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Geopolitics
Power, statecraft and the long view.
8 new picks worth reading, every week.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 28/10/2026
Salmon from the desert: the politics behind Xinjiang's fish farms
How does one of the most landlocked places on Earth end up farming salmon, grouper and lobster? Ian Urbina investigates the aquaculture boom in Xinjiang, from the aquifers beneath the Taklamakan to village dividend ceremonies and the supply chains that carry the fish abroad. Read it to see how food security, land seizures, labour transfers and propaganda fit into one industry. We picked it for its depth: mapping, company records and state media, set against the wider economics of fish farming. Urbina founded The Outlaw Ocean Project, whose wider investigation this belongs to; we found no other stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Jordan's border economy after Syria's war: smugglers, drugs and neglected towns
What happens to a border economy when a neighbour's civil war turns petty smuggling into a drug trade? Armenak Tokmajyan and Laith Qerbaa trace the Jordan-Syria frontier since the 1970s, and ask what Assad's fall has changed for the towns along it. Read it for a long view of security policy and border life. We picked it for its history and detail; it ends with policy recommendations. Tokmajyan is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Qerbaa a lawyer and researcher in Jordan; UK government research funding supported it, and we found no other stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Bolivia's gold rush and why no one can stop it
Original title: La fiebre del oro que enferma a Bolivia
Why has a gold rush in Bolivia's Amazon proved so hard to control? Fernando Molina follows the metal from cooperative dredges in northern La Paz to smuggled bullion at Santa Cruz airport, through a porous concession system, mercury poisoning and a central bank short of dollars. Read it to see how one boom can be livelihood, criminal economy and political bargaining chip at once. We picked it for explaining a mechanism few outsiders follow, without casting miners as villains. Molina writes for Nueva Sociedad, a centre-left journal funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation; we found no stake. In Spanish.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Why Beijing won't forgive Tonga's debt, and who pays instead
Why won't Beijing write off the loans weighing on Tonga's budget, and who covers the repayments instead? Jack Salmon explains how the kind of Chinese loan signed years ago decides what relief a country can hope for, and what blocks a write-off even for a tiny debtor. Read it for a clear account of how China's Eximbank lends, and for the uncomfortable question it puts to Canberra. We picked it for packing much evidence into a short piece. Salmon is an independent researcher on development finance and Chinese lending in the Pacific; we found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Kinmen drinks from Fujian: a pipe under the Taiwan Strait
What does it mean when an island held by Taiwan drinks water piped from mainland China? Leonie Spangenberg tells the story of the undersea pipeline from Fujian to Kinmen, from a local water shortage to a symbol each side reads differently. Read it for a small, concrete case of how infrastructure binds places that politics keeps apart, and what that leaves an island on the old front line to weigh. We picked it as this issue's wildcard: short, specific and unlike anything else we reviewed. Spangenberg is an economic sinologist who studied in Shanghai and Seoul; we found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Niger's failed mutiny and the Sahel juntas' two armies
What did a failed mutiny in Niamey in August reveal about the military regimes of the Sahel? Moussa Traoure looks past the night of gunfire to who took up arms and why, and compares Niger with Mali and Burkina Faso. Read it to understand how these juntas protect themselves against their own officers, and what that protection costs the armies fighting jihadist groups. We picked it as a clear argument from an African outlet on a story mostly covered as breaking news; it draws on other analysts rather than new reporting. Traoure writes for African Arguments; we found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Ethiopia's hunt for a coastline and the wars it could start
Original title: La desesperada carrera etíope por el acceso al mar
Why could a strip of coast Ethiopia never obtained start a war in the Horn of Africa? Héctor Barros retraces the 2024 memorandum with Somaliland and the chain it set off, through Somalia, Egypt, Turkey, Israel and Eritrea, and back to Ethiopia's own roads to the sea. Read it for a patient map of how a port question tangled with older disputes over the Nile and Tigray. We picked it as the clearest account we found of a crisis usually told in fragments, though it draws on published reporting. Barros writes for Nueva Sociedad; we found no stake. In Spanish.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Syria's disappeared children and the institutions that kept the records
When children of detainees vanished into Syrian care homes under Assad, who knew? Zeina Allouch, writing after new reporting on SOS Children's Villages, asks what responsibility falls on the international organisations overseeing those homes, and sets Syria beside Argentina, Ukraine and Canada. Read it for an argument about records: who holds them, who sees them, and how a label like 'orphan' can erase a family. We picked it from Daraj, new to our sources; it builds on others' investigations. Allouch, a child protection expert in Lebanon, has put this view to investigators; we found no other stake.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 28/10/2026
Wood for war: how Wagner was paid in Central African forest
How does a mercenary army get paid when the state it protects has no money? In the Central African Republic, part of the answer was a forest. Amadou Diarra follows a timber concession granted as Wagner's fighters retook territory, using sanctions files, customs data and transparency reports. Read it for a clear view of how the resources-for-security model works, and why it outlives the companies that front it. We picked it for its paper trail: every step is sourced. Diarra is a researcher in Rabat who studies Russia's role in Africa; we found no stake.
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★★★★★ Added 28/10/2026
The Argentine soldier known only to the Kremlin
Original title: Soldado argentino sólo conocido por el Kremlin
How does an out-of-work Argentine lorry driver end up in the Russian army? Ernesto Picco traces one man's path from a Facebook job offer to the front in Ukraine, with documents, messages and the voice of his mother in Buenos Aires. Read it for what headlines about foreign recruits leave out: who is targeted, how the trap works and what families face afterwards. We picked it as original reporting that names those involved, from a region the war rarely reaches in the news. Picco reports for Revista Anfibia, an Argentine long-form magazine; we found no stake. In Spanish.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Iraq's fuel crisis exposes its oil dependence
Why does one of the world's biggest oil producers run out of petrol? Laurent Perpigna Iban reports from Baghdad, with traders, a former oil minister and analysts, on a fuel crisis the war around Hormuz exposed rather than caused. Read it to understand how an economy can sit on vast reserves and still be this fragile, and why the fixes keep failing. We picked it because it explains a mechanism through the people living it, not through a market chart. Perpigna Iban is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for over a decade; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Yemen's Salafist commanders are shaping its battlefield
Who is actually fighting for Yemen's Red Sea coast? Not the Saudi and Emirati governments that pay for the war, but a handful of commanders who started out as Salafist preachers, with loyalties to religious networks and foreign patrons at the same time. Mareb al-Ward profiles three of them in more detail on their careers and rivalries than news reports ever carry. Read it to understand who holds the front line, and why that matters for where the war goes next. We picked it because reporting on Yemen by Yemeni writers is rare in English. The author is a Yemeni journalist and researcher; we found no stake in the story.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Dreaming of Zhu Rongji's China
What does China's educated middle class mourn when it mourns Zhu Rongji? When the former premier died in August, the economist Zhao Jian wrote an obituary that WeChat removed within a day. Sinification translates it in full, with an introduction by James Farquharson. Read it for a mood that rarely reaches foreign readers in Chinese voices: nostalgia, unease and a loss of trust that no single policy explains. We picked it as a primary source the censors chose to remove. Zhao, an economist and founder of the Xijing Institute, campaigns for the market reforms he remembers; we found no other stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
National security on the silver screen
Why is China's spy agency making prime-time television? Zack Chiang looks at the Ministry of State Security's turn to producing popular dramas about espionage and Taiwan, and at what the ministry says it wants from them. Read it to see how propaganda now works through entertainment rather than lectures, and why that matters for how ordinary viewers in China think about Taiwan. We picked it because it reads official sources closely and adds data rather than speculation. Chiang writes for the China Media Project, which studies Chinese media and propaganda; we found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Myanmar's emerging governance mosaic
Who will govern Myanmar after the generals? Since the 2021 coup, dozens of groups have begun building their own administrations, and few people outside the country follow them. Dipannita Maria Bagh, Anders K. Moeller and Moe Thuzar map that patchwork in a long, careful overview. Read it if you want Myanmar beyond the junta: the experiments, the rivalries between them and why outside recognition matters. We picked it as the clearest map we have seen of a story most coverage ignores. The authors write for ISEAS, a research institute in Singapore; we found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Uganda: the entrenchment of a hereditary military oligarchy
Is Uganda heading for a dynastic handover dressed as an election? Omar Kalinge-Nnyago argues that the transfer of power from Museveni to his son is already under way, through the army, a loyalist movement and the courts, and asks who could still mediate it. Read it for an East African view of a succession that most foreign coverage treats as gossip. We picked it as a clear, structured argument from inside the region; it is an argument, not reporting, and says so. Kalinge-Nnyago teaches governance in East Africa and opposes the succession; we found no other stake.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 27/10/2026
“Secure and controllable”: How Beijing is writing Europe out of its systems
Is China quietly removing European technology from its own infrastructure? Janka Oertel draws on more than 1,600 Chinese procurement documents to trace how, and how far. Read it to understand a strategy that has run for a decade, and why it changes what reciprocity should mean for Europe. We picked it for documentary evidence behind a claim usually made on instinct. Oertel writes for ECFR, a European foreign-policy think tank; we found no stake.
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★★★★★ Added 27/10/2026
China’s Strategic Reassessment of India
How does Beijing now see India? Yun Sun draws on ten research trips to China and many exchanges with Chinese experts, quoting their debate in its own terms. Read it for a rare view of Chinese strategic thinking from the inside, and what it means for US policy. We picked it as field research on a relationship that most Western writing views from Washington or Delhi. Sun writes for War on the Rocks, a site on strategy and security; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
The other face of the Chinese miracle is in Hunan
Original title: L’autre visage du miracle chinois est dans le Hunan
What can one railway city in Hunan tell us about China? Ruohan Xie's report follows Zhuzhou's factories from the Soviet-assisted industry of the 1950s to today. Read it for China seen from a province rather than from Beijing and Shanghai, with history that explains the present. We picked it as rare field reporting from inside China's industrial heartland. Xie writes for Le Grand Continent, a French review of European geopolitics; we found no stake. In French.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
The End of Primacy Without Pain: Why the Domestic Foundation of American Power Is Crumbling
Why does American foreign policy keep lurching between extremes? Stephen Wertheim argues the answer lies at home, in a widening gap between what foreign-policy elites want and what voters will pay for. Read it for a long, demanding argument that rewards a slow read. We picked it because it explains a pattern rather than a single decision. Wertheim writes for the Carnegie Endowment and argues for US restraint, a position stated openly; we found no other stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
How Sudan Became a Laboratory for Drone Warfare, Thanks to Abu Dhabi
How did Sudan's war become a testing ground for drones, and who supplies them? Yasir Zaidan went back to Khartoum, where Zaidan grew up, for the first time since the war began, and traces the shift to long-range strikes. Read it for a view of the war from the ground, and for an argument about foreign responsibility. We picked it for first-hand reporting from a war that gets little coverage. Zaidan writes for War on the Rocks; the piece argues openly that the UAE prolongs the war, and we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Marching into the Duma: The cost of Putin’s push for war veterans in parliament
Did Putin's war veterans win their way into Russia's parliament? Mikhail Komin reads beneath the official election results to test the Kremlin's story of a new elite forged at the front. Read it to see what the numbers suggest about the vote, and about how Russians view returning soldiers. We picked it for careful data work on an election usually dismissed as theatre. Komin writes for ECFR, a European foreign-policy think tank; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
The Christian genesis of North Korea’s personality cult
Where did North Korea's personality cult come from? Jonathan Cheng looks beyond the Soviet model to an unexpected source in Kim Il Sung's own upbringing. Read it for a fresh explanation of why the Kim cult outgrew those of Stalin and Mao, with a remarkable cast of characters. We picked it as history that changes how a familiar regime looks. Cheng writes for Engelsberg Ideas, an essay magazine published by a Swedish foundation; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Hezbollah’s Venezuelan money machine
How did Venezuela become a financial base for Hezbollah, and what remains of it now? Magnus Ranstorp traces two decades of drug money, gold and sanctions evasion linking Caracas, Hezbollah and Iran. Read it to understand a network usually glimpsed only in court cases. We picked it for an expert's long view of a story that rarely joins up. Ranstorp advised Argentine court investigators on the 1992 bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires; we found no stake.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 19/10/2026
Portraits of the Sacrificed Generation of Donbass
Original title: Portraits de la génération sacrifiée du Donbass
An interview with photojournalist Marion Péhée, who has followed a group of teenagers from the town of Chtchastia in Luhansk since 2016. After the Russian occupation the group scattered: some fought for Ukraine, some for Russia, several died. She describes how publishing her earlier photographs now carries real risk for people still in occupied territory. Ten years of access most reporting never gets, on the generation the war actually consumed.
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★★★★★ Added 19/10/2026
Foucault's forgotten encounter and geopolitics
Original title: La rencontre oubliée de Foucault et la géopolitique
Recounts, from a participant’s vantage, the 1975 Paris meeting between geographer Yves Lacoste and Michel Foucault that became the founding document of Hérodote the following year. Lacoste pressed Foucault on his limited use of geography despite his spatial metaphors, and the exchange ended with Foucault conceding that power, knowledge, territory and spatial control together amount to a kind of geopolitics. A rare first-hand account of where a discipline’s vocabulary actually came from.
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★★★★★ Added 19/10/2026
Xi's Geopolitical Pivot for Acceleration Lies in Guangxi
Original title: Le pivot géopolitique de l’accélération de Xi se trouve au Guangxi
Traces how Beijing is building Guangxi into a trade corridor to ASEAN, using free-trade rules, rail and port links and the Pinglu canal to compensate for the province’s late start under Cold War-era tensions with Vietnam. The authors go past the strategy document to the balance sheet: a reported 2.4 billion yuan in incentives for Hozon New Energy, later said to have ceased operations, and continuing difficulty attracting foreign capital. Concludes the plan has not yet produced durable industrial gains, which is the part most coverage of China’s regional strategies skips.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Russian economy: public spending nears OECD average
Original title: Économie russe : les dépenses publiques se rapprochent de la moyenne de l’OCDE
Citing economist Alexandre Isakov, reports Russia’s consolidated public spending at around 39 per cent of GDP in 2025, closing in on the OECD average of 42.6 per cent, driven mainly by a defence budget set to rise 32 per cent by 2027. Isakov warns that crossing 40 per cent of GDP risks crowding out business investment, on top of a profit tax rise to 25 per cent and a VAT rise to 22 per cent already under way. A compact read on what funding the war is actually costing the rest of the Russian economy.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Beijing prepares an unprecedented control on the export of its AI models
Original title: Pékin prépare un contrôle inédit sur l’exportation de ses modèles d’IA
China’s commerce and science ministries released a draft export-control catalogue on 16 October adding 40 technologies, 23 of them in AI, covering model weights above a performance threshold, AI agents, compute-cluster architecture and sub-14 nanometre chip design. The draft also proposes automatic licensing for open-source releases, but the piece flags a real tension: labs such as DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and Kimi could be caught by the same rule Beijing says is meant to protect them. Framed by Beijing as security policy rather than a trade weapon, which is itself worth noting.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
BYD expands EV shipping fleet as wars upend freight costs and key trade routes
Reports that BYD is adding its own car-carrying ships because a global shortage of vessels, worsened by conflict-driven rerouting, is capping how many vehicles it can get out of China. A concrete look at how a carmaker ends up owning shipping capacity rather than buying it, and at war’s second-order effects on an industry that has nothing to do with the fighting itself.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Western open-weight models still can’t beat China
From a Rest of World San Francisco event, reports experts concluding that Chinese open-weight models now offer strong capability at lower cost than the nearest Western equivalents, even as the labs behind them struggle to turn that lead into revenue. Named, on-record disagreement rather than a single analyst’s take, on a question that keeps getting asserted rather than tested.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
AI has won the markets, but it is losing global opinion
Original title: L’IA a gagné les marchés, mais elle est en train de perdre l’opinion mondiale
Survey data show 71 per cent of respondents have used an AI tool in the past six months, yet only 18 per cent hold a positive view of it, the lowest trust score of any technology asked about. Respondents favour government authorisation with independent testing over industry self-regulation, which only 7 per cent back. Treats the adoption-versus-trust gap as the actual story, rather than either number alone.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Cognitive vassalisation is an existential threat
Original title: La vassalisation cognitive est une menace existentielle
Argues that Europe’s reliance on US AI platforms is a cognitive, security and linguistic risk, not only a cost line. Its sharper point is about interface design: systems built for maximum ease encourage people to offload thinking, while the friction that protects cognition is commercially unattractive to build. Cites Mistral’s Large 4 as evidence Europe still has a shot, but the argument is that not building is itself a choice that deepens dependence.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
The French language in the age of total automation
Original title: La langue française à l’ère de l’automatisation intégrale
Achille Mbembe argues French spread through centuries of migration, trade and colonial contact rather than decree, and that African speakers reshaped it as much as they absorbed it. Turns that history against the handful of companies now building AI language tools, which he argues optimise languages for reach and engagement at the cost of nuance. Proposes treating languages as a shared commons rather than a resource, with real ecological and democratic stakes if that fails.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
The Case for DUV Controls
Saif Khan of the Center for Technology and Statecraft argues that halting exports of deep ultraviolet lithography tools, not the more publicised bans on leading-edge chips, is the lever that actually caps China’s long-run compute. His own modelling puts China’s ceiling at roughly ten million domestically made chips a year by the mid-2030s against a US figure near a billion H100-equivalents, though he flags wide error bars. Worth reading as the strongest case for a specific policy from someone who wants that policy adopted.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
What if, at bottom, there was nothing in Putin's head?
Original title: Et si, au fond, dans la tête de Poutine il n’y avait rien ?
Russian investigative journalist Roman Badanine, interviewed around his new book on Putin, argues the more useful question is not what Putin believes but what he has actually done, since the gap between his statements and his conduct has become the whole story. Describes a Kremlin system where each concealment requires another to cover it, and reads the war in Ukraine partly as an attempt to rewrite Putin’s own legacy. An author discussing his own book, so treat the framing as his case rather than settled fact.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Europe has to relearn how to plan
Original title: L’Europe doit réapprendre à planifier
Rejects both standard explanations for China’s lead in electric vehicles, neither subsidies alone nor entrepreneurial culture, and argues the real difference is that Beijing coordinates state and private action across the whole value chain while Europe does not. Treats Europe’s tariffs and local-content rules as symptom management, and argues for a genuinely democratic form of value-chain planning covering minerals, batteries, demand and charging infrastructure. A structural argument rather than a response to this month’s tariff news.
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★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Giorgia Meloni chose to back Kyiv against Trump
Original title: Giorgia Meloni a choisi de soutenir Kiev contre Trump
The full text of Giorgia Meloni’s 14 October address to the Italian Senate ahead of the European Council, on competitiveness, energy costs, the 2028 to 2034 EU budget and migration. Its sharpest section calls the US decision to ease sanctions on Russian diesel very risky and argues Europe must speak with one voice rather than let Washington negotiate around it. The primary text, not an account of it, which is rarer than it should be on this subject.
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★★★☆☆ Added 19/10/2026
Will developing nations be able to handle millions of AI agents?
Asks what happens when Meta’s and OpenAI’s new personal AI agents, trained mostly on wealthy-world data and behaviour, reach markets with different infrastructure, languages and family structures. Short on hard data by Rest of World’s usual standard, but the question itself, whether adoption outruns fit, is one the launch coverage skips entirely.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 12/10/2026
European defence against the national bureaucratic-industrial complex
Original title: La défense européenne face au complexe bureaucratique-industriel national
Argues Europe’s defence build-up is held back less by money or political will than by a “national bureaucratic-industrial barrier”: EU-level decisions get diluted once they hit national budgets and procurement, leaving under 20 per cent of equipment bought through joint purchasing. Proposes five concrete levers, including a credible EU defence budget through 2034 and steering national procurement toward European cooperation, rather than another statement of intent.
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180 picks · page 1 of 5
How we rate
How the stars work
★★★★★ Original reporting or data, explains a mechanism, argues fairly.
★★★★ Excellent, one soft spot: a frame, narrow scope, or an interview.
★★★ Solid, if the subject already interests you.
Rated on the piece, never its politics. A frame tag, in italics, names the position a piece argues from so you can weigh it before you read.