Selected protest episodes and comparisons. Numbers identify countries in the key below; detailed case definitions and observation periods are in the report. The Geopolitical Economist Research Desk; basemap: Natural Earth, public domain.
RESEARCH REPORT · SOUTH ASIA · TECHNOLOGY & AI
Why young people mobilise, how digital platforms shape unrest, and who gains power. A global research report with detailed India, Europe and Nepal analysis.
OPINIONDanantara’s Global Ambition: From Sovereign Fund to Investment NetworkDanantara’s expanding global investments and strategic partnerships could transform it from a sovereign investment vehicle into a network connecting Indonesian capital, assets and business with global markets.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAThe Twenty-Year War That America Lost in VictoryAfghanistan: The Human, Economic, and Strategic Cost to America, Its Allies, Pakistan, and the Region
OPINION · INDO-PACIFICASEAN Economic Security AlarmASEAN’s strong economic growth is masking widening disparities in technology, investment and productive capacity, raising a critical question: can the region turn growth into genuine economic security for all its members?
OPINIONBMKS: Can Indonesia Turn Nickel Power into Leadership in Asia’s Electric Motorcycle Battery Market?Indonesia’s planned Strategic Minerals and Commodities Exchange could help turn its dominance in nickel production into a competitive advantage in Asia’s electric motorcycle battery industry through stronger price discovery.
OPINION · AMERICASSignals of a Global Geo-economic and Geopolitical ShiftBarrack's statement signals a shift in the global order, as America's enduring economic and financial dominance faces growing geopolitical competition from China and other rising powers, pushing the world toward a more multipolar system.
ANALYSISIslamic Finance Must Deliver More Than Transaction FiguresIndonesia's growing Islamic finance industry must look beyond financing volumes and business commitments to measure its real impact on productivity, market access, and inclusive economic growth.
OPINION · INDO-PACIFICFrom China+1 to ASEAN+1: Building a Regional Production NetworkAs global supply chains shift beyond China, ASEAN has an opportunity to strengthen regional economic integration by connecting its complementary manufacturing, investment, and logistics capabilities.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAPakistan's Mineral Wealth: A Geological Fortune, A Governance Failure and A Geopolitical ContestWhy a Resource-Rich Nation Has Yet to Transform Its Underground Wealth into Broad-Based Prosperity
OPINION · AMERICASUS Inflation Is Surging: An Alarm for the Global Economy?Rising US inflation, driven by surging energy prices and persistent cost-of-living pressures, threatens to reshape global financial conditions and create new economic challenges for emerging markets.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAThe Bhagiratha Wager: Why India's AI Sovereignty Needs the River-Interlinking IdeaThe two projects are not rivals for the same rupee. They are the same wager made at two scales: that a civilisation-state must be able to sense, model and steer the large systems on which its life depends.
OPINION · EUROPEAs Europe Negotiates with China: A Test for the US and a Strategic Opportunity for ASEANEurope's trade negotiations with China test transatlantic economic coordination while creating a strategic opportunity for ASEAN to strengthen its role in global trade.
ANALYSIS · EUROPEEurope's Diesel Dependence Is Now a Strategic LiabilityWashington's Russian diesel waiver is not simply an American sanctions reversal. It exposes Europe's dependence on imported fuel and the limits of a common Western policy when the United States changes course.
ANALYSIS · MIDDLE EAST & N. AFRICABangkok's Debt Test: Who Pays for the Iran War?The IMF and World Bank arrive in Bangkok as the Iran war drives up fuel and fertilizer costs. The crisis is not only about supply. It is about which governments still have room to protect their people, and which are being forced to pass the bill on.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIADelhi’s Barricades and the ‘Vote Theft’ Claim: What the SIR Record ShowsThe October 10 protest put two different questions on the same street: whether the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision has been conducted transparently, and whether a political slogan can turn a disputed roll exercise into proof that an election was stolen. The first deserves an answer. The second still lacks the evidence it claims.
ANALYSIS · EUROPEThe EU Signed Four Trade Deals in Nine Months. None of Them Solves Its Problem.Between January and March 2026, the European Union concluded trade agreements with Mercosur, India and Australia, and began implementing the framework it struck with the United States the summer before. A steel and aluminium deadline arrives on 31 December. This brief asks whether the deals amount to a strategy or a shopping list.
ANALYSIS · AFRICASudan's Civil War and the Regional Balance of PowerSudan's civil war is drawing in regional powers whose competing security and economic interests could make a settlement harder to reach.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe Congo's Cobalt Export Ban Looks Like a Sovereignty Move. Its Own Design Says Otherwise.This analysis examines whether the DRC’s cobalt export restrictions represent genuine resource sovereignty or primarily expanded regulatory control. It argues that the 2025 quota system largely preserved the dominance of foreign-owned producers because its base allocation relied on historical export shares. While the state gained greater discretion over export rights in 2026, the clearest fiscal benefit still comes through existing mining royalties, rather than a substantial redistribution of cobalt rents.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe Lobito Corridor Isn't an Alternative to China's Railway. It's China's Railway, Re-engineered for a Western Strategic Era.The Lobito Corridor is widely described as the West's infrastructure answer to China in Africa's critical minerals race. This analysis finds a more precise pattern: the railway's physical core was rebuilt by Chinese financing and contractors between 2006 and 2015, and what the United States, the European Union and regional development banks have financed since 2022 is the operating concession and modernization of that existing line, not a newly built alternative. The one genuinely new piece, a Zambia-Angola extension, has fallen behind its own timeline, while China has already signed a comparable concession to modernize its own competing corridor.
OPINION · SOUTH ASIAThree Myths the West Gets Wrong About CPECBeyond the headlines: why calling a $62 billion trade corridor a "debt trap" misses what is actually happening on the ground.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe Sahel Didn't Replace France. It Unbundled It.Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are often described as having swapped France for Russia. The record shows something narrower: the security layer of France's presence was replaced quickly, through Wagner and Turkish drones, while the development finance, monetary architecture and institutional access that came with it were not replaced at comparable scale by anyone.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe G20 Common Framework Fixed Who Sits at the Table. It Never Fixed the Clock.The Common Framework brought China and the Paris Club into one restructuring process for the first time. It left the timeline open-ended, and the IMF and World Bank have since called the missing standstill and deadline design gaps. The delay, not the generosity of each settlement, has been its most underpriced cost.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAAfghanistan After NATO: When the Balloon Economy Lost Its AirFrom the pre-9/11 battlefield to two decades of foreign-funded state-building — and now a search for economic survival
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAWhy AI Power Will Be Claimed in the Next Thirty Months, and by WhomIndia and Russia cannot win the race for capacity. They can contest the race for standing, and standing has a shorter clock.
ANALYSIS · RUSSIA & EURASIAThe Price Cap Didn't Stop Russian Oil. It Created a Toll Booth.The price cap was meant to cut Russia's revenue while keeping its oil on the market. Its enforcement built a parallel shipping system whose costs are shared unevenly by exporters, shipowners, insurers, traders and refiners.
ANALYSIS · MIDDLE EAST & N. AFRICAThe Sandals Gatekeepers: How a Houthi–Horn Axis Could Redraw Red Sea PowerIn September the Houthis stopped being an insurgency and became a landlord. With al Shabaab on the opposite shore, the Red Sea faces a dual chokepoint squeeze.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe UAE Doesn't Buy Africa's Goods. It Buys the Gates.Emirati influence in Africa is better measured by position than by pledges: ports, gold markets and farmland place the UAE at the points where African goods change jurisdiction or form.
ANALYSIS · MIDDLE EAST & N. AFRICAThe Middle East’s New Firestorm: The Houthis, Saudi Arabia and the First Test of the Makkah PactThe pact's most important test may not be whether Pakistan and Türkiye enter the Yemen war, but whether the three countries can strengthen Saudi Arabia's defence while preventing the conflict from widening.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAEgypt Didn't Fix Its Foreign Currency Problem. It Rented a Solution.The $35 billion Ras El-Hekma deal with the UAE, not structural reform alone, most immediately eased Egypt's foreign-exchange crisis, arriving just as Houthi attacks collapsed Suez Canal revenue.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAThe Cost of Partition: What the Subcontinent Lost in 1947What was the economic, political and social price of dividing an integrated subcontinent?
ANALYSIS · INDO-PACIFICKazakhstan’s Agricultural Machinery RevolutionHow Astana Is Turning Foreign Competition into Industrial Power
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe Migration Management Trap: No Victims, No Criminals—Only ManagersMigration is neither a threat nor a tragedy. It is a system of management—and everyone is a manager.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAThe Global South's Financial Alternative Isn't the One With BRICS on the DoorAfrica's most consequential break from dependence on external financial intermediaries is not the BRICS-led New Development Bank, but the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, a homegrown initiative moving money across African currencies without routing it through a third one.
OPINION · SOUTH ASIAWhat If We Were Not Enemies?Pakistan and India: two neighbours spending too much energy on each other, while poverty waits at the door
COMMENTARY · MIDDLE EAST & N. AFRICAThe Conflict That Conscripts Its SpectatorsWhy Israel and Palestine turn distant observers into participants in a war over legitimacy
ANALYSIS · AFRICAWhy Gold Can Buy Political Distance and Garments CannotSouth Africa and Lesotho share a currency and a customs union, and absorbed the same American trade shock. The difference between their outcomes is not primarily about politics. It is about what each country sells, and how much of the value of those exports survives when the buyer changes.
COMMENTARY · AMERICASTrump Storms the UN StageTrump's speech to the United Nations put the contours of 'civilizationism' into greater relief. The real test case is not Iran but Cuba — and the ideology shaping both Trump's and Rubio's approach to the western hemisphere.
ANALYSIS · AFRICANigeria's Rating Upgrade Is Partly a War DividendNigeria's sovereign credit rating upgrade is being presented as proof that three years of painful reform have finally paid off. Some of it has. But part of the improvement traces back to an oil price spike tied to a war Nigeria did not start.
ANALYSIS · MIDDLE EAST & N. AFRICABeyond Hormuz: How Saudi Arabia's Oil-Route Redundancy Is Being TestedThe East-West pipeline gives Saudi Arabia an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, but when one route fails, the remaining routes can become new points of vulnerability.
ANALYSIS · AMERICASWhy China Will Get What It Wants From TrumpXi arrives in Washington with rare earths, cheap energy, and leverage. Trump arrives with $6 diesel and a war he can't afford.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAMozambique's LNG Restart Is a Fiscal Bet on TimingMozambique's delayed LNG restart could bring major gas revenues into state coffers just as a global supply wave reshapes prices, buyer leverage and the value of that revenue.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIAGrid, Factory, and the Shared Sovereignty Problem: India-Israel Convergence in Electrical, Automation, and Robotics TechnologyIndia's manufacturing scale without design-and-verification depth, and Israel's design-and-verification depth without manufacturing scale, are mirror-image versions of the same incomplete sovereignty position. Converging them is not merely good industrial policy.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAMozambique's Mining Law Is a Fiscal Bet on Resource SovereigntyMozambique's 15% state mining stake could increase public control over mineral resources, but its success will depend on whether the country can attract the investment needed to turn that stake into actual revenue.
BRIEFING · SOUTH ASIAPakistan, Afghanistan Trade: From a Historic Lifeline to an Economic DeadlockWhen two neighbours close their doors, both sides pay the price.
ANALYSIS · AFRICAWho Defines Tunisia's Geopolitical Value? How Its Environment Shapes the State ItselfTunisia's geopolitical value is not simply imposed by Europe, America or China. It is produced through an unequal exchange in which external demands reshape domestic incentives, and eventually the state itself.
ANALYSIS · SOUTH ASIABangladesh's BRICS Absence Was About More Than ProtocolDhaka's no-show in New Delhi exposed a narrowing strategic space between BRICS-style financial autonomy and new U.S.-linked economic-security commitments.
ANALYSIS · EUROPECanada Cannot Join Europe. It Can Get Most of the Way There.Ottawa is exploring a status that does not exist, with a bloc whose treaties say it cannot join, to escape a neighbour that takes seven in ten of its exports. This brief sets out what is actually on the table, what is not, and how to price the outcomes.
ANALYSIS · RUSSIA & EURASIAWashington Is Now Defending Russia's Oil RefineriesAmerican diesel passed $6 a gallon on Friday. On Sunday the President asked Ukraine to stop destroying the refineries of the country he is sanctioning. The two facts are the same fact.
ANALYSIS · MIDDLE EAST & N. AFRICAThe Last Way Around Hormuz Is ClosedDrones launched from Iraq shut the pipeline that carried five million barrels a day past the strait. Brent is above $107, the ten-year Treasury is at 4.97%, and the Federal Reserve meets on Wednesday.No recent analysis for this region on the front page. See the topic pages or the full archive.
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