South Sudan faces a rocky road to first elections

Significance The current government’s mandate was meant to end this year. Instead, elections prescribed for 2021 have been delayed to 2023, ostensibly to allow more time to implement the 2018 peace agreement that ended the country’s civil war. Even with such a delay, the path to elections is likely to be littered with challenges. Impacts Few new opposition groups will consider forming political parties, as military strength is still viewed as the only viable route to power. Opposition groups may form alliances to boost their bargaining power, but talking with government is seen as more viable than toppling it. The post-election period will also be volatile, amid likely rejections of results or attempts to negotiate access to non-elected posts.

Madkhali-Salafi influence in Libya may spread further

Significance A component of key armed factions in both east and west, they have used their resulting military strength to impose their anti-democratic worldview and hardline social agenda. Their rise has alarmed many, including civil society advocates and religious minorities who fear further targeting, and has led to clashes in some areas. Impacts Growing Madkhali influence threatens Libya’s already constrained civil society space. Libyan women, who have seen their public role diminished, fear that a more empowered Madkhali current could accelerate the trend. Madkhali preaching against Western organisations risks stoking wider anti-Western sentiment that can affect investment opportunities.

Alliance Dynamics in the Shadow of Shifting Power

Alliances are costly to form and to terminate, and yet alliances change frequently. Scholars typically attribute these decisions to static factors, such as the power balance, and retrospective ones, such as past power shifts. We highlight another factor: prospective changes, particularly anticipated military strength shifts. We analyze a three-country bargaining model of alliances and war that incorporates forward-looking power dynamics. The model, unlike those restricting players to set roles, flexibly allows players to ally in any arrangement. We find that alliance arrangements that are optimal when power is static are often suboptimal when power fluctuates. Maintaining prior alliances despite expected power shifts may even lead to preventive war. States thus strategically look to the future to identify optimal alliances in the present. Quantitative analyses corroborate the expectation. As the anticipated size of power shifts increases, alliance changes become more common. Accordingly, states navigate expected changes in the international landscape by rearranging current alliance commitments that can help minimize the risk of conflict. When power balances are in flux, malleable institutional arrangements may prove preferable to rigid ones.

The End Comes to Byzantium

This chapter examines how the Byzantine Empire crested and began to fade under the rule of Basil II. When Byzantium lost wars, the emperor had to find some other way to pay for military and governmental expenses. Basil's innovation was to give the nobles tax relief rather than direct payment. He also got them to fight “for free” by letting them take land from smaller peasants. Increasing the size of nobles' estates increased the power of regional aristocrats. This gave them independent power bases, which increased their capacity to hold back resources from future wars — or to try to take over the empire for themselves. Civil wars and regional uprisings flourished. A particularly nasty civil war between 1341 and 1354 gutted Byzantium's military strength and led to gains by the Serbs, the Venetians, and the Genoese. While Constantinople did not disappear entirely, Byzantium did. Byzantium went from being a center of power, wealth, and culture to being a subordinate outpost of an Atlantic economy.

Conformity

This chapter speaks about Asch’s classic study about how individuals will conform to the group even in the face of unambiguously true information. Similar trends were witnessed in the real world during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where President Kennedy’s top advisors succumbed to groupthink and failed to recognize Cuba’s military strength and foresight in predicting the planned US invasion. Contrary to common sense, individuals tend to resolve the cognitive dissonance they experience when faced with group pressure by changing their deeply held (and objectively true) opinions. Conformity to work processes is necessary in any workplace environment, but when taken to the extreme, it can lead to false perceptions about agreement, a lack of speaking out, and ultimately poor decision-making.

The Role Which Religion Played during the King Philip’s War

King Philip’s war (1675-1676) was arguably one of the most brutal and bloody conflicts in the Atlantic world. As a war fought among the English colonial forces and the Natives, King Philip’s war was an important turning point, as it secured the colony’s position over the Natives. Most of the Indian resistance were killed or enslaved during the war. The rest of the Indian population after the war experienced an extreme demographic decline through frequent dislocation and death (Note 1). However, the war ended with the death of Metacom, the sachem of the Wampanoag tribe. The war was victorious for the English, as it undermined Native military strength and political sovereignty and reduced future resistance to expansion, giving the English control over some of the colonies and Native reservations (Note 2).Many historians narrate the war by focusing on the causes and effects of this brutal conflict. However, this paper looks at the different roles that religion played in the war, considering the motives and effects of the evangelization, and the effects of the war on Christian Indians. This paper also examines how the Puritan evangelists and religion contributed and perpetuated the war through using evangelization to create cultural divisions within the tribal communities and creating strong racial distinctions among the English colonists and the Indians. Throughout the war, religion perpetuated and prolonged the war by creating religious and cultural divisions among the tribes; by giving strong justification for anti-Indian bias; and by giving both sides confidence that they had God’s blessing.

Uprawnienia konstytucyjne władz V Republiki Francuskiej w dziedzinie obrony

French constitution adopted in 1958 by referendum has profoundly modified the political system in France by establishing the renewed V Republic. General de Gaulle who inspired “the spirit and the letter” of the new wording, focused on the one and the most important goal. Inserted changes were aimed at ensuring the survival of the state by enhancing French institutions, their decision-making powers as well as resilience, in case of occurrence of the major crisis and threat for the country. The President became directly and personally responsible for the state continued existence, while making the Prime Minister responsible for the national defense. This constitutional – legal and logical contradiction characterized also as a diarchy at the top level of the power has proved nevertheless to be singularly efficient. After more than 60 years of V Republic, Military Strength Ranking placed France in 2019 on fifth position.

The 1962 Military Confrontation on Salvaging West Papua: An Analysis on War Theory

Based on the Round Table Conference between Indonesia and the Netherlands' representatives in 1949, West Papua will be delivered to Indonesia a year later. Nevertheless, the Dutch broke their promise to return West Papua to Indonesian sovereignty. The Dutch continued to insist on West Papua as their land and then increased their military presence in West Papua to prepare for defending the territory. Responding to this, initially, Indonesia made peaceful efforts, namely bilateral diplomacy within the Indonesian-Dutch Union ties, continued with trilateral diplomacy and diplomacy efforts using the Asian African Conference and United Nations organizations. However, Indonesian diplomatic efforts met with deadlock. Hence, another form of diplomacy, the military effort, has been displayed. This study's main aim is to review the 1962 military confrontation on salvaging West Papua in the analysis on war theory. Also, to prove that with sufficient military strength, the country will confidently step up to be the negotiating table winner. The Indonesian military strength at that time was playing a significant role as a deterrent effect. The research uses a qualitative descriptive phenomenology method, using data sources from several books and journals available. The result of the research shows that Indonesia absolutely needs a modern and more rigid military force to maintain its sovereignty, protect our Island and its natural resources. Without the deterrent effect of military power, Indonesia will be underestimated in international politics.