In search of a better image, Russia has created a whole arsenal of soft power since the mid-2000s according to a Western model.

The German Legislation on Improving Law Enforcement in Social Networks (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz – NetzDG), which came into force on October 1, 2017, is the legislative response to how social networks handle complaints about illegal content. 

Over the past five years, several political and security developments have made it increasingly necessary to look at European Union (EU) / North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) relations through a different lens.

2019 has marked a fundamental turning point in the energy transition of the European Union (EU). 

This paper explores the latest developments in key spheres of the Russia-India relationship in order to identify the state of bilateral ties at a time when South Asia has turned into an area of geopolitical contest of both global and regional powers.

Restrictive measures are a major instrument of the European Union (EU)’s external action, which has emerged as one of the world’s leading sanctions emitters. The EU has thus leveraged the size of its market and its economic and financial clout (trade relations, aid policy and bilateral agreements).

Russia’s Syrian campaign has demonstrated the returning challenge the West faces in the underwater domain.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, if not from the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) itself, relations with United States have proven to be a central factor in China’s strategic calculus and a major driver of Chinese foreign policy. Indeed, America’s ability to weigh on all spheres of China’s national security – from domestic to regional and global – poses fundamental challenges for Beijing.

Confronted with a strained strategic environment and a relative decline of its resource base, Australia is currently going through a historical shift of its global status. 

The world plastic production has been multiplied by 23 since 1964 to reach 348 million tonnes (mt) in 2017. This production level is expected to double in the next 20 years, largely because of the significant growth in plastic consumption in developing countries. Today, China is the largest producer of plastics (representing nearly 30% of global production) and the European Union (EU) comes second (18.5%) with 64 mt. 

China’s 2018 energy consumption data capture the ambiguity of Beijing’s attitude toward climate change. Energy demand rose by 3.5% to 3,155 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe), with an increase of coal consumption (though its share in the overall energy mix is decreasing) and an expected greenhouse gas (GHG) emission surge of 2.3%, to 9.5 gigatonnes (Gt) for the same year. 

With the expansion of modern production and consumption patterns to large African cities, population growth and urbanization, production of municipal waste has risen sharply. Unregulated dumps are becoming numerous and have strong negative health effects by polluting the local environment. 

The new European Union (EU) strategy on India marks a major moment of departure in EU-India relations.

The Mediterranean region has been identified as one of the most affected regions by climate change endangering human security at the food-water-energy nexus. 

Only devised a few years ago, the concept of the Indo-Pacific seeks to express a new configuration of the world’s globalization. In terms of economic exchange and power distribution, the Indo-Pacific is a unitary region spanning from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, where all the major powers meet, size up and confront one another.

With sluggish economies that create few jobs, soaring demographics, international aid often considered as revenue, and a security apparatus unable to protect national territory and its population, are the Sahel states losing control of their own domestic areas?

The European Union did respond to the massive influx of migrants in 2015, but with short-term measures, which have widened the divisions between member states.

The major transformations that are occurring on the Chinese gas market have profound repercussions on the global gas and LNG markets, especially on trade, investment and prices. In just two years, China has become the world’s first gas importer and is on track to become the largest importer of Liquefied natural gas (LNG).

China’s gas industry has been moving into a new era. China’s natural gas demand has skyrocketed amid a state campaign that encourages coal-to-gas switching. In just two years, China added 75 billion cubic meters (bcm) to global gas demand, the equivalent of the UK gas market, the second largest European market. Despite steadily rising, Chinese gas production has not been able to cope with such a huge increase in demand and gas imports have also surged.

The recent calls for the militarization of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) require first a comprehensive democratization of European foreign and security policy.

While it was left behind from power politics for the last decades, Africa is at the core of a renewed attention from global powers.

RAMSES 2020. A World without a Compass?, written by Ifri's research team and external experts, offers an in-depth and up-to-date analysis of geopolitics in today’s world.

International trade is one of the themes that used to constitute the very raison d’être of the G7, alongside international security and energy policy. 

The G7 has made the fight against inequality a crosscutting issue for the Biarritz Summit. The Development Ministerial will address issues of vulnerability, especially the Sahel Alliance. This focus on inequalities and vulnerabilities is nonetheless inseparable from a general discussion on financing sustainable development.

Global governance emerged to deal with the gap between the plurality and diversity of states and the collective and transnational nature of increasingly complex global affairs. 

The Think Tank 7 (T7) is an engagement group that brings together the leading Think Tanks from the G7 countries in order to analyze and make recommendations on key issues of the G7 presidency. 

The near imminent breakdown of the INF Treaty (1987) has strongly intensified political and public concerns about the failure of traditional arms control and the escalation of a new nuclear arms race.

Since 2015, refugee resettlement programmes have grown significantly in Europe becoming a key component of European asylum strategy. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron committed to resettle in France 10,000 refugees until the end of 2019. Refugees from Syria and Africa are increasingly welcome in small towns and rural areas.

Information dominance through the exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum has become a cornerstone of military superiority. However, it is now threatened by increasingly advanced electronic warfare capabilities.

Although the first and foremost domain in the history of warfare, Land power has been dissociated from the concept of “strategic forces” for some time now, as these generally referred to long-range and/or high-yield strike capabilities, above all nuclear weapons. 

Europe has become a frontrunner in fixed offshore wind. Can this success story be replicated with floating offshore wind, a technology that would lift the sea depth constraint and thus open up wider market opportunities? This research study looks at the main success factors for this emerging industry.

Airports in the Gulf emirates are major transit hubs in global airline networks today. Apart from their “advantageous” geographical location, their development results primarily from the ambitions of political actors seeking to maintain their power. This has led especially to the creation of the “Gulf companies”, namely Emirates Airline (Dubai), Etihad Airways (Abu Dhabi) and Qatar Airways (Doha). However, the three emirates are not following identical strategies. Within the unstable context of the Middle East, it is important to look at the development dynamics of these companies which symbolize the global reach of small but powerful political entities on the international stage.

The Greater Eurasia project has emerged as the poster-child of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, symbolic of a resurgent and self-confident Russia.

For the second consecutive year, the coal sector registered good results in 2018. Global coal demand continues to increase (+0.7% in 2018), reversing the trend observed in 2015-16. Coal accounted for 26% of global primary energy consumption, maintaining its position as the second-largest energy source after crude oil, and the first for electricity generation with 38% of global power generation.

Operational command structures have always been able to adapt to the strategic context. However, they now face a new challenge: high intensity threats. 

On June 26, French President Emmanuel Macron will make his first, what is deemed to be a long overdue visit to Japan, a year after his previous travels to Asia led him to China (January 2018), India (March 2018), and Australia (May 2018).

It is a classic exercise to imagine what today’s world would be like if all satellites were shut down. The exact consequences of such a scenario, which is not unlikely given the inherent vulnerability of space systems to natural, accidental and deliberate interferences, are however difficult to appreciate, even for specialists. 

The architecture of democracy is complex, coupling a legal framework to a social foundation that allows it to take root.

The war in Yemen has entered its fifth year, and the situation is more complex than ever.