Quote:In the world of American legal scholarship, Seth Barrett Tillman is an outsider in more ways than one. An associate professor at a university in Ireland, he has put forward unusual interpretations of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution that for years have largely gone ignored — if not outright dismissed as crackpot.

But at 60, Professor Tillman is enjoying some level of vindication. When the U.S. Supreme Court considers on Thursday whether former President Donald J. Trump is barred from Colorado’s primary ballot, a seemingly counterintuitive theory that Professor Tillman has championed for more than 15 years will take center stage and could shape the presidential election.

The Constitution uses various terms to refer to government officers or offices. The conventional view is that they all share the same meaning. But by his account, each is distinct — and that, crucially for the case before the court, the particular phrase “officer of the United States” refers only to appointed positions, not the presidency.

If a majority of the court accepts Professor Tillman’s rationale, then Mr. Trump would be allowed to appear on the ballot. At issue is the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which bars people from holding office if they participated in an insurrection after having sworn to uphold the Constitution as an “officer of the United States.”

Professor Tillman, heavily bearded with black-rimmed glasses and a bookish demeanor, is flying to the United States this week to watch the arguments. With Josh Blackman, who teaches at South Texas College of Law Houston, Professor Tillman submitted a friend-of-the-court brief and asked to participate in arguments, but the court declined.

Still, his hobbyhorse will be on the Supreme Court’s agenda, and it has drawn as much zealous backing as it has ferocious pushback.

Mr. Trump’s legal team led with the idea in its brief to the court, and many supporters of overturning Colorado’s disqualification of Mr. Trump have invoked it — including three former Republican attorneys general, Edwin R. Meese III, Michael Mukasey and William P. Barr.

But the conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig, in a withering series of posts on X, mocked Mr. Trump and his supporters for having “put all of their eggs in Blackman’s and Tillman’s tattered basket of constitutional interpretation.” He cited a recent Lawfare article that called attention to a letter Justice Antonin Scalia sent Professor Tillman in 2014 rejecting his theory. (Professors Tillman and Blackman published it in an article last year.)

During a video interview from his book-cluttered living room in Dublin, Professor Tillman gave a rueful chuckle and gestured toward his outsider status — and location — as he said that critics were objecting “in the most meanspirited and personal way, without any attempt to grapple with the ideas.”

“It’s very dispiriting,” he added. “But fortunately, I’m here. I’m in a position where I can walk away from such things.”

Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale Law School professor who submitted a brief siding with Colorado’s top court, portrayed Professor Tillman’s theory as a “gimmick” that relied on tracing words in “all these interesting little ways that makes no sense of the thing as a whole.” He predicted it would get at most three votes on the nine-member court.

At the same time, Professor Amar described Professor Tillman as a “brilliant” person who was at last gaining mainstream recognition.

“Tillman is one of the genuinely interesting people in our world, and the world hasn’t rewarded him very much,” he said. “Think about the strength of character that is required to keep plodding away for 30 years on some of these things, when no one seems to be paying any attention to you.”

Professor Tillman declined to predict how the Supreme Court would rule but said that even one vote based on his position would lend it credence as a “serious or reasonable point of view.” But asked whether he would feel vindicated if a majority of justices were to endorse it, he struck a tone of resignation.

In one sense, yes, he said. “But in the sense of would there be any vindication in the largest element of American legal academia? I think the answer is no. I think they would still say what the largest numbers have already said, which is that the particular view I put forward is wrong and if the Supreme Court adopted it, they did it for pragmatic reasons they don’t wish to acknowledge.”

The Supreme Court could also decide the case on other grounds. It could uphold the Colorado decision. Or it could restore Mr. Trump to the ballot based on different reasoning, like saying that Mr. Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot fell short of insurrection, or that — as Professor Tillman also argues — Section 3 would need a statute to be enforceable.

But earlier in the case, a trial judge in Denver embraced Professor Tillman’s idea. While the judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s efforts qualified as insurrection, she kept him on the ballot because, she said, presidents are not “officers of the United States.” The Colorado Supreme Court later disagreed. But Professor Tillman said the fact that a lower court had embraced his position already meant it could no longer be dismissed as off the wall.

An Orthodox Jew who goes offline for the Sabbath at sundown each Friday, Professor Tillman was born in New York in 1963, the second of two children. His father was a co-owner of a factory in Yonkers and his mother a homemaker.

His parents relocated to the suburbs of Rockland County when he was 7, he said, because they were alarmed that he had witnessed a murder on a playground. He said a woman had slapped a drunk man, who chased her until a janitor intervened and choked the man to death.

After earning an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1984, he worked as a commodities trader and researcher until 1997, when he enrolled in Harvard Law School. Once he graduated in 2000, he bounced around for a decade, completing four judicial clerkships and a stint at two law firms — while writing academic articles on the side.

He wanted to be a law professor but had difficulty finding a full-time position. In 2011, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology hired him as a lecturer and he moved to Ireland with his wife, now a secretary at a Dublin synagogue, and their four children. In his spare time, he said, he enjoys stargazing and East Asian history and political philosophy. This term, he is teaching equity and trusts law.
He said he was grateful for the job, but he also sounded somewhat lonely professionally. Most of his Maynooth colleagues, he noted, focus on legal questions related to Ireland or the European Union, rather than on the American constitutional issues that preoccupy him.

Professor Tillman described himself as the perpetual odd man out. His great passion, he said, has been to show that the original meaning of words and phrases in the Constitution are rooted in parliamentary understandings that quickly disappeared after its ratification, as American thinking shifted to a separation-of-powers model that emphasized the judiciary rather than Congress. Few scholars on the left or the right, he said, are interested.

“I’m not on anybody’s speed dial back in the United States — my work is very unusual,” he said, adding, “If you try to hawk that or to sell that position in the United States, within legal academia, the opportunity of finding an audience is vanishingly small.”

Professor Tillman employs a hyperclose reading of the Constitution. He assumes that the text was written with tremendous precision and intentionality, so subtle distinctions are significant — and their meaning can be inferred by carefully tracing words through the text.

His argument that presidents are not “officers of the United States” traces back to his response to a 1995 law journal article by Professor Amar and his brother, Vikram D. Amar, a professor at the University of California, Davis.

A law that puts the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro temp in the line of presidential succession is unconstitutional, the Amars argued, partly because of a provision that bars “holding any office under the United States” while also being a member of Congress. In a footnote, they observed that a “quibbler” might try to insist that the presidency is not an “office under the United States,” even as they rejected that idea.

“The whole basis of the paper, as I understood it, was that the varying terminology in the Constitution for ‘office’ and ‘officer’ all meant the same thing,” Professor Tillman recalled. “I set out on an intellectual project of saying, ‘Well, what if the Amars are wrong? What if the different “officer” phraseology in the Constitution had different meanings?’”

In short, Professor Tillman became a quibbler. As a law clerk in 2008, for example, he asserted in a paper that the winner of the 2008 presidential election, which pitted Senator Barack Obama against Senator John McCain, could keep his Senate seat while also serving as president.

Professor Tillman made various iterations of that argument, eventually catching the eye of William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. In a short essay in 2016, Professor Baude appeared both bemused and intrigued.

“When you read an individual Tillman piece, you will notice exceedingly technical arguments combined with an almost urgent voice,” Professor Baude wrote. “You cannot help but think the author is brilliant, and you cannot help but wonder if the author is rather eccentric. As you read more of the pieces together, you will realize that he has a constitutional project, that he pursues it with great skill and knowledge, and that if he didn’t do it, nobody would.”

That did not mean Professor Baude agreed. Last summer, he co-wrote a widely cited article arguing on originalist and textualist grounds that Mr. Trump is ineligible to be president again. The essay repudiated Professor Tillman’s view, saying that phrases like “officer of the United States” must be read “sensibly, naturally and in context, without artifice” that would render it a “‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings.”

Professor Tillman’s theory started to get more attention as Mr. Trump’s presidency raised novel legal issues. After Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, Professor Blackman said he recognized that a president who owned a global hotel empire would lead to legal fights over the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It bars people holding “any office of profit or trust under” the United States from accepting certain payments from foreign states.

Professor Blackman approached Professor Tillman and proposed they write about the office issue. In a case challenging Mr. Trump’s acceptance of foreign government patronage at the hotel he then operated in Washington, the two scholars submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the clause does not cover the presidency.

In a 2018 ruling, a federal judge in Maryland engaged at length with Professor Tillman’s view — and rejected it. That case was eventually dismissed on other grounds. But the Colorado ballot case has now given the line of inquiry even greater salience.

“His work was frantic,” Professor Blackman said. “Now everyone is listening.”

Listen up, CAT5's are just not scary enough!

Quote:Study Calls for New Category 6 Mega-Hurricane Classification Amid Climate Change

A recent study by scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presents compelling evidence that the current Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which classifies hurricanes up to Category 5, is no longer sufficient for the types of mega-hurricanes the world could soon start seeing.

With hurricanes reaching unprecedented intensities due to global warming, researchers say there’s a strong argument for introducing a new Category 6 classification.

“Both observations and models suggest that the open-endedness of the 5th category of the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale becomes increasingly problematic for conveying wind risk in a warming world,” study authors write.

“Our motivation here is to reconsider how the open-endedness of the scale can lead to an underestimation of risk, and, in particular, how this underestimation becomes increasingly problematic in a warming world.”

Historically, the Saffir–Simpson scale has been instrumental in communicating the potential wind damage of hurricanes to the public. However, it caps at Category 5, which includes storms with wind speeds of more than 157 miles per hour.

Dr. Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and climate scientist Dr. James Kossin say the Category 5 cap now fails to accurately represent the increased intensity and potential damage of the most mega-hurricanes in a warming world.

Researchers say extending the scale to include a Category 6—for storms with wind speeds exceeding 192 mph—will better convey the risks associated with the types of mega-hurricanes we will likely experience in the near future.

Study findings published in the journal PNAS-Environmental Sciences highlight a concerning trend of global warming significantly increasing the strength of the most intense hurricanes.

Using a blend of observational data, theoretical models, and climate simulations, researchers said evidence suggests future hurricanes are expected to increasingly surpass the Category 5 threshold.

According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, 22 Category 5 hurricanes have occurred in the last 100 years. Nearly half (48%) of those occurred within the past 20 years.

In the last 10 years, several storms, including Typhoon Haiyan and Hurricanes Patricia, Haiyan, and Goni, all exhibited wind speeds exceeding 192mph, placing them within the researcher’s proposed Category 6. 

And current climate projections suggest that such ultra-intense mega-hurricanes will only become more frequent as global temperatures rise.

The issue’s core lies in the fact that global warming is pumping more energy into the climate system, particularly the oceans, which serve as the engine for hurricanes.

Warmer ocean temperatures increase the latent and sensible heat for storm formation, leading to more powerful hurricanes. This phenomenon raises the peak wind speeds of these storms and increases their potential for destruction.

The recent study isn’t the first time climate scientists have kicked around introducing a new Category 6 mega-hurricane classification.

At a 2018 climate conference in New Zealand, climatologist and the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, Dr. Michael Mann, described the current Saffir–Simpson scale as increasingly outdated.

“Scientifically, [six] would be a better description of the strength of 200mph storms, and it would also better communicate the well-established finding now that climate change is making the strongest storms even stronger,” Dr. Mann said.

In a 1991 interview, meteorologist and co-creator of the Saffir–Simpson scale, Dr. Robert Simpson, said going beyond the maximum Category 5 is unnecessary because the scale was initially designed to measure property damage, not as a scientific barometer.

“When you get up into winds in excess of 155 miles per hour, you have enough damage [and] if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building, it’s going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered,” said Dr. Simpson. “I think that it’s immaterial what will happen with winds stronger than 156 miles per hour. That’s the reason why we didn’t try to go any higher than that anyway.”

Regardless of its original intent, many climate scientists like Dr. Mann, Dr. Wehner, and Dr. Kossin say today’s Saffir–Simpson scale is used for more than simply demonstrating a hurricane’s property damage potential.

“Since the scale is now used as much in a scientific context as it is a damage assessment context, it makes sense to introduce a category six to describe the unprecedented strength 200mph storms we’ve seen over the past few years,” Dr. Mann explained.

Given the system’s current use and the increasing intensity of modern storms, Dr. Simpson may have eventually warmed up to the idea of updating the scale he helped create. However, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 102.

Researchers say introducing a Category 6 mega-hurricane to the classification system is more than a technical adjustment. It’s a crucial step for public safety and awareness.

With storms growing stronger, researchers argue that current categorizations underplay the actual risk posed by the most severe hurricanes. They say a new category would better reflect the escalating hazard, helping to ensure communities are more appropriately prepared for the impacts of these supercharged mega-hurricanes.

The study’s authors advocate adopting a Category 6 classification to raise awareness and prompt action. They hope that recognizing the increasing intensity of storms will improve preparedness and response strategies, potentially saving lives and reducing damage.

The study also underscores the broader issue of climate change, highlighting the urgent need for global efforts to mitigate its impacts.

“Tropical cyclone risk messaging is currently a very active topic, and changes in messaging are widely believed necessary to better inform the public about inland flooding and storm surge, phenomena that a wind-based scale is only tangentially relevant to,” wrote study authors.

“While adding a 6th category to the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale would not solve that issue, it could raise awareness about the perils of the increased risk of major TCs due to global warming.”

WTF? LOL, check this story out...

Quote:A Bellevue, Washington man had a conundrum. He had acquired a the rocket of a missile built to carry a nuclear bomb during the Cold War from his deceased neighbor and was looking to donate it. He had called the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio about giving it to them. The museum then called the police. That’s according to the Bellevue Police Department, which this week shared that they had sent the bomb squad to the man’s home to discover he was in possession of an air-to-air munition.

Photos shared by the Bellevue Police Department make it clear the device is obviously a rocket. But what the bomb squad found when they inspected it was that it wasn’t just any rocket. It was an AIR-2A Genie — a Cold War-era air-to-air rocket.

According to the very museum the man tried to donate the rocket to, the AIR-2A Genie “is an air-to-air rocket with a nuclear warhead designed for use against formations of enemy bombers. It has no guidance system and is powered by a solid-propellant rocket motor.”

Somehow a Cold War-era air-to-air rocket meant for carrying a nuclear payload ended up in the greater Seattle area. According to the would-be donor, his neighbor had bought it at an estate sale and he acquired it after his neighbor died. The chain of custody before that is unclear.

Thankfully the rocket was inert. Not only was there no nuclear warhead inside of it threatening the greater Seattle area, there was no fuel either. A spokesman for the police department even described it as essentially being a gas tank for fuel when talking to the BBC.


The AIR-2 Genie was introduced in the 1950s, being put into use by the U.S. military in 1957. It was also used by the Canadian military (with an arrangement with the U.S. that left them in American custody until needed). However it was taken out of service in 1988. It was early in its operational use that its biggest test was done. On July 19, 1957 the military did a test detonation over Yucca Flats, NV as part of Operation Plumbbob. That was a series of more than two dozen nuclear tests, with the AIR-2 (or the MB-1 as it was also known as) being fired at approximately 18,000 feet above sea level.

“It was the first and only test detonation of a U.S. nuclear-tipped air-to-air rocket,” according to the museum. The museum itself already has at least one AIR-2 on display.

Now here’s where the situation in Bellevue gets weird. The rocket, which again was meant for launching nuclear warheads, was left with the owner.

“Because the item was inert and the military did not request it back, police left the item with the neighbor to be restored for display in a museum,” Bellevue police said in a statement. That means the owner is going to get another shot at sending the rocket to a museum. It’s unclear if he intends to try giving it to the Air Force Museum a second time. 

Police find rocket from nuclear missile in Washington home

Quote:A mysterious phenomenon is caught on camera in different places , but no one knows what it is, or where it's coming from. Could it be "the hum" , or the oakville blobs ? To make things even stranger and creepier mysterious monster like footprints are showing up in people's backyards and they seem to disappear out of nowhere. Bigfoot ? Skinwalkers ? Let's find out. From creepy jelly like blobs falling from the sky to unexplained glitches in the matrix, In this video I will analyze the creepiest and most unexplained videos that are shaking the internet. Welcome to the Impossible channel where James LaFleur analyses the creepiest and the most mind blowing videos for your entertainment.

I remember when the movie was released and all the religious protest that made people want to see the movie even more. I saw it and do not remember anything that would have gotten someone bent out of shape...but some people are always looking for something to be offended by IMO.



The video is rather dark compared to the movie seen in theaters but the audio is OK. I never saw what all the hubbub was about ?

Ukraine is not the end goal as some have said. The following video brings up statements and documents that reveal the grand plans for the Russian and Chinese NWO.
 

Quote:It’s been nearly 2 years since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and while we closely follow the frontline and the movement of Ukrainian and Russian armed forces, as we wait for military support for Ukraine from both the US and Europe, we don’t any more dwell on the real reasons why Russia attacked Ukraine. In this video, we look at Russia’s main aims in this war: shifting the entire global order, questioning the hegemony of America, and the rivalry between the USA vs China in this increasingly global conflict. With our experts, we will be questioning the possibility of a new global war (WW III), the likelihood of a US China war, why Ukraine, what is the dynamics between NATO vs Russia today - and what shifts Russia and China really want to achieve; the war in Ukraine explained.

Quote:T-G-I-F vs S-H-I-T

A business man got on an elevator. 

When he entered, there was a blonde already inside who greeted him with a bright, 
"T-G-I-F" 

He smiled at her and replied, 
"S-H-I-T" 
She looked puzzled and repeated, 
"T-G-I-F," more slowly. 

He again answered, 
"S-H-I-T." 

The blonde was trying to keep it friendly, so she smiled her biggest smile, and said as sweetly as possibly, 
"T-G-I-F." 

The man smiled back to her and once again, 
"S-H-I-T."

The exasperated blonde finally decided to explain. 

'T-G-I-F' means 'Thank God, It's Friday.' Get it, duuhhh?" 

The man answered, 
"S-H-I-T' means 'Sorry, Honey, It's Thursday'-- duuhhh.

What can I say... common sense truth. (Except for the last part about Democrats being able to reverse course and salvage sanity as I think they have already jumped the shark)

Incompetent Elites Make Trump Look Appealing

His supporters don’t love everything about him but are sick of being disdained and misgoverned.

https://archive.is/RnVYz#selection-5669.0-5673.95

Quote:Democrats and traditional Republicans are flummoxed. How are 4 in 10 of our fellow citizens ready to vote for Donald Trump? Democrats deplore Trump supporters as racists who must be saved from their ignorance. Traditional Republicans dream that some policy plan or another attack on Mr. Trump’s character might sway his voters.



We ought to listen instead. What motivates Trump supporters? Simple: They want their country back.
They might have lost a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan. What was the sacrifice for? In the botched peace and withdrawal, they concluded that the foreign-policy elite don’t know what they’re doing. They are hesitant about Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan because the same crew is in charge. They’ll back an America that fights to win, but they don’t want their sons and daughters to die for America only to lose slowly.


In the 2007-08 financial crisis, they lost a house, a job or a business. They learned that the people in charge of the financial system don’t know what they’re doing. ObamaCare sent them a health-insurance card that doesn’t work well when they get sick. They wonder: Do any of the policy wonks who promote this stuff actually use it themselves? They looked at Hillary Clinton and saw her insincerity, her nonprofit collecting millions, the way she said Trump supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” They gambled on Mr. Trump.


Then the establishment blew up. They saw the Federal Bureau of Investigation harass Mr. Trump’s appointees, much of official Washington fashion itself “the resistance,” the Russia-collusion hoax, years of pointless investigations.


In 2020 Covid hit. Trump supporters initially went along, trusting institutions. But the pandemic soon exposed the politicized incompetence of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the scientific establishment. Lockdowns destroyed lives. Officials made up rules and ramped up censorship. Inquiries about whether the virus came from a lab leak, or anything negative about masks or vaccines, became “misinformation” subject to censorship. Trump supporters saw media, tech companies and national-security bigwigs suppress the news of the Hunter Biden laptop just in time for the election.


When schools went remote, parents found out what was actually going on inside the classrooms. Teachers were coaching students to hate themselves, their country and their religious traditions and sexualizing young children. The FBI treated angry parents as domestic terrorists. After Oct. 7, Trump supporters learned that universities are incompetent and politicized and disdain people like them. They saw that once-trusted mainstream-media outlets had become political advocates long ago.


Voters see the chaos of a dysfunctional immigration system spill into their neighborhoods. They see crime overwhelming and shutting down cities where officials refuse to enforce laws. They see the homeless invading public spaces.


They aren’t proud of Mr. Trump’s actions after the 2020 election. But 91 felony counts, some brought by prosecutors who campaigned on a promise to get Mr. Trump, and most unrelated to the election? Bonnie and Clyde didn’t have this much legal trouble! And now disqualifying Mr. Trump from the ballot? “Destroy democracy to save democracy” is no longer a joke. The existence of the deep state seems to be confirmed with every outrage.


Why aren’t Trump supporters properly grateful for Bidenomics? They understand the economy is just recovering to something like normal after the pandemic. They are smart enough to know that big spending programs will go down a rat hole into someone’s pocket. They know that a mountain of debt must end badly. They see the river of wasted money and the surge of inflation, more evidence that macroeconomic elites don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t want to be force-fed electric cars and trucks. They’re sick of washers that don’t wash, toilets that don’t flush, showers that don’t clean.


Why are these voters inclined toward Mr. Trump? Well, there is no better way to stick it to the elites than to vote for the man who drives them most crazy.


This election isn’t about employment, spending promises or 12-point policy plans. Voters everywhere want the basic institutions of American society and government to return to a semblance of apolitical competence. Warren Harding’s “return to normalcy” after the first Progressive Era might be a good slogan.


What should Nikki Haley do? Show that she understands this deep frustration. Explain how she will fix the country’s institutions and why Mr. Trump won’t or can’t. What should Mr. Trump do? Understand that this election isn’t about him. He is but the vessel for these voters’ hopes for their country. His personal vendettas will keep him from office.


What should Democrats do? Listen. Stop screaming your talking points and hyperventilating that Mr. Trump is a dictator in waiting. Stop falling into the obvious trap. Mr. Trump is gifted at provoking ridiculous overreaction from his opponents. You promised moderation, openness, conciliation and simple competence. You delivered the opposite. It is still possible to acknowledge, listen and pivot.

Stunning coincidences are happening to some Black Americans who publicly criticize Biden or refuse to endorse him.... 

Just a quick summary that I was trying to wrap my head around. Tons of sources out there which I quickly grew numb after trying to gauge which to believe, let alone understand. Feel free to add-on sources and/or your opinion on the wars/armed conflicts. I know, it's all become so tiresome.

How many wars going on in Africa?

According to the Swiss Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law & Human Rights the Middle East and North Africa have more than 45 Armed Conflicts in the following territories: Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and Western Sahara.

The majority are non-international (NIACs), involving a multitude of armed non-state actors and foreign interventions by Western powers, Russia, and neighboring countries – except for the NIACs taking place in Egypt and Turkey.

Syria is the most affected country in the region.

Africa comes second in the number of armed conflicts per region with more than 35 non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) taking place in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. Several armed groups – fighting against government forces and/or against each other’s – are involved in these conflicts.

Western powers and/or neighbouring countries are intervening in the NIACs that take place in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Somalia.

Asia is the theatre of 19 non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) involving 19 armed groups. These are happening in Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan and The Philippines.

Two international armed conflicts – between respectively India and Pakistan, and between India and China – are also taking place in the region.

Pakistan and the Philippines are on the top of the list with six NIACs for each country. In Pakistan, governmental forces are fighting various armed groups acting throughout the territory, particularly Taliban-affiliated groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and independence fighters in Balochistan. In the Philippines, most NIACs are taking place in the Mindanao region where government forces are fighting against several armed groups, including the Moro National Liberation Front, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, the Maute Group and the Abu Sayyaf Group.

The following military occupations constitute the majority of armed conflicts that are taking place in Europe, four out of seven conflicts: Russia is currently occupying Crimea (Ukraine), Transdniestria (Moldova), as well as South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia), while Armenia is occupying parts of Nagorno Karabakh (Azerbaijan). Europe is also the theatre of an international armed conflict (IAC) between Ukraine and Russia, and of two non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) in Ukraine opposing governmental forces with the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Latin America: Six Armed Conflicts

The six non-international armed conflicts that are taking place in the region are split evenly between Mexico and Colombia.

While Colombia has experienced one of the longest non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) in modern times and is still the theatre of three NIACs, Mexico is characterized by three NIACs involving gangs’ drug cartels. This is the first time we classify armed violence involving criminal organizations as NIACs and we did so given the level of organization of the cartels and intensity of violence.

Quote:

Violent conflict is increasing in multiple parts of the world. In addition to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the Israeli offensive on Gaza, raising the specter of a wider war in the Middle East, there has been a surge in violence across Syria, including a wave of armed drone attacks that threatened U.S. troops stationed there. In the Caucasus in late September, Azerbaijan seized the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—forcing an estimated 150,000 ethnic Armenians to flee their historical home in the territory and setting the stage for renewed fighting with Armenia. Meanwhile, in Africa, the civil war in Sudan rages on, conflict has returned to Ethiopia, and a military takeover of Niger in July was the sixth coup across the Sahel and West Africa since 2020.

In fact, according to an analysis of data gathered by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, conducted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the number, intensity, and length of conflicts worldwide is at its highest level since before the end of the Cold War. The study found that there were 55 active conflicts in 2022, with the average one lasting about eight to 11 years, a substantial increase from the 33 active conflicts lasting an average of seven years a decade earlier.

Notwithstanding the increase in conflicts, it has been more than a decade since an internationally mediated comprehensive peace deal has been brokered to end a war. UN-led or UN-assisted political processes in Libya, Sudan, and Yemen have stalled or collapsed. Seemingly frozen conflicts—in countries including Ethiopia, Israel, and Myanmar—are thawing at an alarming pace. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, high-intensity conflict has even returned to Europe, which had previously enjoyed several decades of relative peace and stability. Alongside the proliferation of war has come record levels of human upheaval. In 2022, a quarter of the world’s population—two billion people—lived in conflict-affected areas. The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide reached a record 108 million by the start of 2023.

Until now, the international response from European Union member states, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all of whom invested heavily in peace building in the wake of the Cold War, has been to shift the goal posts of “peace” from conflict resolution to conflict management. But events in the Middle East and elsewhere are a reminder that conflict can be managed for only so long. As fighting flares worldwide and the root causes of conflict remain unresolved, traditional peace building and development tools look increasingly ineffective. The result is that aid bills grow, refugees are displaced, and fractured societies continue to suffer. A new approach to resolving and managing conflicts and their impact is urgently needed.

BROKEN MACHINERY

Having fallen between 1990 and 2007, the total number of conflicts worldwide began to rise in 2010, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program found. The number of civil and interstate wars, and the fatalities they cause, are now at their highest levels since the mid-1980s, and the UN declared in January that the number of violent conflicts worldwide is at its highest level since the end of World War II. Wars that are halted are increasingly likely to reignite within a year, as happens about five times a year on average.

Wars are becoming more common, and difficult to end, for a number of reasons. One is the changing nature of conflict. Twenty-first-century wars tend to be fought between states and armed groups committed to different causes with access to relatively advanced weaponry and other forms of technology, as well as money earned from natural resources and criminal activity. Complex, multiparty conflict became the norm after the Soviet Union collapsed, which removed the binary organizing principle of West-Soviet competition that shaped many earlier wars. More recently, conflicts have also become increasingly internationalized. Countries including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States regularly become drawn, whether indirectly or directly, into foreign wars, as has been seen repeatedly in conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. The more local and international parties that are involved in a conflict, the harder it is to end it.

The UN, once the go-to conflict mediator, has been sidelined. The UN’s loss of influence has been driven by geopolitical competition, which has divided powerful states. The UN Security Council is particularly affected by these forces. It has seized up, plagued by growing international rivalries between the United States, Russia, and China and by an increasingly transactional approach to international politics. Deadlock at the Security Council means that the UN can offer neither solutions nor censure for war crimes or aggression. Security Council–mandated peacekeeping and transition teams are becoming rarer and are often short-lived, and UN envoys, peacekeepers, and other officials increasingly lack leverage and credibility with conflicting parties. This June, for example, Mali sought the withdrawal of a decadelong UN peacekeeping presence because of tensions between the government and the mission, including a disagreement over their role and mandate. Sudan’s rival warlords reportedly refused to even speak to their country’s UN Special Envoy Volker Perthes, before he resigned in September. The UN peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, has stated that divisions within the Security Council mean UN missions are no longer able to achieve “the ultimate goal of peacekeeping”—devising durable political solutions—and must instead settle for “intermediate goals” such as “preserving cease-fires.”

Increasingly overwhelmed by a series of global crises and new policy priorities, including Russian aggression in Europe and an assertive China, many high-level policymakers in the United States and Europe see limited value in intervening militarily or investing significant political capital in far-flung conflicts that they regard as of little strategic consequence. Attention has instead shifted to dealing with the consequences of conflicts—waves of refugees and cross-border smuggling of drugs and weapons, in particular—rather than their causes.

LOWERING THE BAR

Faced with this array of challenges, the perception of what is possible among UN officials and Western countries who once threw their weight behind peacemaking—principally EU member-states led by France and Germany, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States—is changing. A former UN official who worked for decades on international peace processes has noted that the numerous barriers to mediation make it “almost impossible” to end modern conflicts. In practice, UN intervention today often serves to de-escalate conflicts or, in a best-case scenario, initiate a fragile political process that few expect to work. In private, many veteran mediators and policy officials have argued that the ambitions of many international mediation efforts are tacitly limited to bilateral dealmaking designed to achieve short-term détente or limited goals, such as the 2022 agreement that allowed Ukrainian grain to pass through the Black Sea. Marginalized during negotiations, and lacking broad peace agreements and political transitions in which they can play a significant role, UN mediators have lost much of their raison d’être. Most other peace-building tools—including inclusive political dialogue, accountability, transitional justice, and security sector reform—cannot succeed without political processes to anchor them.

Elsewhere, the aspirations of many Western diplomats have quietly shifted to pursuing or supporting containment or de-escalation, avoiding the search for peaceful and sustainable resolution to conflicts. Efforts by the United States to describe the Abraham Accords—which sought to normalize Arab relations with Israel—as “a peace process” highlight this change. The accords in practice fail to address the drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as has become disastrously clear in the Israel-Hamas war.

International aspirations for long-term solutions are particularly low in the Middle East and North Africa. The current phase of Yemen’s civil war has slowed to a near-halt following negotiations between the Houthi rebels—who sparked the conflict by seizing the capital in 2014—and Saudi Arabia, which intervened to oust them in 2015. But the UN and the Houthis’ domestic rivals have been excluded from negotiations, and the chances of a meaningful political settlement appear low. Many Yemenis, including the veteran researcher Nadwa al-Dawsari, expect either a return to fighting sooner or later, or the continuation of a limbo state of “no war, no peace” if the Houthi-Saudi channel remains the main negotiation track.

Syria’s so-called frozen conflict is also seeing an alarming but predictable uptick in violence and instability because of the lack of progress of negotiations. On one track, negotiations between the Arab Liaison Committee, which is composed of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and the Arab League, and the Syrian government have stalled. At the same time, the UN-led peace process in Syria is detached from the conflict’s drivers. It is pursuing limited objectives, including a new constitution to be drafted by a committee that has not met in 18 months, and a yet-to-begin process, led by the UN, that seeks to build mutual confidence between Syria and the Arab Liaison Committee, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This process is largely divorced from current political and military developments, including a recent spike in violence across the country.

VIOLENCE CANNOT BE CONTAINED

Until recently, some international officials appeared to think an end to fighting was a good-enough goal. In late September, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, touting the Biden administration’s foreign policy bona fides, claimed that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades.” But Hamas’s brutal attacks in Israel a week after his comments and Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza, as well as surging violence across Syria, show the limits of containment.

Containment does not resolve conflicts and requires active management. This means proactive efforts to address grievances, quell violence, advance negotiations, and take action to deal with increasing instability or unexpected events. Whereas reducing violence is a sensible initial goal, once conflicts have been de-escalated, attention all too often shifts elsewhere. It is easy, then, to miss warning signs that fighting is about to restart. This is a particular problem when armed actors or regimes remain in control after failed peace processes or during political transitions. Without accountability for their past misdeeds, such groups feel free to repeat violence. For this reason, Sudan’s generals appear to have believed that they would not be held to account by the UN, their international backers (particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE), or the states engaged in supporting the transition process (including Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States) when they began to fight each other in April. Sudanese activists and diplomats based in the capital rightly pointed out that they had repeatedly warned that the men who have governed the country since the 2019 military coup were gearing up for war with one another. But these warnings were either dismissed or watered down in Western capitals, including Washington, in part because no conflict had yet broken out and because officials did not see Sudan as a priority.

Both regional actors and Western diplomats and analysts have long argued that the status quo in Gaza and the West Bank is unsustainable. But international attention has been focused elsewhere. Regional normalization efforts led by the Trump administration built ties between Israel and former Arab adversaries including Bahrain and the UAE. The Abraham Accords have been sustained by the Biden administration, which has energetically pursued an Israeli-Saudi deal. But these efforts have completely failed to address the drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite this, even as the war between Israel and Hamas escalated, U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, declared that Washington still hoped to continue Israeli-Saudi normalization negotiations.

THE AID TRAP

All too often, humanitarian aid has become a panacea for managing unresolved conflict. Take Syria, where, 12 years after the war began, the UN aid funding requests for 2023 included $4.81 billion for programs inside the country and $5.7 billion to support refugees. Similar sums are being expended in Sudan and Myanmar, both of which are suffering conflicts and have vacant UN political envoy roles and no discernible peace process. Violence grinds on unabated, and civilians subsist on meager aid provision—in areas where they can be reached. As the number of conflicts rises, the price tag for aid keeps growing.

Donors cannot keep up with the growing cost of war. Funding for aid appeals increased by an average of ten percent year on year between 2012 and 2018 but then tapered off. Yet UN appeals for funds have continued to grow, quadrupling in number between 2013 and today. Of the 406 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2022, 87 percent lived in a country in the midst of high-intensity conflict, and 83 percent in a protracted crisis.

Aid, in these circumstances, cannot be the only answer. Refugee return requires a fundamental shift in local dynamics that allows those fleeing violence and persecution to safely return home, access their properties, and reintegrate into society without discrimination. At the same time, postconflict justice and development require management by suitable governments that are willing to address the violations committed during the conflict and provide adequate governance free of discrimination to facilitate a productive economic environment in which corruption and illicit activity are combated. Locally led peace building that heals the social fractures caused by conflict requires civic space to conduct dialogue, address grievances, and secure inclusive decision-making and governance.

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

The world is at an inflection point, and it is still possible to galvanize support for a new approach to resolving conflict. To achieve this, creative and courageous leadership is needed from a broad coalition of politicians, business leaders, the UN, peace builders, and local communities—aligned with a renewed ambition to make peace. Without aspiring to, and placing a value on, sustainable peace, it is all too easy to accept least bad outcomes and to forget the enormous human and resource toll of doing so.

First and foremost, any effort at renewing peacemaking for the twenty-first century needs political will from powerful states, principally the United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council. This point was explicitly made by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his recently published policy brief, “A New Agenda for Peace,” a vision that places the responsibility for securing the peace and upholding international norms in the hands of individual countries rather than the multilateral system. If governments that say they believe in a rules-based order—including those in Brussels, London, and Washington—are willing to uphold international laws and norms, then there may be some hope for the future. But if they are not, then the current race to the bottom is certain to continue.

More accurate language referring to “peace” may help these governments reengage with the struggle for it. Describing negotiations over a cease-fire as a “peace process,” as if peace were just around the corner rather than years or decades away, all too often leads to early claims that it has been achieved just because the guns have temporarily fallen silent. This misconception leads to disengagement. New, more accurate framing that differentiates between stages of conflict management, conflict resolution, and peace building, as well as a more honest account of the prospects for progress into the next stage, would lead to a more honest account of what is possible and practical—or morally acceptable. In particular, this new approach to language would help to establish realistic expectations of what can be achieved in the short, medium, and long terms. It would also prevent the all too familiar rush to declare success that scuppers the continuation of many peace processes.

Most important, a new approach to mediation is needed. Formal peace-building processes and practices were expanded and professionalized during the post–Cold War period, and they presume or require dynamics—including geopolitical cooperation and successful peace settlements and political transitions—that no longer exist. Today’s world is defined by geopolitical competition and requires something very different. In responding to these challenges, mediators must become more creative and collaborative. They must become advocates for their own cause, making the public case for peace, and they must secure diplomatic support and engage with a wide variety of groups, including civil society. In particular, mediators must work closely with, and empower, local peace builders, absorbing local knowledge and involving key players in peace processes, which must no longer seek to perpetuate status quo power dynamics. Mediators must also work closely with—and at times provide support to—regional blocs, play a greater role in supporting bilateral negotiations, and empower conflicting parties to create sustainable peace once the guns have been silenced.

Meanwhile, those seeking to make peace will need to engage nontraditional actors—middle powers, humanitarian organizations, and actors from the private sector. These partnerships should harness the potential of the environmental, social, and corporate governance agenda to carve out a role for the private sector in supporting peace, forge new models of geopolitical cooperation, and use aid to support peace rather than serve as a substitute for it. These are big asks. But they are also the basic requirements for building sustainable peace, stopping the proliferation of conflict, and aiming for more than the temporary quelling of violence.

A World at War