World news
A never-before-used Dutch emergency law, a suspended Chinese CEO, and a Beijing export ban that nearly stopped Volkswagen’s production line. The Nexperia affair turned an unglamorous chipmaker into the flashpoint of an EU–China struggle over strategic industry. China’s swift retaliation revealed just how fragile Europe’s grip on its own industrial base has become, and how readily economic interdependence is now used as a weapon.
As artificial intelligence increasingly transforms societies, economies, and political systems, questions of ethics, human dignity, and social cohesion gain renewed importance. This paper explores the potential role of Vatican diplomacy in addressing these challenges. Drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” (2026), it argues that the Holy See represents a unique source of moral authority and soft power in a rapidly changing world. Unlike actors relying on military or economic influence, Vatican diplomacy promotes dialogue, mediation, and human-centered development. In an age shaped by competing technological futures, it may help foster alternative narratives grounded in solidarity, peace, and human dignity.
With climate change rapidly progressing, water is increasingly becoming more scarce. Countries are looking to secure current and future access to the precious resource, creating an arena of tension and potential conflict. This analysis looks at how and why conflict erupts over water, as well as how water cooperation and diplomacy offer a win-all situation to all stakeholders involved.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is recognised as a general-purpose technology capable of compressing developmental trajectories, transcending historical constraints, and catalysing broad-based economic progress in the Global South. In Africa particularly, an increasingly prominent Promethean discourse imagines AI as possessing a uniquely elastic and scalar capacity for cross-sectoral integration, capable of generating developmental gains across healthcare, education, agriculture, finance, and public administration; the dream, in its fullest iteration, being of a continent that inherits abundance without enduring the long, grinding ordeal of industrialisation that was, in any case, never fully permitted to run its course. In their more modest expression, these visions are not unsubstantiated – cases of AI-assisted healthcare delivery in Kenya and AI-enabled education services in Rwanda, inter alia, lend credence to AI’s elasticity. Yet, given the scale of capital investment and depths of institutional capacity required for their realisation, the conditions underpinning these claims nevertheless warrant closer examination.
It is a striking political paradox: the very mass exodus that signals a country’s governance failure is often what keeps its leaders in power. For decades, Middle Eastern regimes have quietly mastered the art of treating the exit door not as a crisis, but as a survival tactic. By allowing millions of frustrated, educated young citizens to leave, ruling elites manage to systematically export their most potent critics and outsource their economic failures before domestic anger can boil over into organized revolt.
Beyond the usual rhetoric, the restored CCP–KMT meeting after a decade raises questions about Beijing’s cross-strait strategy and what the KMT under Cheng Li-wun is trying to achieve politically.
Hungary’s April election was closely watched as test case for illiberalism’s survival, and it presented a sea-change to domestic, foreign, and European policy more broadly.
Arab identity has always been contested, but never quite like this. For Gen Z across the region, social media has become something far more than entertainment: it is a negotiation table, a sanctuary, and sometimes, a battleground. In a landscape where a coded tweet or a tactical beauty tutorial can carry real political weight, this generation is rewriting what it means to be Arab, in real time, across borders, and entirely on their own terms.
The United States and China are increasingly locked in a competition over the future of artificial intelligence, but they pursue fundamentally different strategies. While the US channels massive private investment into the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), China focuses on three core pillars: maintaining political control over AI systems, achieving technological self-reliance in semiconductor production, and promoting open-source AI models as global alternatives to Western platforms. Through initiatives like the AI+ program and its latest Five-Year Plan, Beijing aims to integrate AI deeply into industry, infrastructure, and national security rather than concentrating solely on frontier AI research.
The signing of the EU-Australia Security and Defence Partnership epitomises a radical shift in the EU’s External Action and geopolitical self-awareness.
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