Human Rights Violations in the Taliban’s Afghanistan
HRRL presents the report "Revenge Killings and Other Serious Human Rights Violations in Afghanistan in the Aftermath of the Taliban’s Seizure of Power." The findings will be discussed by Afghanistan experts such as Richard Bennett, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan, and HRW researcher Fereshta Abbasi.
Governance Through Regime Complexity: What Role for the EU in the African Security Regime Complex?
The international response to armed conflict in Africa often takes the form of a regime complex characterized by institutional proliferation, overlap, unclear hierarchies, and multiple interconnections. At the same time, the course of conflict is hardly predictable. In such an environment, how can component units (institutional fora) of a regime complex effectively govern through complexity? We explore this question by focusing on the EU as an important actor within regime complexes. Building on the regime complexity literature and complexity theory, we identify four conditions. We argue that actors who operate as resource hubs, create complementarity, support system self‐organization, and practice adaptive forms of peacebuilding are best placed to manage regime complexity. Empirically we probe these assumptions in the context of the Sahelian security regime complex and the role the EU is playing in it.
Anarchy is a Bridge: Russia and China are Pushing NATO and Japan Together
After nearly 70 years of distant relations, security ties between NATO and Japan are flourishing. A number of important initiatives have recently been adopted, including high-level political dialogues, joint military training, and cooperation in science, technology, and cyber security. This article considers recent developments in NATO-Japan relations and in particular their origins, drivers and implications.
Digital Supply Chain Dependency and Resilience
While a growing body of literature addresses how states increasingly aim to secure their digital domains and mitigate dependencies, less attention has been paid to how infrastructural and architectural configurations shape their ability to do so. This paper provides a novel approach to studying cyber security and digital dependencies, paying attention to how the everyday business decisions by private companies affect states’ ability to ensure security. Every mobile application relies on a multitude of microservices, many of which are provided by independent vendors and service providers operating through various infrastructural configurations across borders in an a-territorial global network. In this paper, we unpack such digital supply chains to examine the technical cross-border services, infrastructural configurations, and locations of various microservices on which popular mobile applications depend. We argue that these dependencies have differing effects on the resilience of digital technologies at the national level but that addressing these dependencies requires different and sometimes contradictory interventions. To study this phenomenon, we develop a methodology for exploring this phenomenon empirically by tracing and examining the dispersed and frequently implicit dependencies in some of the most widely used mobile applications. To analyse these dependencies, we record raw traffic streams at a point in time seen across various mobile applications. Subsequently locating these microservices geographically and to privately owned networks, our study maps dependencies in the case studies of Oslo, Barcelona, Paris, Zagreb, Mexico City, and Dublin.
WEBINAR: The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans left
How stable is the current Taliban regime in Afghanistan?
PODCAST: AI and geopolitics