In September, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a war that has been cold since the demise of the Soviet Union, rapidly heated back up. Azerbaijan, after a lightning military campaign that it described as an ‘anti-terrorist’ operation, …
Articles by: "William Gourlay"
By a range of measures, democracy is under pressure around the globe. Not only is democracy failing to make inroads in states long dominated by authoritarian regimes, but it is in retreat in some places …
It’s said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. In diplomacy, it would seem that it’s seating arrangements that can be tricky. At a 6 April meeting of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and …
This month marks five years since Russia launched its well-publicised airborne intervention in Syria’s civil war. The first sparks of Syria’s unrest arose from civilian protests against President Bashar al-Assad, but the conflict morphed into …
The Kurds are flavour of the month. We are now familiar with media coverage of Kurdish fighters, many of them women, pushing back the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Pursuing …
The long-anticipated battle to wrest Mosul from the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is underway. Sitting on an ethnic fault line between Turkish, Kurdish and Arab spheres, the city affords a prism …