Happy 20 TTs guys.
I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.
So:
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.
But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Mali
From independence onward Mali has had trouble with an insurgency from the Taureg ethnic group that lives in the North (and is also spread across parts of the countries in North Africa, a little like the way different Kurdish groups are divided across several nations). The area they wanted, Azawad or “Brown Mali,” is the upper half of the nation, the deeply inhospitable part of the country that sticks up into the Sahara Desert. However, the conflict is complicated by the fact that there are crucial, mostly undeveloped resources there as well, including possible oil and gas from the Taoudeni Basin that overlaps north Mali and neighboring Mauritania.
You may have heard of the Tauregs before associated with Gaddafi - he had this notion they were super badass desert warriors and recruited a bunch of them for his Islamic Legion, and then later his personal guard. After he was overthrown in 2011 a huge influx of armed and battle hardened tauregs came back to Mali and joined the People's Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and took the conflict to its peak in 2012. The government ultimately won and a lasting peace deal was established in 2015. Part of the agreement was that 20% of the revenues from oil and gas harvested in the Azawad region would be reinvested there as well.
However, fighting has flared up again with the Coordination of the Azawad Movement (a somewhat-successor organization to the MPLA) since August. Last week Mali reported “attacks on three army posts in two days” and has now redeployed the Army to the North to directly face down the restored insurgency.
To nobody’s huge surprise, the Junta has also now delayed elections, originally supposed to happen in February to an as of yet undetermined time in the future. Opposition parties (funny they still keep these around tbh) have been protesting the move in the capital.
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