Category: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Gerard Toal, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

On Nov. 21, 1995, in the conference room of the Hope Hotel on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia initialed an agreement that brought the three-and-a-half-year war in Bosnia to an end. Three weeks later, the General Framework Agreement, known as the Dayton Peace Accords, was signed.

The war over Bosnia was the most brutal and devastating of the wars spawned by the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Attacked from the moment it moved toward independence in early 1992 by militias supported by the neighboring nations of Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia was born under fire and nearly perished. Half of its population of 4.4 million were forcefully displaced, and over 100,000 people died during the conflict.

Ethnic cleansing and war crimes marked the war, including the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak victims were murdered by the army of Republika Srpska.

The peace agreed to at Dayton left Bosnia, or Bosnia and Herzegovina as it is known in full, intact as a country but divided into two entities, Republika Srpska – a secessionist entity proclaimed by ethnonationalist Serbs in January 1992 – and the Bosnian Federation. Meanwhile, an international military force was deployed to secure the peace.

But it was an ugly peace: The patient was saved, but left deformed and weak. As scholars who have written extensively about the Bosnian war and its aftermath, we believe the legacy of the Dayton Peace Accords, 30 years on, is decidedly mixed.

The sorting of ethno-territories

Bosnia’s life after Dayton can be divided into three roughly decade-long eras: reconstruction, stalemate and permanent crisis.

The first decade was the toughest but most hopeful. With peace enforced by an international force including U.S. and Russian troops, Bosnians returned to their war-shattered country.

But restoring the country’s social fabric proved hard. While the international community aspired to reverse ethnic cleansing, the obstacles were immense.

A once proudly multicultural country was left divided into separate ethno-territories.

Under the Dayton Accords, Bosnians were promised the right to return home. But this was complicated by the fact that many houses were destroyed, while others were occupied by those who had forcefully displaced them.

By the summer of 2004, the UNHCR, the United Nations agency coordinating returns after the peace agreement, announced that it had achieved 1 million returns. What became evident, however, is that “minority returns” – that is, people returning to places where they would be a minority community – were limited. Many returnees reacquired their old property after a struggle but promptly sold it to build a life elsewhere among people who were the same ethnicity as them.

Cross-ethnic trust was largely shattered by wartime experiences.

Incompatible horizons

The first decade was peak liberal international statebuilding. An international high representative charged with “civilian implementation” of the Dayton Accords centralized control over military and intelligence functions at the state level. A central state border service and investigations agency was created. So also was a central state court, state-level criminal codes and an indirect taxation authority to unify indirect tax collection and finance state institutions.

Bosnia’s trajectory, though, stalled in 2006 when the high representative stepped back from state building. In April 2006, a package of constitutional amendments designed to streamline Dayton by strengthening central state institutions fell two votes short in the state Parliament.

Surprisingly, the package was not blocked by parties from Republika Srpska, traditional obstructionists, but by former Prime Minister Haris Silajdžić’s Bosniak-dominated party. This failure set the stage for a decade of polarization and stalemate.

Silajdžić campaigned for abolition of the entities – Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Federation – and the creation of a single united Bosnia. Republika Srpska’s leading politician, Milorad Dodik, answered by floating the prohibited idea of an entity independence referendum.

With the high representative largely passive, Bosnia was stalemated between incompatible horizons, each side strong enough to block but too weak to prevail.

Dodik turned referendum talk in Republika Srpska into a steady repertoire of threat, while casting central state institutions in Sarajevo as rotten, artificial and destined to fail. In the process, Dodik and his family got rich, creating a classic patronal power network across Republika Srpska.

With the media thoroughly divided by wartime allegiances, the public sphere was filled with incendiary rhetoric.

The word “inat” is a shared idiom across Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. It is stubborn uprightness, a combination of narcissism and spite. Politics increasingly rewarded those who could perform “inat” more vividly than their rivals.

Central state institutions in Bosnia did not collapse but became sclerotic. Procedures multiplied, confidence thinned and decision-making settled into a theater of anticipatory vetoes where the point was less to implement a program than to keep imagined endpoints – the creation of a unified nation on one side; an independent Republika Srpska on the other – alive and to make the other side feel the pain of their impossibility.

A country on the brink

A decade of stalemate slowly evolved into a condition of permanent crisis.

In November 2015, Bosnia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the marking of Jan. 9 as “Republika Srpska Day” – a celebration of virtual independence – was discriminatory and illegal under human rights law.

Dodik, the Republika Srpska’s de facto leader, responded by organizing an extralegal referendum whose result asserted that the Republika Srpska population wanted the date retained.

Defiance evolved into active subversion of the constitutional order and provisions of Dayton. The Republika Srpska parliament passed laws that directly challenged central state institutions built in the first postwar decade. With weak enforcement capacity, the Bosnian state was unable to command compliance.

When in 2021 a new high representative was appointed over Russian objections, Dodik rejected his authority outright. By then, Bosnia was routinely described as “on the brink” of war.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw Dodik side firmly with Moscow. He visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow frequently. The Republika Srpska media relayed Russian propaganda, featuring correspondents reporting live from Russia’s front lines.

Meanwhile, people and institutions in the Bosnian Federation aligned with Ukraine and the West. A giant geopolitical rift ran through the country: two entities, two different realities.

In February 2025, the drama peaked when Bosnia’s Constitutional Court barred Dodik from political life. Predictably, he rejected the top court’s authority, and a standoff ensured. Dodik hired figures close to the Trump administration such as Rudy Giuliani to lobby on his behalf. By the end of October 2025, they had succeeded in getting U.S. sanctions on Dodik removed in exchange for him agreeing to leave the Republika Srpska presidency.

The ugly peace endures

To distant observers, Bosnia may register as a success story because it has not returned to war. But the peace forged at Dayton bound Bosnia in a straitjacket that has kept it divided since.

Ethnonationalism and crony capitalism have thrived while many Bosnians have left or aspire to do so.

Yet, unloved as it may be today, the Dayton Accords preserved Bosnia. It stopped a war, enabled freedom of movement, permitted economic revival, regularized elections, revived cultural life and allowed more than 1 million people to exercise their right of return.

As peace agreements go, the Dayton Peace Accords wasn’t the worst – but it is far from the best.

Gerard Toal received funding from the US National Science Foundation in the past for research on Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Adis Maksić does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Dayton Peace Accords at 30: An ugly peace that has prevented a return to war over Bosnia – https://theconversation.com/the-dayton-peace-accords-at-30-an-ugly-peace-that-has-prevented-a-return-to-war-over-bosnia-268424

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Andy Hogg, Professor and Director of ACCESS-NRI, Australian National University

Over the past week we’ve witnessed the many political discussions that go with the territory of a COP – or, more verbosely, the “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”.

COP30 is the latest event in annual meetings aiming to reach global agreement on how to address climate change. But political events such as COP base the need for action on available science – to understand recent changes and to predict the magnitude and impact of future change.

This information is provided through other international activities – such as regular assessment reports that are written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These reports are based on the best available scientific knowledge.

But how exactly do they evaluate what will happen in the future?

Climate futures

Predictions of future climate change are based on several key planks of evidence. These include the fundamental physics of radiation in our atmosphere, the trends in observed climate and longer-term records of ancient climates.

But there is only one way to incorporate the complex feedbacks and dynamics required to make quantitative predictions. And that is by using climate models. Climate models use supercomputers to solve the complex equations needed to make climate projections.

The most sophisticated climate models are known as Earth system models. They ingest our knowledge of climate physics, radiation, chemistry, biology and fluid dynamics to simulate the evolution of the entire Earth system.

Climate centres from many different nations develop Earth system models, and contribute to a global data project known as CMIP – the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. This data is then used by scientists worldwide to better understand the possible trajectories of, and to study the reasons for, future change.

Regional climate changes

Data from Earth system models cover the whole globe, but there is a catch. The computational expense of these models means that we run them at low resolution – that is, aggregating information onto grid boxes that are about 100 kilometres across. This puts the entirety of Melbourne, for example, within a single grid box.

But the climate information that we need to guide future adaptation needs more detailed information. For this, scientists use tools known as “downscaling”, or regional climate projections. These take the global projections and produce higher resolution information over a limited region.

This high-resolution information feeds into products such as the recently released National Climate Risk Assessment from the Australian Climate Service. Similar climate information is used by local governments, businesses and industry to understand their exposure to climate risk.

We’re doing it all again

Each iteration of CMIP, which began in 1995, has brought about improvements which have helped us to better understand our global climate.

For example, CMIP5 (from the late 2000s) helped us to understand carbon feedbacks and the predictability of the climate system. The CMIP6 generation of climate models (from the late 2010s) provided more accurate simulation of clouds and aerosols, and a wider set of possible future scenarios.

Now we are doing it all again – to create what will be known as CMIP7. Why would we do this?

The first reason is that more climate information has become available since CMIP6. CMIP simulations use “scenarios” to look at the range of plausible futures of climate change under different socio-economic and policy pathways.

For CMIP6, the “future” scenarios were started from the year 2015, using the information available at the time. We now have an extra decade of information to refine our projections.

The second reason is that CMIP7 shifts more to emissions-driven simulations for carbon dioxide, allowing models to calculate atmospheric concentrations on the fly.

Simulating how atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases interact with the land and ocean (known as the carbon cycle) allows feedbacks and potential tipping points to be calculated. However, this also requires a more complex Earth system model.

Australia’s CMIP7 contribution aims to incorporate new science and knowledge with a refined carbon cycle which includes Australian vegetation, bushfires, land use change and improved ocean biology.

Thirdly, this time around we aim to run models at higher resolution – such as having 16 grid boxes over Melbourne, instead of one. This is possible thanks to advances in computational capability and modelling software.

We’ve started the process

This week, Australia’s newest Earth system model version – known as ACCESS-ESM1.6 – is initiating the first phase in the CMIP7 contribution process, which is supported through the National Environmental Science Program Climate Systems Hub.

This includes a long “preindustrial spinup”, where we run the model for about 1,000 virtual years using greenhouse gas levels from before the industrial revolution until the stable conditions are reached and available observations are matched. The spinup is required to ensure that all subsequent simulations start from a physically consistent state.

In the next phase we’ll run a “historical” simulation that emulates the last 200 years of civilisation. Only then can we implement a range of future scenarios and complete our climate projections.

This work is a partnership between CSIRO and Australia’s climate simulator (ACCESS-NRI), with support from university-based scientists and the Bureau of Meteorology. It’s an exercise that will take multiple years, consume hundreds of millions of compute hours on high performance supercomputers of the National Computational Infrastructure, and will produce about 8 petabytes of data – or 8 million gigabytes – to be processed and submitted to CMIP7.

As the only Southern Hemisphere nation submitting to past CMIPs, Australia has a unique and crucial perspective.

This data will also be used for higher resolution regional climate projections, which will then be used for future climate risk assessments and adaptation plans. It will also inform IPCC’s next assessment report.

Ultimately, a future COP will translate this evidence into global action to further refine our climate targets.

---

The authors acknowledge the work of Christine Chung and Sugata Narsey from the Bureau of Meteorology in preparing this article

Andy Hogg works for Australia’s Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI), based at the Australian National University. He receives funding for ACCESS-NRI from the Department of Education through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, and receives research funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Tilo Ziehn receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program.

– ref. Behind every COP is a global data project that predicts Earth’s future. Here’s how it works – https://theconversation.com/behind-every-cop-is-a-global-data-project-that-predicts-earths-future-heres-how-it-works-269893

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Zaya Rustamova, Associate Professor of Spanish, Kennesaw State University

In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Francisco Franco’s death on Nov. 20, 2025, the left-leaning Spanish government led a vigil honoring the many victims of the dictator’s regime.

While the exact numbers remain impossible to determine, historians estimate that Franco’s men killed up to 100,000 people during the brutal Spanish Civil War, and tens of thousands were executed during his dictatorial rule from 1939 until his death in 1975. Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned, sent to labor camps or subjected to political persecution. To these figures, we must add the roughly half a million people who fled or were forced into exile.

Among the multitudes of Francoism’s victims were women and children who endured psychological and physical abuse in prisons, orphanages and asylums. Yet for decades their experiences have remained marginal in the public narrative – highlighting the uneven acknowledgment of different groups of victims amid Spain’s broader struggle to confront its past.

Still, their stories remain alive in the testimonies of the women who were imprisoned by the regime. In the summer of 2024, I conducted research at the Documentation Center of Historical Memory in Salamanca, collecting documented written accounts of traumatic experiences suffered by Spain’s female population under Franco. They reveal the extent to which Francoist repression was structured through gender, framing women as inherently subordinate and subjecting those who resisted the regime’s patriarchal order to especially severe punishment.

Franco’s gendered violence

My study explores the testimonies of women imprisoned during the civil war or subsequent decades, all of whom endured suffering related to their motherhood. While some were detained for their ideological allegiance to the republic that preceded Franco’s ascent, others had no formal partisan affiliations or were merely related to men who did.

These women suffered what many survivors and historians have described as a “double punishment” – targeted not only for their beliefs or associations but just for being women and mothers.

The earliest testimony I came across was from a woman detained in 1939, just three years after Franco, a military general, led an uprising against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic that precipitated the civil war and his subsequent reign.

Under Franco’s dictatorial regime, women’s roles were rigidly controlled by the ideology of National Catholicism, which linked femininity, motherhood and loyalty to the state. The church reinforced this vision, “dictating that women served the fatherland through self-sacrifice and dedication to the common good.”

Those who defied the patriarchy were criminalized and subjected to “re-education” focused on religious values.

Women’s so-called “redemption” under this reeducation was no less violent than their confinement. As one witness described, in May of 1939 the auditorium of Las Ventas prison was prepared to celebrate “two girls and a boy (… recently) born in prison.” During the ceremony, a choir “composed of forty inmates, including opera singers, music teachers, violinists, and amateurs,” had to perform the national anthems with the fascist arm-raised salute.

Yet confinement itself was particularly brutal.

According to Josefina García, a woman imprisoned during the 1940s, guards regularly insulted and beat inmates. “If you were at home behaving like decent women, you wouldn’t be here,” she recalled one saying. García continued: “Of course, they used a crude, sexist language. The police ‘used words’ in a way that sometimes leave a mark deeper than a bruise.”

Gender also played a role in the type of punishment prisoners received. Following their arrest, women were subjected to head shaving, forced ingestion of castor oil and the subsequent public humiliation of being made to walk in circles while defecating. In addition, they were often subjected to sexual violence by prison guards or interrogating officers.

Recounting her experience, another witness reported the case of an 18-year-old sister of a guerrilla fighter in Valencia who “was subjected to terrible torture, stripped naked in a room with several Civil Guards who pricked her breasts, genitals, and stomach with … needles.”

Motherhood as battleground

One of the most painful aspects of Franco’s repression was the forced separation of mothers and their children.

Upon incarceration, women frequently lost custody of their sons and daughters, who were placed in orphanages or adopted by families loyal to Franco and his regime. Such violent ruptures of the maternal bond were more than an act of personal cruelty – they were a calculated political strategy rooted in the broader Francoist ideology.

Since Francoism promoted an image of women as obedient wives and self-sacrificing mothers devoted to the Catholic family model, Republican women were demonized as immoral, dangerous and unworthy of motherhood.

By stripping women of their children, the regime both punished them and reinforced its narrative that only “loyal” women could be true mothers.

Meanwhile, child-rearing or birth during incarceration was marked by fear and uncertainty. In certain cases, newborns were allowed to stay with their mothers for a short time. However, a lack of proper nourishment and mental exhaustion made breastfeeding an impossible task.

At times, women who began to lactate were denied the possibility of nursing their infants, leading to physical pain and emotional torment.

More often, babies were permanently taken away altogether, deemed at risk of being “contaminated” by their mothers’ ideological values.

“When I was arrested, my son was five days old,” one victim, Carmen Caamaño, reported. “About a year later, they said I no longer needed to breastfeed him and took the child out of the prison. Some friends had to take him in because I had no family there.”

There were also countless cases in which children were imprisoned alongside their mothers. With no other relatives to care for them, these children suffered from hunger, disease and a lack of basic hygiene in their overcrowded cells. For mothers, the psychological burden was immense as they were forced to watch their children suffer, yet they had no power to protect them.

In the summer of 1941, about six or seven children died daily in these prisons from starvation and diseases, according to accounts of survivors.

Trauma and resistance

Alongside trauma, there were also moments of resistance.

Mothers in prison looked for ways to nurture their children despite scarcity and fear. Testimonies I reviewed relate cases of inmates sharing food, telling stories and protecting children as best they could. These small acts of care were a quiet but powerful form of defiance.

Yet for many women, the trauma of these losses never healed. Survivors often speak of the pain of separation as an open wound that lasted a lifetime. Children raised in prisons or separated from their families carried the scars into adulthood.

Even decades after the regime ended, many descendants still struggle with the weight of this silenced past. Yet because of Spain’s Amnesty Act of 1977, which was granted for past political crimes, those responsible for atrocities committed under Franco have seldom been held accountable.

Histories of the Franco years often leave the grief of the intergenerational trauma in the shadows. And for the victims themselves, the traumatic motherhood experiences under his dictatorship reveal more than just personal suffering – they expose how authoritarian power can reach into the most intimate parts of life.

Zaya Rustamova received funding to conduct this study from Radow J. Norman College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kennesaw State Unviversity.

– ref. 50 years after Franco’s death, giving a voice to Spanish dictator’s imprisoned mothers – https://theconversation.com/50-years-after-francos-death-giving-a-voice-to-spanish-dictators-imprisoned-mothers-249931

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Awni Etaywe, Lecturer in Linguistics | Forensic Linguist Analysing Cyber Terrorism, Threatening Communications and Incitement | Media Researcher Investigating How Language Shapes Peace, Compassion and Empathy, Charles Darwin University

Words are powerful tools. Violent extremists know this well, often choosing their phrasing extremely carefully to build loyalty among their followers. When wielded just so, they can do enormous harm.

Because their words are chosen so deliberately, researchers can look for patterns, trends and red flags. What exactly do extremists say that builds followings, incites hatred and violence, and can ultimately lead to deadly attacks?

Our research looking at the rhetoric of the extremists behind some of recent history’s worst terror attacks sheds light on this question. We’ve identified six key tactics terrorists use to mobilise people behind their cause.

By being able to spot the tactics, we can dismantle the language and protect people and communities from radicalisation.

Divide and conquer

In previous work, we examined the language of far-right incitement in the Christchurch shooter’s 87-page manifesto.

Our latest work analysed jihadist texts. These included al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama bin Laden’s speeches after September 11, and Islamic State’s former leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s statements in the organisation’s magazine.

We used linguistic analysis to focus on how language was used strategically to both reduce and accentuate cultural differences. We examined how inciters use words to create bonds and obligations to mobilise violence.

We found two main types of incitement messages: those that strengthen connections in the group to build a shared purpose, and those that separate the group from outsiders and paint others as enemies.

This kind of messaging can divide society and make people strongly identify with the group. As a result, following the group’s rules – even extreme actions – can feel like proof someone truly belongs and is loyal.

But in violent extremism, commands alone are often insufficient to inspire violence or mobilise support. So how do extremists use these underlying strategies to get people to act?

6 rhetorical tactics

Once violence has been established as a moral duty by isolating the group, there are six key techniques extremists deploy.

1. Weaponise difference

Extremists don’t just label outsiders as different. They frame them as immoral and dangerous. “Us” versus “them” becomes the backdrop for later calls to action.

Inciters link loyalty and honour to threats from outsiders. Osama bin Laden urged violence against pro-US Arab governments, calling them “traitor and collaborator governments […] created to annihilate Jihad”.

The Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, attacked nongovernmental organisations supporting immigrants, calling them “traitors”. He called immigrants “anti-white scum” and compared them to a “nest of vipers” that must be destroyed.

Dehumanising outsiders strengthens group bonds and can have deadly consequences.

2. Evoking heroes and icons

Extremists use famous people, places or events to make their audience feel part of a bigger story. Names like “Saladin” or places like “Hagia Sophia” and “Londinium” link followers to icons or past struggles, making them feel like defenders or avengers.

Tarrant said:

this Pakistani Muslim invader now sits as representative for the people of London. Londinium, the very heart of the British Isles. What better sign of the white rebirth than the removal of this invader?

3. Repurposing religious texts

Extremists use not religion itself, but twisted and decontextualised versions of religious texts to justify violence.

Quoting God or religious figures makes the message seem legitimate and frames violence as a moral or spiritual duty. This strengthens followers’ loyalty and belief that violent acts serve “our” shared values.

Tarrant quoted Pope Urban II of the first Crusade, while Al-Baghdadi misquoted Allah.

4. Tailored grievances and inflammatory language

Inciters tailor grievances before audiences voice them. Words like “humiliation”, “injustice” or “cultural loss” help bind followers to a common cause.

Osama bin Laden spoke of Muslims living in “oppression” and “contempt”. While the Christchurch shooter warned of “paedophile politicians” and that immigration would “destroy our communities”.

Naming and labelling unites followers and divides outsiders.

5. Metaphors and messages of kinship

Osama bin Laden hailed his audience through metaphor as “soldiers of Allah”, while describing enemies “under the banner of the cross”. Such contrasts intensify loyalty and hostility at once.

On the other hand, kinship terms pull people in. Words like “brothers”, “sisters”, “we” and “our” make strangers feel like family. Calling followers “our Muslim brothers” turns political duty into a personal, moral duty — like protecting family.

Tarrant did this too. His line “why should you have peace when your other brothers in Europe face certain war?” links violence to family safety and future generations.

By contrast, “they” and “them” mark outsiders as non-kin. That sharp us versus them grammar strips empathy and makes exclusion or harm easier to justify.

6. Coercion into violent actions

In addition to commands, recommendations, or warnings that explicitly instruct someone to do something, there’s also coercion. It makes violence feel like care for the group.

Extremists do this by framing violence as duty. Phrases like “it is permissible” in jihadist texts shift violence from taboo to obligation, as in “it is permissible to take away their property and spill their blood”.

They also frame the outgroup as an existential threat. This justifies preemptive violence as self-defence or necessity, as in Tarrant’s “mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic binds […]”.

What can be done with this research?

Extremist rhetoric does not just exist online. It echoes in protests, forums and political debates.

The “Great Replacement theory” once confined to extremist manifestos now surfaces in mainstream anti-immigration protests.

ASIO has warned the “promotion of communal violence” is rising, with politically motivated violence “flashing red” to authorities.

---

Read more:
How Australia’s anti-immigration rallies were amplified online by the global far right

---

Countering extremism means understanding its tactics. Policymakers, educators and community leaders can help by identifying and deconstructing these tactics if they encounter them.

Teaching critical literacy is also key so communities can spot and resist coercion.

We can also create counter-messages that affirm belonging without fuelling polarisation.

Extremist language hijacks shared values, turning them into obligations to hate and harm. Stopping violence before it starts means dismantling this language through education, transparency and proactive communication.

Awni Etaywe is affiliated with Charles Darwin University, Australia – a Lecturer in Linguistics and a researcher specialising in forensic linguistics, focusing on countering violent extremism, threatening communication, and incitement to hatred and violence.

– ref. Violent extremists wield words as weapons. New study reveals 6 tactics they use – https://theconversation.com/violent-extremists-wield-words-as-weapons-new-study-reveals-6-tactics-they-use-266053

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Festival Godwin Boateng, Senior Research Associate, University of Oxford

Travelling on Africa’s roads comes with many challenges. The biggest is arriving at your destination safely. The continent is one of the hotspots of global road trauma. Its traffic deaths account for about one quarter of the global number of victims, despite having less than 4% of the world’s vehicle fleet.

The situation in sub-Saharan Africa is particularly dire. Road crashes affect this region more than any other in the world. Its road fatality rate of 27 per 100,000 people is three times higher than Europe’s average of 9 and well above the global average of 18.

Then there’s Africa’s road infrastructure. Despite recent rising investments in road developments, the quality of roads in many African countries is generally low. This has been captured in research reports, the World Economic Forum’s surveys and the International Monetary Fund’s cross-country road quality ranking.

Crashes and poor roads are not the only things that can make travelling a less-than-pleasant experience. Another is a lack of toilets. You are in deep trouble if nature calls you while travelling on Africa’s roads. When planning roads and mobility, the authorities rarely include access to adequate, safe and clean toilets.

In 2020 a public interest lawyer, Adrian Kamotho Njenga, successfully sued some authorities in Kenya, compelling them to provide toilets for travellers.

It is not a uniquely African problem. Similar challenges exist in the US and the UK.

The difference is that in those places, researchers are building knowledge about the problem to influence and demand support for change.

I am a senior researcher in mobility governance at the Transport Studies Unit of the University of Oxford. My research interests include toilet access within mobility systems. In a recent paper, I drew attention to the road safety benefits of toilets.

I argue that enhancing drivers’ reasonable and reliable access to toilets can yield road safety benefits in ways that are comparable to enforcing laws against drunk or fatigued driving.

I searched academic databases such as Scopus and reviewed several papers. I found that improving toilet access for drivers was rarely researched as a road safety strategy in Africa. But it can enhance safer driving by reducing driver distraction and other unsafe driving practices that lead to road traffic crashes.

Road traffic crash losses in Africa are immense. Not long ago, the African Union was lamenting that they drain an estimated 2% of its member states’ GDP annually. Bringing the problem under control will require investing in a wide range of interventions, including unconventional ones – such as making it easy for drivers to “go” while on the road.

Road safety benefits of toilets

Driving while pressed for the bathroom can be a torturous experience and a significant distraction. It could make drivers a danger to themselves and other road users by diverting their attention away from the road and traffic conditions. The physical urgency can affect their judgment and reaction to dangerous situations.

The distraction and the urgency can make the driver impatient, and inclined to start speeding, tailgating, or trying reckless manoeuvres to get to the nearest place where they can ease themselves.

Research has shown that people who cannot urinate when their bladder is full experience cognitive or attention impairment that is equivalent to staying awake for 24 hours.

The cognitive deterioration associated with the extreme urge to void is also equivalent to having a blood alcohol concentration level of 0.05%. This is equivalent to or exceeds the blood alcohol concentration limits that Tunisia (0.05%); Sudan and Mauritania (0%); Morocco (0.02%); Mali (0.03%), Madagascar (0.04%), and other African countries impose on drivers.

All this suggests that driving while pressed for the bathroom is as dangerous as drunk or fatigued driving. It also implies that enhancing access to toilets can yield road safety benefits comparable to enforcing laws against drunk or fatigued driving.

Toilets should be integrated within road developments and mobility systems.

Time to invest in toilet access within mobility systems

For starters, governments on the continent can build more public toilets. Africa is one of the key locations of global toilet poverty. The World Health Organization says that some 779 million people on the continent do not have reasonable and reliable access to adequate, safe and clean toilets. Building more public toilets can help address general toilet poverty on the continent as well as in the context of mobility.

Refreshingly, in Ghana for example, private developers are investing in rest stops along highways. These social road transport infrastructures serve as places for commuters to relax, access goods and services, and socialise during their journey break. They often have toilets that travellers pay to access. Governments can explore ways to support these private provisions to expand and become more affordable.

Rest stops are often located on the outskirts, however. Most drivers and other road users operate in cities. When in need of a toilet while out and about, some drivers and other urban commuters are likely to use the toilet facilities available in fuel stations, hotels, restaurants, banks, coffee shops, hair salons, and other establishments in cities.

Not much is known about their cost, safety, cleanliness and location, or the embarrassment associated with using them. Researchers will have to investigate these issues and share the findings with the public.

When more people are aware of the issues, there could be a shift in thinking to demand and support better access to toilets as part of mobility policy.

Festival Godwin Boateng is affiliated with the American Restroom Association (ARA)

– ref. Toilets can make Africa’s roads safer, according to this new study – https://theconversation.com/toilets-can-make-africas-roads-safer-according-to-this-new-study-269297

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Cameron Shackell, Adjunct Fellow, Centre for Policy Futures, The University of Queensland; Queensland University of Technology

The world’s most valuable publicly listed company, US microchip maker Nvidia, has reported record $US57 billion revenue in the third quarter of 2025, beating Wall Street estimates. The chipmaker said revenue will rise again to $US65 billion in the last part of the year.

The better than expected results calmed global investors’ jitters following a tumultuous week for Nvidia and broader worries about the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble bursting.

Just weeks ago, Nvidia became the first company valued at more than $US5 trillion – surpassing others in the “magnificent seven” tech companies: Alphabet (owner of Google), Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) and Microsoft.

Nvidia stocks were up more than 5% to $US196 in after-hours trading immediately following the results.

Over the past week, news broke that tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s hedge fund had sold its entire stake in Nvidia in the third quarter of 2025 – more than half a million shares, worth around $US100 million.

But in that same quarter, an even more famous billionaire’s firm made a surprise bet on Alphabet, signalling confidence in Google’s ability to profit from the AI era.

Buffett’s new stake in Google

Based in Omaha, Nebraska in the United States, Berkshire Hathaway is a global investing giant, led for decades by 95-year-old veteran Warren Buffett.

Berkshire Hathaway’s latest quarterly filing reveals the company accumulated a US$4.3 billion stake in Alphabet over the September quarter.

The size of the investment suggests a strategic decision – especially as the same filing showed Berkshire had significantly sold down its massive Apple position. (Apple remains Berkshire’s single largest stock holding, currently worth about US$64 billion.)

Buffett is about to step down as Berkshire’s chief executive. Analysts are speculating this investment may offer a pre-retirement clue about where durable profits in the digital economy could come from.

Buffett’s record of picking winners with ‘moats’

Buffett has picked many winners over the decades, from American Express to Coca Cola.

Yet he has long expressed scepticism toward technology businesses. He also has form in getting big tech bets wrong, most notably his underwhelming investment in IBM a decade ago.

With Peter Thiel and Japan’s richest man Masayoshi Son both recently exiting Nvidia, it may be tempting to think the “Oracle of Omaha” is turning up as the party is ending.

But that framing misunderstands Buffett’s investment philosophy and the nature of Google’s business.

Buffett is not late to AI. He is doing what he’s always done: betting on a company he believes has an “economic moat”: a built-in advantage that keeps competitors out.

His firm’s latest move signals they see Google’s moat as widening in the generative-AI era.

Two alligators in Google’s moat

Google won the search engine wars of the late 1990s because it excelled in two key areas: reducing search cost and navigating the law.

Over the years, those advantages have acted like alligators in Google’s moat, keeping competitors at bay.

Google understood earlier and better than anyone that reducing search cost – the time and effort to find reliable information – was the internet’s core economic opportunity.

Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page started with a revolutionary search algorithm. But the real innovation was the business model that followed: giving away search for free, then auctioning off highly targeted advertising beside the results.

Google Ads now brings in tens of billions of dollars a year for Alphabet.

But establishing that business model wasn’t easy. Google had to weave its way through pre-internet intellectual property law and global anxiety about change.

The search giant has fended off actions over copyright and trademarks and managed international regulatory attention, while protecting its brand from scandals.

These business superpowers will matter as generative AI mutates how we search and brings a new wave of scrutiny over intellectual property.

Berkshire Hathaway likely sees Google’s track record in these areas as an advantage rivals cannot easily copy.

What if the AI bubble bursts?

Perhaps the genius of Berkshire’s investment is recognising that if the AI bubble bursts, it could bring down some of the “magnificent seven” tech leaders – but perhaps not its most durable members.

Consumer-facing giants like Google and Apple would probably weather an AI crash well. Google’s core advertising business sailed through the global financial crisis of 2008, the COVID crash, and the inflationary bear market of 2022.

By contrast, newer “megacaps” like Nvidia may struggle in a downturn.

---

Read more:
Could a ‘grey swan’ event bring down the AI revolution? Here are 3 risks we should be preparing for

---

Plenty could still go wrong

There’s no guarantee Google will be able to capitalise on the new economics of AI, especially with so many ongoing intellectual property and regulatory risks.

Google’s brand, like Buffett, could just get old. Younger people are using search engines less, with more using AI or social media to get their answers.

New tech, such as “agentic shopping” or “recommender systems”, can increasingly bypass search altogether.

But with its rivers of online advertising gold, experience back to the dawn of the commercial internet, and capacity to use its platforms to nurture new habits among its vast user base, Alphabet is far from a bad bet.

---

Disclaimer: This article provides general information only and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is not intended as financial advice. All investments carry risk.

Cameron Shackell works primarily as an Adjunct Fellow at The University of Queensland and Sessional Academic at QUT. He also works one day a week as CEO of a firm using AI to analyse brands and trademarks.

– ref. As AI leader Nvidia posts record results, Warren Buffett’s made a surprise bet on Google – https://theconversation.com/as-ai-leader-nvidia-posts-record-results-warren-buffetts-made-a-surprise-bet-on-google-270140

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Alexander Korolev, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, UNSW Sydney

As Russia continues its grinding offensive and Ukraine braces for another winter of war, the European Union remains paralysed over a seemingly straightforward decision: whether to use 140 billion euros (A$250 billion) in frozen Russian assets to support Kyiv.

Officially, the delay is about legal caution and financial liability.

But beneath the surface, a more uncomfortable truth is emerging: some EU leaders may no longer believe Ukraine can win.

This isn’t about public rhetoric. Most European heads of state still affirm their support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

But when we examine strategic behaviour – especially the hesitation to deploy high-risk financial tools, such as using Russia’s frozen assets in Europe – we see signs of realist recalibration.

The EU’s frozen assets debate has become a litmus test for Brussels’ confidence in Ukraine’s long-term viability.

What are the concerns over using the assets?

Belgium holds the bulk of Russia’s frozen assets, amounting to about 210 billion euros (A$374 billion) in a financial institution called Euroclear. European finance ministers have discussed using the assets as a loan to Ukraine, which would only be repaid if Russia provided reparations following the war.

Brussels is insisting on legal guarantees before releasing the funds. It is also demanding collective liability shielding from other EU states, citing concerns about lawsuits filed by Russia and financial exposure.

There’s a reputational risk, as well, if other countries such as China or India start to view European banks as an unreliable place to park their funds.

In parallel, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has suspended military aid to Ukraine and said his country’s goal is not Russia’s defeat, but to “end war as soon as possible”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has gone further, saying Ukraine “cannot win on the battlefield”.

Although Fico and Orbán are more pro-Russia than other EU leaders, they reflect a growing undercurrent of realist strategic thinking within the bloc.

Even among more supportive states, there is growing ambiguity about the war effort. France and Germany continue to support Kyiv, but with increasing emphasis on diplomacy and “realistic expectations.”

And while Poland and the Baltic states are the most vocal supporters of using Russia’s frozen assets, Germany, France and Italy have adopted a more cautious posture or demanded Ukraine commit to spending the assets on European weapons – a demand Kyiv resists.

Strategic posturing is happening, too

Unavoidably, these frozen assets are not merely financial – they are a geopolitical wager. To deploy them now is to bet on Ukraine’s victory. To delay is to preserve flexibility in case Russia prevails or the war ends in a frozen stalemate.

In 2022, supporting Ukraine was framed as a moral imperative. By late 2025, some now see it as a strategic liability.

As is invariably the case in international politics, moral aspirations give way to strategic imperatives when the geopolitical push comes to shove. As war fatigue is rising across Europe, many Ukrainians are wondering if Europe still cares.

These concerns are amplified by the shifting battlefield: the key transit city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine is under siege and Russian forces are advancing in Huliaipole in the south. Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is being systematically dismantled by Russian drone strikes.

This also explains the hesitance of EU leaders about releasing Russian frozen assets. Aside from the legal concerns, questions are increasingly being asked about the trajectory of the war. Could the EU risk billions of euros on a failed cause, while forfeiting leverage in postwar negotiations?

From an international politics perspective, this classic realist logic and the widening gap between ethics and interstate relations are neither new nor surprising: states act in their interests, not in service of ideals.

The frozen assets are being treated not as aid, but as a bargaining chip – to be deployed only if Ukraine stabilises the situation on the battlefield or if Russia can be pressured into concession.

By delaying a decision on the frozen assets, the EU preserves optionality. If Ukraine regains ground, the assets can be deployed with stronger justification. If Russia ultimately prevails, the EU avoids being seen as the architect of a failed financial intervention.

This ambiguity is not indecision – it’s strategic posture. The EU is hedging its bets, quietly preparing for multiple outcomes. The longer the war drags on, the more likely unity fractures and realism overtake idealism.

No perfect outcomes

A final decision on the assets is expected in December. But even if approved, the funds may be disbursed in cautious tranches, tied to battlefield developments and political optics, locking Ukraine into the unforgiving calculus of great power rivalry between Russia and the West.

The EU is not abandoning Ukraine, but it is recalibrating its risk exposure. That recalibration is grounded in strategic doubt as EU leaders are no longer sure Ukraine can win – even if they won’t say so aloud.

In the end, whether or not the assets are deployed, Ukraine’s outlook remains bleak unless both Russia and the West find a way to de-escalate their zero-sum rivalry in the region.

Any future settlement is unlikely to be optimal and will likely disappoint Ukrainians. But the current challenge is not to pursue perfect outcomes, which no longer exist, but to choose the least damaging path to ending the war, among all the imperfect options.

Alexander Korolev does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. By delaying a decision on using Russia’s frozen assets for Ukraine, Europe is quietly hedging its bets – https://theconversation.com/by-delaying-a-decision-on-using-russias-frozen-assets-for-ukraine-europe-is-quietly-hedging-its-bets-269507

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Danilo Urzedo, Research fellow, The University of Western Australia

Indigenous peoples are on the vanguard of climate action. Longstanding relationships with land means they endure the direct consequences of climate change. And their unique knowledge offers effective solutions to climate problems.

But despite this, international climate policies have fallen short of encouraging Indigenous leadership. With the UN climate summit hosted in the Amazon for the first time, COP30 marks an unprecedented effort to elevate Indigenous voices.

Returning to Brazil again after the 1992 and 2012 Rio conferences, COP30 has the largest Indigenous delegation in the summit’s history. More than 3,000 Indigenous representatives from around the world are in the Amazonian city of Belém.

Inside and outside the negotiation rooms, Indigenous organisations and coalitions have brought an unprecedented agenda to the summit: pressure for climate justice centred on the recognition of land rights and fair financing mechanisms.

Indigenous voices in diplomacy

A new form of climate diplomacy is emerging. This shift marks the creation of space for Indigenous delegates to participate in formal discussions that were previously exclusive to government officials.

Since 2019, the UN’s Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform has expanded the Indigenous role in official negotiations. At this year’s summit, more than 900 Indigenous delegates – a record number – are participating in official debates.

Led by Brazil’s Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Sônia Guajajara, the COP30 presidency has encouraged Indigenous leadership in decision-making. This includes giving Indigenous delegates seats in negotiation rooms and embedding their demands in climate pledges and finance mechanisms.

“Indigenous Peoples want to take part, not just show up”, said Guajajara. “We want to lead and be part of the solution. So far, the investments driven by COP decisions have failed to deliver results – the 1.5°C goal is slipping out of reach”.

But turning community participation into political influence requires more than participation. Initiatives such as Kuntari Katu in Brazil assist Indigenous leaders in connecting their priorities with broader climate policies. Such training provides modules on topics such as carbon market mechanisms and equips Indigenous representatives with tools to communicate their priorities in climate debates.

Indigenous influence at COP30 is not confined to formal diplomacy. Protests inside and outside the COP venue have amplified long-sidelined demands. Under the rallying cry “Our land is not for sale”, one of the demonstrations occupied areas of the COP30 venue with direct confrontation with the security staff.

Thousands of activists also joined a four-kilometre march in the host city of Belém to call for action from leaders to stop environmental destruction. These protests have brought global attention to injustices that climate politics have long tried to contain. They highlight unresolved land-tenure conflicts and the rising violence faced by Indigenous communities on the frontline of climate impacts.

Land rights as climate solutions

Indigenous territories deliver some of the world’s most effective responses to the climate crisis, from curbing deforestation to storing vast amounts of carbon. Yet much Indigenous land remains without formal recognition, leaving it exposed to invasions by illegal mining, agribusiness expansion, and land grabs, including for renewable energy projects.

COP30 has brought commitments to recognising Indigenous territories as climate solutions. During the opening ceremony, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva emphasised the centrality of Indigenous territories to promote effective climate action. World leaders pledged to secure 160 million hectares of Indigenous and community lands by 2030.

Indigenous organisations say pledges remain far from sufficient given the threats to their lands. The Munduruku Indigenous community, an indigenous people living in the Amazon River basin, made this clear with a major blockade at COP30. Their action created long queues at the summit entrance, delaying thousands of delegates. The disruption compelled the COP presidency to meet with Munduruku leaders, who pressed for the demarcation of their territories and the right to be consulted on development projects in their territory.

Fair climate finance

One of COP30’s major negotiation challenges is finalising the Baku-Belém Roadmap, which aims to unlock A$1.5 trillion in climate funding. Yet climate finance mechanisms have a long history of undervaluing Indigenous knowledge and governance. Indigenous organisations say that fairness must be central to these pledges.

At the Leaders’ Summit, a multilateral coalition launched the Tropical Forests Forever Fund. This commits A$7.6 billion to protect over one billion hectares of forests. With backing from 53 nations and 19 sovereign investors, the fund earmarks 20% of its finance for Indigenous projects. The Forest Tenure Funders Group also renewed its pledge, with a commitment of A$2.7 billion to secure Indigenous land rights.

Still, Indigenous advocates warn climate finance must go beyond dollar amounts. They want a shift in who controls the funding and how projects are governed. Placing Indigenous leadership at the centre of financing means making sure Indigenous communities can receive funding directly and have fair agreements that protect them from financial risks.

Transformative leadership

UN climate conferences have long been criticised for delivering incremental progress but little systemic change. Yet signs of political transformation are emerging.

Beyond climate debates, significant Indigenous leadership is gaining momentum across other international environmental policies. In 2024, the UN’s meeting to combat desertification formalised a new caucus for Indigenous Peoples, while the Convention on Biological Diversity established a permanent Indigenous subsidiary body.

These growing political shifts reveal that effective environmental actions depend on dismantling power inequalities in decisions. Inclusive leadership in policymaking may not completely address the environmental crisis, but it marks a turning point as historically silenced voices begin to lead from the centre.

Danilo Urzedo receives funding from the Australian Research Council under the Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Healing Country (IC210100034).

Oliver Tester receives funding from the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Healing Country.

Stephen van Leeuwen receives funding from the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Healing Country.

– ref. Finally, Indigenous peoples have an influential voice at COP30. They’re speaking loud and clear – https://theconversation.com/finally-indigenous-peoples-have-an-influential-voice-at-cop30-theyre-speaking-loud-and-clear-269403

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Javier Díaz Giménez, Profesor de Economía, IESE Business School (Universidad de Navarra)

In early October 2025, with his political future hanging by a thread, France’s resigned-and-reappointed prime minister Sébastien Lecornu pledged to suspend unpopular pension reforms until 2027, when presidential elections will be held.

Socialist MPs declared victory. The French business community groaned. The S&P downgraded France’s credit rating, citing budget concerns.

With France kicking inevitable reforms at least two years down the road, and many European countries facing pension crises of their own, it is worth considering how to design pension reforms that are sustainable, equitable and politically viable.

One striking feature of the debate over pension reform in Europe is how well understood and extensively documented its root problems are. Europe’s population is aging. The birth rate is declining. Life expectancy is growing ever longer. Fewer people are contributing to fund public systems that will have more people drawing money from them for longer periods of time. At the same time, technological disruption is reducing the share of labour income in gross domestic product.

Since most of Europe’s pay-as-you-go systems were designed when demographics were entirely different, they must be adjusted to reflect the current reality. We accept this in other areas like education, where we rezone school districts and trim new school construction to reflect smaller numbers of children in our neighbourhoods. But any talk of adjusting the retirement age is met with thousands of furious protesters filling the streets of Paris, Madrid or Brussels.

In France, it’s also important to put the reform in perspective: it proposed raising the retirement age by two years, to 64. Denmark adjusts its retirement age every five years in line with life expectancy, and approved raising it to 70 by 2040 from its current 67 earlier in the year.

Pension reforms keep failing because the politics overrules the economics. Demographic transitions are predictable, their costs are measurable, and the policy tools needed to address their consequences already exist. But reforms collapse when they collide with electoral incentives and public mistrust.

How to move beyond these problems? Rather than looking at only one item, such as retirement age, we propose a multidimensional approach that addresses expenditures as well as contributions and compensates those who are initially impacted by the reforms. Spain served as our case study, but the lessons hold true for many European countries, France among them.

---

Leer más:
With delay of pension reform, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu puts France’s Socialist Party back in the spotlight

---

Automatic adjustments and one-off compensations

Part of the solution is incorporating new automatic adjustment mechanisms, or rules that adapt pensions according to changing economic and demographic realities. These mechanisms make pension systems more predictable and credible, and reduce their reliance on series of ad-hoc reforms that are fraught with political difficulties.

We also propose compensating the workers and retirees that bear the brunt of lowered pensions. This would be done through a one-off transfer of liquid assets from the government to households.

The downside of this policy is that governments would have to fund these payments, most likely by issuing new public debt. But as we have seen many times, reforms that are pushed through without any attempt to compensate those who lose out very often get reversed. Older voters with an eye on retirement – and there are increasing numbers of them every day – will block any attempt to cut their benefits unless they understand that they will be compensated for their losses.

---

Leer más:
Retirement as we know it is ending – it’s time to rethink the idea of working age

---

Making pension reform viable

For pension reforms to actually work, they should rest on five elements:

1. Introduce a sustainability factor that adjusts the amount of initial pensions to the life expectancy of the cohort of the worker who is retiring. In practice, this means people who retire younger will receive a lower pension because they are likely to receive payments for more years. This creates an incentive for workers to extend their working lives.

2. Introduce an automatic adjustment rule that updates pension rights and/or pensions to guarantee the financial sustainability of the system. Currently, many systems update pensions using the consumer price index. This is not sustainable, as it reduces the pension replacement rate, the ratio of pre-retirement salary to pension income. This is especially true in an environment of low or even zero labour productivity growth (as is the case in Spain).

3. Calculate pensions using the contributions made during the entire working life of the workers who retire, rather than the last 25 years or some other reduced measure. Disregarding initial years worked tends to benefit top earners, and underfunds the system as a whole.

4. Eliminate the caps on payroll tax contributions but maintain maximum pensions, so that higher earners pay more into the system without receiving higher pensions in return.

5. Offer a one-time compensation for the workers and retirees that lose with these reforms. These compensations can be financed with public debt. This transitional component facilitates a fair transition and prevents the social rejection that often causes pension reforms to fail.

When combined, these measures not only improve the financial sustainability of the pension systems reducing future pension expenditures, but they also encourage private savings and promote longer working lives. If the reforms are announced well in advance, the cost of the transition may be lower, as households have more leeway to adjust their consumption, savings and retirement choices.

This doesn’t mean pension reforms will not create controversy. If these measures were adopted, governments would need to explain them clearly and anticipate public pushback. They would also need to make clear that without reforms, substantial tax increases will be inevitable.

The alternative, however, is worse. According to our calculations, Spain would have to raise its average value-added tax by 9 percentage points, from 16% to 25%, in order to raise enough revenues to sustain the current system indefinitely. By delaying unpopular decisions on pensions, politicians are setting themselves up for even more unpopular tax hikes in the future.

---

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

---

Javier Díaz Giménez is the holder of the Cobas Asset Management Chair on Savings and Pensions at IESE Business School.

Julián Díaz Saavedra has received financial support from the Cobas Asset Management Chair on Savings and Pensions at IESE Business School.

– ref. European nations have no choice but to raise retirement ages – our case study shows why – https://theconversation.com/european-nations-have-no-choice-but-to-raise-retirement-ages-our-case-study-shows-why-268412

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Justin Willis, Professor of History, Durham University

The recent capture of the western Sudanese city of El Fasher by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been followed by allegations of appalling war crimes: massacres, looting and rapes.

There is much reason to believe the allegations from Sudan are credible. UN leaders and experts, most western governments and the International Criminal Court have acknowledged reports of the atrocities and condemned the killing of civilians as a potential war crimes.

Formerly a government-sponsored militia, since April 2023 the RSF has been at war with its former allies in the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). Throughout its existence the RSF has been notorious for violence, and every RSF military success has been accompanied by gross violations of human rights.

Less credible are the claims of the RSF leader, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo – better known in Sudan as Hemedti – who has promised to punish any of his followers found to be responsible for any of these atrocities.

Recent reporting of these terrible abuses has presented them as part of an ethnic conflict, with the RSF portrayed as an Arab militia murdering non-Arabs. There is much truth in this. But there are other drivers of the continuing violence in Sudan.

---

Read more:
Sudan civil war: despite appearances this is not a failed state – yet

---

The RSF itself is the terrible creation of a history of state-driven violence, exclusion and opportunism in Sudan. Its origins are usually traced to the infamous Janjaweed, a militia drawn from Arab communities that was armed by the then president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, to suppress an insurgency in the region early in the 21st century.

In raising the Janjaweed, Bahir’s regime exploited tensions between Arabs and other communities in Darfur, a large region of western Sudan region of which El Fasher is the historical capital.

It was therefore tempting for audiences in North America and Europe to see the conflict – like the long-running war in what was then southern Sudan (now the independent country of South Sudan) in simple racial terms: Arabs against Africans. That narrative has given strength to the international campaign to end the violence in Darfur.

But that narrative was always a simplification, and certainly does not explain the current war. The RSF also has other origins.

It exploited a long-term sense of economic and political exclusion felt by people in Darfur – both Arabs and non-Arabs. It fed off and was partly funded by an international trade in livestock, gold and mercenaries that has thrived on the margins of a state whose leaders have ruthlessly used office to prey on their people.

And it arose in a political system that has rewarded those who seize office by violence, partly thanks to the meddling of external powers who seek political or economic gain by supporting rivals for power in Sudan.

Rise of Hemedti

Hemedti was a relatively minor figure in the Janjaweed. But Bashir created the RSF in 2013, under his leadership, as part of a complicated balancing of multiple militias and security agencies. These competing forces violently repressed challenges to the regime while keeping one another in check through their rivalry.

In 2019, that system broke down in the face of popular unrest in the regime’s political heartland, in central riverain Sudan – the area stretching along the Nile, roughly from Atbara, north of Khartoum to Wad Medani, about 85 miles to the southeast. This has been the economic centre of Sudan since colonial rule began.

Bashir was toppled in a military coup and, after internal army power struggles, Lt Gen Abdel Fattah Burhan emerged as leader and named Hemedti as his deputy. The pair were key figures in the “transitional” government that was supposed to take Sudan back to civilian rule.

But they represented very different constituencies, in a way that demonstrates that Arab identity can take many forms. Affluent urban Arabs from Khartoum have often looked down on the nomadic lifestyle of the communities Hemedti and the RSF have mobilised and sometimes belittle them as “Chadian” on account of their ties to the wider Sahelian region.

Arabs from Darfur, such as Hemedti, can see themselves as long-term victims of what they call the “1956 state”. This is the political and economic system inherited from colonial rule, which favoured the riverain centre.

Both Hemedti and Burhan insist that they are fighting for all Sudan, and all Sudanese. Yet both have been entirely willing to appeal to ethnic and religious sentiment when it suits them. That has repeatedly added an extra, vicious dynamic to the conflict – from the recent massacres in El Fasher to the reported violence against people from South Sudan in Khartoum when SAF recaptured the city in March 2025.

The real reasons for the conflict

Ethnicity is not the basis of the conflict. This instead lies in an embedded culture of political violence, complicated by a shifting power balance between central and western Sudan and by international meddling.

Some Arab nations – particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia – back the army. While the UAE’s enabling of RSF violence has been widely publicised, prominent African governments have also maintained ties with Hemedti.

Hemedti has also made alliances of convenience with groups such as SPLM-North Hilu, which principally draws support from the non-Arab communities in the southern Sudanese region of South Kordofan and, like Hemedti, aims to dismantle the “1956 state”.

For Sudanese observers, the tension between central and western Sudan is more recognisable. Both before and after his role in the 2023 ransacking of Khartoum, Hemedti has been compared with the Khalifa – the western Sudanese successor to Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi. It was al-Mahdi who defeated the British and the Egyptians to found the Mahdist state in the late 19th century.

Since the 1950s, those seeking to seize control of the Sudanese state have repeatedly mobilised support among disaffected groups in western Sudan – sometimes combining Arab and non-Arab communities, sometimes turning them against one another. Hemedti’s claims to represent the marginalised communities of the west are opportunistic and mendacious, but far from unprecedented.

This war is not a simple Arab-African conflict. But its viciousness reflects the willingness of both RSF and SAF to turn multiple societal fault lines into tools for mobilisation. They have created a context in which ethnic polarisation has been driven by wars for control of the state – rather than vice versa.

Justin Willis has previously received funding from the UK government, via the Rift Valley Institute, for research on elections in Sudan.

Willow Berridge receives funding from Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), funded by UK International Development from the UK government.

– ref. Why has Sudan descended into mass slaughter? The answer goes far beyond simple ethnic conflict – https://theconversation.com/why-has-sudan-descended-into-mass-slaughter-the-answer-goes-far-beyond-simple-ethnic-conflict-269293