Crisis Group

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de septiembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Taiwanese navy Kuang Hua VI-class missile boats move within the harbour of Keelung, Taiwan, 14 October 2024. REUTERS / Tyrone Siu

MundoAsia

After a choppy patch, U.S.-China relations have been on a more even keel since a November 2023 summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden. The two countries reopened military-to-military channels, vital for managing the risk of unintended collisions between Chinese and U.S. warships in the Pacific or planes overhead, and China reportedly took tentative steps to stem the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals into the United States. Still, President-elect Donald Trump will take office with the rivalry far more entrenched than it was eight years ago.

Trump’s Asia policy is as unpredictable as his approach to other arenas.…  Seguir leyendo »

People watch a TV broadcasting a news report on North Korea firing missiles that flew 400km after lifting off at around 7:30am from Sariwon, just south of the capital Pyongyang, at a railway station in Seoul, South Korea, 5 November 2024. REUTERS / Kim Hong-Ji

MundoAsia

2024 started with a surprise speech by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in which he dropped North Korea’s decades-old policy of peaceful unification with South Korea and declared Seoul to be Pyongyang’s principal foe. The year ended with Kim ratifying a mutual defence pact with Moscow and deploying thousands of North Koreans to fight alongside Russia against Ukraine – as well as a botched self-coup attempt by South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol that ended with parliament voting for his impeachment.

With much in flux, the Korean Peninsula is set for an edgy 2025.

In his January speech, Kim aimed to further seal off North Korea, especially from South Korean cultural exports – K-Pop, in other words – while tightening his grip on the economy.…  Seguir leyendo »

A CNA soldier surveys the damage in a building in Thantlang town. The neglected Chin State in Myanmar has been the site of fierce clashes between the military junta and local resistance groups. September 2024. CRISIS GROUP / Richard Horsey

MundoAsia

Midway through 2024, Myanmar’s military regime appeared to be teetering, as rebels had seized large tracts of the uplands as well as key military bases. Since then, China, fearing a disorderly collapse, has thrown military leader Min Aung Hlaing a lifeline. But the junta still faces determined resistance. A vote in 2025, if it proceeds as planned, will bring further bloodshed.

The civil war that has torn Myanmar apart since the military seized power in 2021 has set the country back decades: More than 3 million people are displaced internally, health and education systems have crumbled, poverty has skyrocketed and Myanmar’s currency, the kyat, has crashed.…  Seguir leyendo »

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Texas Governor Greg Abbott during a visit at the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, as seen from Piedras Negras, Mexico, 29 February 2024. REUTERS / Go Nakamura

MundoAmérica, , , ,

Mexico is already reeling from violence involving criminal gangs that resembles some of the world’s worst wars. During the U.S. election campaign, Donald Trump – now the president-elect – promised to slap high tariffs on the United States’ southern neighbour, send back millions of migrants, and even bomb cartels.

Since 2006, when then-Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels, perhaps half a million Mexicans have been killed and another 100,000 people disappeared in violence that followed. The government killed kingpins and dismantled big criminal organisations but set off conflicts among smaller groups, heavily armed mostly with weapons imported from the United States.…  Seguir leyendo »

Members of the second contingent of Kenyan police disembark after arriving in the Caribbean country as part of a peacekeeping mission, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 16 July 2024. REUTERS/Ralph Tedy Erol

MundoAmérica,

Many Haitians’ hopes that a new government and a Kenya-led multinational police mission could loosen criminal gangs’ grip on the country have been shattered.

Since President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in July 2021, the gangs have seized much of Haiti. Historically used by elites for profiteering or to take out rivals, such groups have grown more powerful and autonomous. In early 2024, an alliance of previously warring gangs, known as Viv Ansanm, besieged the capital of Port-au-Prince. Ariel Henry, an unpopular prime minister who took over after Moïse was killed, was in Nairobi at the time overseeing the creation of the police mission and unable to fly home.…  Seguir leyendo »

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and military commanders watch as military equipment passes by during the annual military parade in Tehran, Iran, September 21, 2024. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

In the first half of 2024, Iran saw its Axis of Resistance – the Assad regime in Syria, and a collection of militant groups, including Hizbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza – as still providing the Islamic Republic a measure of protection and region-wide influence.

What a difference a few months can make. In July, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran. In September, Israel detonated hundreds of Hizbollah’s pagers and other devices, taking out much of its mid-level command. Airstrikes and a ground offensive followed, killing Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and decimating its ranks and military assets, while razing many villages.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinian inspect damage at the site of an Israeli strike on a house, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, December 12, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

MundoOriente Próximo

Israel’s assault on Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, has laid waste to the strip. The campaign, according to local authorities, has killed upwards of 45,000 Palestinians. Most were civilians—at least a third of them children. Thousands more bodies are missing, presumably under the rubble. Two thirds of buildings and infrastructure are damaged or in ruins, with entire neighbourhoods levelled.

While many Hamas leaders have been killed and the group’s military assets decimated, Western officials and even some Israelis quietly acknowledge that no authority can govern Gaza or carry out civil functions without Hamas’s acquiescence.

Israel’s operations are reshaping Gaza’s geography.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ukrainian Armed Forces take part in a tactical medicine exercise, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Donetsk region, Ukraine December 14, 2024. Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Force

Europa, , ,

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war by negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Talks are worth trying, but it is hard to see a path to a sustainable ceasefire – let alone a peace deal.

Russian forces have the upper hand, though their slow advance in Ukraine’s east is coming at immense cost. The Kremlin’s army has suffered an estimated half-million deaths and injuries since 2022, Russia’s heavily sanctioned economy is struggling, and Putin wants to avoid calling up more soldiers, presumably fearing unrest. Plus, bogged down in Ukraine, Putin has lost his main Middle Eastern client, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.…  Seguir leyendo »

People wait for food to be distributed at the Adré provisional reception site. Fleeing the war ravaging neighbouring Sudan, more than 930,000 people have taken refuge in eastern Chad since April 2023. March 2024. Ouaddaï, Chad. CRISIS GROUP/Charles Bouessel

MundoÁfrica,

Sudan’s war, by dint of sheer numbers displaced and hungry, is the world’s most devastating. Some 12 million Sudanese – more than a third of the pre-war population – have fled their homes. More than half face acute food shortages, with parts of the Darfur region suffering famine. UN officials describe rates of sexual violence against women and girls as “staggering”. Increasingly, the country looks headed for violent fracture.

Fighting has engulfed ever wider tracts of the country. It pits the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – paramilitaries led by Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo – against the Sudanese army, headed by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and an array of aligned militias and Darfuri armed groups.…  Seguir leyendo »

A man rides a motorbike with children holding up flags adopted by the new Syrian rulers, after Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was ousted, in Damascus, Syria, December 15, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

MundoOriente Próximo

Let’s start with the good news: Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship has fallen. Syria could get back on its feet after one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars. But plenty could go wrong.

For several years, a stalemate had prevailed. In 2020, Turkey sent in troops and struck a deal with Russia, which used its ties with Assad to halt an assault on Syria’s north west that Ankara feared would drive millions more refugees into Turkey. The truce left Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate that had broken with the global jihadi movement, in charge of Idlib province. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) held the north east.…  Seguir leyendo »

Fighters of the ruling Syrian body attend a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) after the ousting of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

InternacionalOrden Mundial

In unsettled times, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House looks set to shake things up further. But how does a disrupter deal with an already disrupted world?

In the Middle East, a chain reaction set off by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel has propelled a year of staggering change. Israel has buried Gaza under rubble; degraded Iran’s regionwide network of nonstate proxies; demolished Tehran’s own defences; and, inadvertently, set the stage for Islamist rebels to topple the Assad family’s half-century-old dictatorship in Syria.

In Asia, where China vies with the United States and its allies for primacy, flash points in the South China Sea, the waters and skies around Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula look ever more precarious.…  Seguir leyendo »

An Israeli outpost (centre) now occupies the area where the Al-Baqa’a Bedouin community once lived before being forcibly displaced. Dark patches on the ground mark the former locations of the Bedouin tents. September 2023. CRISIS GROUP / Jorge Gutierrez Lucena

MundoOriente Próximo,

Israeli settler violence – attacks on Palestinians and their property by Israelis living in the occupied West Bank – is at an all-time high. As Crisis Group laid out in a recent report, the number of settler attacks began climbing in late 2022, following the election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. It then spiked after Hamas’ 7 October 2023 assault kicked off a war in Gaza that continues to this day. Since the Gaza war began, there have been over 1,000 incidents of settler violence, in which over 1,300 Palestinians have been driven from their homes. These incidents occur as the Netanyahu government tightens Israel’s hold on the West Bank.…  Seguir leyendo »

Myanmar’s junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, arrives to give a speech to thousands of soldiers in which he blamed the country’s growing armed resistance movement for preventing long-promised elections. March 27, 2024. STR / AFP

MundoAsia

More than three and a half years since launching a coup deposing Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularly elected National League for Democracy government, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is struggling. While he has concentrated decision-making authority in his own hands, the military under his command is suffering humiliating defeats to its adversaries. In the process, it is losing control of most of the country’s borders. Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly reshuffled the military’s top brass, while also prosecuting senior officers for ostensible command failures or insubordination – perhaps in part to head off potential plots against him amid rising criticism. The only exit strategy from emergency rule that he seems to have contemplated is the one he set out at the time of the coup but has so far failed to act on: holding elections.…  Seguir leyendo »

A sign reads “bel avenir” (bright future) at the Ministry of Youth and Sport in Bangui. November 2019. CRISIS GROUP / Julie David de Lossy

MundoÁfrica

The Central African Republic (CAR) is home to one of the world’s overlooked crises, with millions languishing in acute poverty and facing persistent threats of violence. Despite numerous foreign interventions over the years, as well as military and humanitarian aid that an array of international partners have poured into the country, CAR is weighed down by ethnic feuds and deeply flawed governance exercised by an overly centralised administration. Outside the capital, Bangui, state offices and social services remain largely unavailable. Despite the security assistance from abroad, rebel groups continue to fight the government in many rural areas, particularly around gold and diamond mining sites.…  Seguir leyendo »

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado holds up a copy of electoral records during a protest against the election results announced by President Nicolas Maduro’s government. Caracas, Venezuela, August 28, 2024. REUTERS/Maxwell Briceno

MundoAmérica

Hopes that the 28 July presidential election might mark the beginning of the end of Venezuela’s protracted political crisis proved short-lived. Both incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and opposition candidate Edmundo González claim victory in the poll, while authorities have mounted a nationwide crackdown on opposition supporters, who insist that their candidate won in a landslide. The president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), a close ally of the government, declared late on the evening of the poll that Maduro had prevailed with over 51 per cent of the vote. But he showed no detailed tallies, alleging that a cyber-attack had impeded the vote count.…  Seguir leyendo »

People walk past graffiti on a wall next to the parliament building on Shota Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, Georgia. July 2024. CRISIS GROUP / Elissa Jobson

EuropaUnión EuropeaAmpliaciónMundoCáucaso,

On the eve of a crucial election in Georgia, scheduled for 26 October, the government’s relations with the European Union are worsening. In December 2023, Brussels granted Georgia the EU candidate status that successive governments have long sought. For the EU, the decision affirmed its support for Georgia’s integration with the West as Russia continues its full-scale war in Ukraine. Just six months later, however, the governing Georgian Dream party introduced legislation that echoes Russian measures used to suppress civil society and stifle dissent. The EU has declared this law, now in force, to be incompatible with Georgia’s accession to the bloc, meaning that the process has ground to a halt.…  Seguir leyendo »

Watch List 2024 – Autumn Update

Internacional

Only three weeks remain until a U.S. presidential election that may be of huge significance for trans-Atlantic cooperation on peace and security.

The U.S. election pits sitting Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, against former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate. From the European perspective, Harris represents continuity – the heir to an Atlanticist foreign policy that she has helped President Joe Biden forge and carry out. Although she would invariably make adjustments, it is unlikely that her winning in November would bring fundamental change to trans-Atlantic cooperation. A Trump win, on the other hand, could cause shocks. Transactional in his foreign policy outlook, Trump has long argued that the NATO alliance is a bad deal for the United States, and many of his advisers urge the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

¿Vientos de cambio en Venezuela? El chavismo enfrenta su mayor desafío electora

MundoAmérica,

Tras 25 años en el poder, el chavismo, el movimiento político creado por el difunto presidente Hugo Chávez, parece enfrentarse a una contundente derrota en las urnas si se llevan a cabo unas elecciones competitivas. El gobierno del presidente Nicolás Maduro es profundamente impopular, el resultado de una prolongada crisis política y un colapso económico que ha desencadenado una de las peores emergencias humanitarias de la región y un éxodo de más de 7,5 millones de venezolanos. Las encuestas de opinión indican que la mayoría de los electores votarán por un cambio en las próximas elecciones presidenciales del 28 de julio.…  Seguir leyendo »

Watch List 2024 – Spring Update. Working with Others to Halt Sudan’s Collapse

MundoÁfrica,

The catastrophic war in Sudan has entered its second year, with no end in sight. The conflict erupted in April 2023 amid a struggle between the country’s two most powerful security forces, the Sudanese army, under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. After a year of fighting, much of the capital Khartoum lies in ruins, with major combat still raging there and in several other cities and parts of the countryside. The state has largely collapsed. The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced nine million and threatens millions more with starvation.…  Seguir leyendo »

Watch List 2024 – Spring Update. Philippines: Calming Tensions in the South China Sea

MundoAsia,

Rising maritime tensions between China and the Philippines have highlighted the risk of armed conflict in the South China Sea and the dangers it would pose to global trade. Several countries are implicated in the set of complex sovereignty disputes in the sea, which stem from rival claims to various features and the maritime entitlements they generate, but recent incidents involving Beijing and Manila have triggered the greatest concern.

The Philippines controls nine outposts in the Spratlys, a contested group of land and maritime features at the heart of the South China Sea. A submerged reef known as Second Thomas Shoal has become a dangerous flashpoint, with Chinese boats continually trying to block Manila’s efforts to resupply the BRP Sierra Madre, a rusting ship housing a handful of soldiers that a former Philippine government purposely grounded in 1999 in a bid to assert sovereignty over the atoll.…  Seguir leyendo »