to transcontinental flows: more than 70% remain in Africa.

To what extent has the COVID-19 pandemic affected defense priorities across Europe?

Diversification is a key tenet of South Korea’s New Southern Policy (NSP). In the economic sphere, however, the need for diversification is apparently less pressing as, unlike what is observed in the diplomatic and security domains, Korea’s economic partnerships are less unbalanced and are not (or not as clearly) polarized on the big Four (China, Japan, the United States, and Russia).

Beginning with early voting in Zanzibar on October 27, 2020, Tanzanians went to the polls in a general election for district councilors, Members of Parliament (MPs) and the President. As official results began to be declared, it became clear that Tanzania’s long-time ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, had won a landslide. 

In France, the launch of the Quad Plus raised little attention.

Some twenty international personalities from different horizons and backgrounds were asked to reflect on the impact of the Biden presidency for the future of European strategic autonomy.

2020 has been a challenging year for the world economy. Although the magnitude of the shock triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic differed widely from one country to another, no economy was left unscathed. 

In September 2020, the Ifri Center for Asian Studies held an online event on Japan’s cybersecurity strategy.

France has traditionally taken a security-based approach to the fight against terror. It was a latecomer to the field of radicalization prevention and the establishment of disengagement programs aimed at jihadists. It only started to think seriously about the issue in 2013 and its first attempts involved certain irregularities.

The New Southern Policy (NSP), the signature foreign policy initiative by President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea (ROK) that was officially launched in November 2017, has opened a new chapter in Seoul’s relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as India.

Europeans first grew aware of a possible pandemic exactly one year ago. The wave is here. It has submerged the world, claiming many lives and causing tremendous collateral damage. 

From basic training to the conduct of international exercises, operational readiness planning aim to make the components of military capabilities (equipment, doctrines, operational know-hows) consistent with the operational contracts decided at the strategic level. 

What are the next geopolitical challenges of the century? The global pandemic has altered the equilibrium between Asia and the West and sealed the rift between China and the United States, accentuating the world’s shift towards the East. On this polarized chessboard, two fault lines converge: environmental degradation and technological propagation where the main strategic and economic rivalries are now being played out.

From the dawn of China’s space program in the mid-1950s to the ability to build, launch and operate satellites in low Earth and geosynchronous orbits from the 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is in 2021 a complete space power with autonomous access to outer space and to deep-space exploration.

Whereas the strong ties between France and its former colonies in Africa have been studied extensively, the relationships between Portugal and Lusophone Africa have attracted less attention. This editorial offers insights into the political, economic, and diplomatic interactions between Lisbon and different African countries.

The topic of nuclear risk reduction has gained momentum in the international security debate among policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and experts. 

For most of United States (US) history, environmental issues enjoyed bipartisan support. While Democratic President Johnson signed the Clean Air Act in 1963, Republican President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. America’s “environmental decade” culminated under President Carter, with Congress enacting ambitious environmental legislation. 

In the context of increasing awareness of the climate crisis, environmental parties across the EU obtained high scores in the European elections of May 2019, reaching 20% in Germany, 17% in Ireland, 16% in Finland and 13 % in France. Meanwhile, far-right parties gained strength.

With the advent of New Space, Russia is engaged in a race against time to preserve one of its major industrial assets.

With a look at evolutions over the past three decades, the thematic chapters cover French defense institutions and civil-military relations, the transformation of armed forces, nuclear deterrence, the defense industry, military interventions, and alliances.

During his term in office (2012-2020), Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought to demonstrate Japan's high level of interest in Africa, including by pledging a total of $ 60 billion in financial support at the 2013 and 2016 Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) summits and announcing his vision for a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP) at the TICAD-VI in Nairobi.

The COVID-19 crisis has made clear the importance of resilient supply chains and effective economic security.

Energy and electricity policy, planning and regulation in South Africa has been slow and bureaucratic, lacking visionary leadership, and marred by uncertainty. Policy positions and actions taken have tended to be reactive, and driven more by crisis management than by forward-looking leadership.

This sad year ends with a pandemic that continues in full swing over a large part of the planet, especially in the United States and Europe, with no other reassuring prospect than that of one or more vaccines, which is already a lot. But that’s not the subject I want to focus on in this eighth letter, the last one for 2020. Internationally, two other facts have dominated the scene in recent months.

At the end of year 2020, the European space sector finds itself at a crossroads between challenges and opportunities. While the 2019 European Space Agency (ESA) Ministerial Conference marked a progression in terms of budgets, a sign of renewed space ambitions, the technological and financial acceleration from the United States represents a disruptive scenario that poses threats to the continuity of European space capabilities. 

Since 2018, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU - Christlich Demokratische Union) has been confronted with a long-lasting leadership crisis. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s favorite candidate for the position of party leader, was not able to maintain herself at the top of the party and resigned after only 15 months.

On December 9, 2020 will be celebrated the 115^th anniversary of the 1905 law on French secularism (laïcité). On the very same day, a new law project will be presented by the French government, with the objective of further strengthening the “republican values” in order to fight against so-called “Islamist separatism” within French society.