"Social Movements And Democratization In North Africa, 1912–2024," by Moha Ennaji

A Century Of Contention, Provisionally Mapped: Notes Toward A Critical Reading Of Moha Ennaji’s Social Movements And Democratization In North Africa, 1912–2024 – Book Review

July 31, 2026
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Key Takeaways:

Ennaji’s book offers a rare 112-year single-authored treatment of Maghrebi social movements. Covering 1912–2024 across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, it links colonial-era nationalist resistance to post-2011 youth protest in one continuous analytical frame.

The structure organizes contention into six discrete movement types. Nationalist, human-rights/democratic, women’s, Islamist, Amazigh, and youth movements each receive chapters, raising questions about whether overlaps and long-term continuities are fully theorized.

Its distinctive contribution is longue-durée depth within a narrow Maghreb focus. Unlike broader or shorter-span works (Beinin & Vairel, Hill, Mako & Moghadam), the book’s ultimate value hinges on whether it delivers a synthetic theory of change rather than a chronological sequence of separate cases.

1. An Ambitious Act of Periodization

Ennaji’s title stakes a claim before the introduction begins. Framing a study of social movements across a 112-year span—from the eve of the French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco to the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings and their long tail—signals an ambition rarely attempted in single-authored treatments of Maghrebi contentious politics (Ennaji, 2026). Most comparable works either anchor themselves to a single rupture (Beinin & Vairel, 2013, organize their volume around the 2011 uprisings and their immediate antecedents) or to a policy-relevant window such as post-independence state formation (Waltz, 1995). Ennaji’s periodization instead treats 1912 as a hinge in a continuous history of mobilization, implicitly arguing that nationalist resistance to colonial rule and twenty-first-century youth protest belong to a single analytical lineage rather than to separate historical epochs requiring separate theoretical vocabularies.

This is a defensible and productive move, and one consistent with Ennaji’s earlier work, which has repeatedly argued that questions of cultural recognition, minority rights, and democratic governance in North Africa cannot be understood synchronically but must be traced through their colonial and immediate postcolonial origins (Ennaji, 2014). It also raises the central methodological question a full review must answer: does the book sustain a single explanatory framework across this span, or does it function more as a chronological anthology of six movement-types loosely bound by shared geography? The chapter architecture—nationalist, human-rights/democratic, women’s, Islamist, Amazigh, and youth movements, organized in sequence—suggests the latter risk is real. A century-long periodization is only as strong as the connective tissue the author builds between chapters; whether Ennaji’s introduction and conclusion supply a genuine theory of change linking 1912 to 2024, or whether the unity is asserted more than demonstrated, is the single most consequential question for assessing the book’s contribution.

2. The Architecture of Six Movements

The publisher’s description confirms eight chapters organized around six movement categories—nationalist, democratic/human-rights, women’s, Islamist, Amazigh (Berber), and youth—bookended by an introduction and conclusion, with confirmed chapter titles including “The Nationalist Movements” (Ennaji, 2026, Chapter 2), “The Islamist Movements” (Ennaji, 2026, Chapter 4), and “The Youth Movements,” appearing later in the sequence (Ennaji, 2026, Chapter 7). The book states its intention to trace how nationalism, language, religion, gender, and socioeconomic inequality each generate distinct mobilizational logics, while arguing more broadly that uneven development, political exclusion, and identity-based discourse continue to structure contention across the region (Morocco World News, 2026).


Two structural questions follow directly from this design, and both are answerable only once the chapters themselves are in hand. First, category boundaries in social movement scholarship are rarely as clean as a table of contents implies: Amazigh activism in Morocco has been substantially carried by women (Sadiqi, 2014), and youth mobilization after 2011 drew heavily on human-rights and constitutional-reform vocabularies inherited from earlier democracy movements (Beinin & Vairel, 2013). A chapter structure organized by discrete movement-type risks reproducing these movements as more separable than they were on the ground, artificially partitioning what were often overlapping coalitions and shared repertoires of contention. Whether Ennaji’s chapters acknowledge and theorize this overlap—rather than simply noting it in passing—will be decisive for judging the book’s analytical rigor.

Second, the relative textual weight given to each movement-type is itself an argument, even before a single claim is stated. A comparative reviewer will want to know, once pagination is available, whether the space allotted to the Amazigh movement matches its billing in the publisher’s own framing—which lists it alongside women’s, Islamist, human-rights, and youth movements as receiving “particular attention”—or whether, as has occurred in other single-authored regional surveys, the chapter functions as a coda rather than a full analytical unit comparable to the treatment given Islamist or nationalist movements. Given Ennaji’s own substantial prior corpus on Amazigh cultural and political questions, this is a natural point of continuity to verify rather than assume.

3. Positioning Within the Field

Ennaji’s book enters a crowded but unevenly distributed literature. Beinin and Vairel’s edited volume (2013) remains the most influential theoretical intervention on MENA social movements, explicitly challenging classical social-movement-theory concepts—political opportunity structures, framing, mobilizing structures, repertoires of contention—as insufficiently attentive to authoritarian contexts, and doing so through country case studies rather than a single connected narrative. Hill’s Democratisation in the Maghreb (2016) takes the opposite structural approach to Ennaji’s: a state-centered account of regime type and transition trajectories in Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, with social movements treated largely as inputs to elite bargaining rather than as the primary unit of analysis—a book Ennaji has himself reviewed and implicitly positioned his own work against (Ennaji, 2017). Mako and Moghadam’s After the Arab Uprisings (2021) offers the most recent comparative synthesis, organized around four explanatory variables—state and institutions, civil society, gender and women’s mobilization, and international influence—applied across a wider MENA case set including Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

Against this backdrop, Ennaji’s contribution is distinctive on two axes rather than one. First, its three-country scope—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, explicitly excluding Libya, Mauritania, and the broader Sahel—narrows the comparative frame relative to Mako and Moghadam or Beinin and Vairel, trading breadth for depth within the Maghreb proper. Second, its 112-year time depth is genuinely without close precedent among these comparators, all of which begin their empirical analysis at or after mid-twentieth-century independence movements at the earliest, and typically in the 1990s or 2000s. The claimed contribution, then, is not that North African social movements are unstudied—Ennaji’s own long publication record on the region’s minorities, women, and multiculturalism attests otherwise (Ennaji, 2014)—but that the region’s contentious politics have not previously been assembled into a single longue-durée narrative spanning colonial nationalism through post-Arab Spring youth mobilization within one authored volume.


Whether this trade-off—depth and duration purchased at the cost of comparative breadth—is vindicated by the analysis depends on execution the reviewer cannot yet assess: does the book’s three-country focus generate genuinely comparative insight into why Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan trajectories diverged despite shared colonial and Arab-Islamic inheritances, or does it default to a country-by-country compilation within each chapter, with comparison asserted in the introduction and conclusion but not sustained in the analytical chapters themselves? This is precisely the kind of question that separates a genuinely comparative-historical contribution from a well-organized descriptive survey, and it cannot be settled from the paratext alone.

4. Design Choices That Invite Scrutiny

Several choices visible even from the outside merit flagging as lines of inquiry for the full review, rather than as conclusions.

The exclusion of Libya and Mauritania. A book that takes “North Africa” as its geographic frame while restricting itself to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia implicitly defines the Maghreb around its most institutionally continuous states, bracketing the cases—Libya’s state collapse, Mauritania’s distinct Sahelian-Arab hybridity—that might complicate a narrative organized around gradual, uneven democratization. This is a legitimate scoping decision common to much of the literature (Hill, 2016, makes a similar choice extending only marginally further), but it should be justified rather than left as an unstated convention, since the excluded cases are precisely the ones that test whether “North Africa” functions as a coherent unit of analysis or as a geographic label imposed on divergent trajectories.


“Movement” as the unit of analysis. Organizing chapters by movement-type (nationalist, Islamist, women’s, etc.) rather than by country or by mechanism (framing, resource mobilization, repression) commits the book to treating movements as relatively bounded, coherent actors persisting across decades. This is a stronger claim than it may appear: does Morocco’s Amazigh movement of the 1990s share enough organizational and ideological continuity with earlier Berber cultural associations of the 1960s to be narrated as a single movement, or is continuity itself part of what needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed by the chapter structure? Scholars working from a political-process framework, including contributors to Beinin and Vairel (2013), have generally been more cautious about movement coherence over multi-decade spans, treating organizational continuity as an empirical question rather than a structuring premise.

The state/civil-society framing. The publisher’s abstract commits the book to examining the roles of the state and civil society in enhancing civil rights and democracy, a formulation that presumes civil society’s function is fundamentally enhancing rather than, at times, co-opted, instrumentalized, or channeled by the state into managed rather than genuine liberalization—a dynamic well documented for Morocco’s associative sector specifically (Beinin & Vairel, 2013, describe Moroccan civil society as frequently serving as a field for professionalized activists to increase the value of their credentials as much as a vehicle of popular mobilization). Whether Ennaji’s chapters interrogate this ambiguity or adopt a more linear civil-society-builds-democracy logic will materially affect how the book’s normative stakes should be read.

5. What a Complete Review Must Still Establish

Four questions define the agenda for the fuller, chapter-engaged treatment this essay is meant to precede.

First, does the introduction articulate an explicit theoretical framework—whether political process theory, resource mobilization, framing analysis, or a synthetic alternative—robust enough to carry the analysis across six movement-types and eleven decades, or does the book’s theoretical commitment remain largely implicit, asserted through case selection rather than argued through method?

Second, how does each chapter handle the three-country comparison internally? A chapter that proceeds Morocco-then-Algeria-then-Tunisia in sequence, with a closing paragraph noting similarities and differences, performs a different kind of comparative work than one organized thematically across the three cases throughout.

Third, what primary and secondary sourcing underlies the historical chapters, particularly the earliest material (1912–1956), where the historiography on nationalist mobilization is uneven in quality and often shaped by the nationalist movements’ own retrospective self-narration—a methodological hazard familiar from Maghrebi historiography more broadly.

Fourth, and most consequentially: does the concluding chapter return to the century-long arc promised by the title and demonstrate a cumulative argument—a theory of how nationalist mobilization structurally enabled or constrained the women’s, Amazigh, and youth movements that followed—or does it summarize six chapters without fully synthesizing them into a single argument about the relationship between social movements and democratization in North Africa over time?

6. Provisional Assessment

On the evidence available before reading the manuscript, Ennaji’s Social Movements and Democratization in North Africa, 1912–2024 is best understood as a considered attempt to give the Maghreb’s contentious politics the kind of longue-durée, single-authored treatment that Middle Eastern and North African social-movement scholarship has generally reserved for edited, multi-contributor volumes (Beinin & Vairel, 2013) or narrower state-centered comparative studies (Hill, 2016; Mako & Moghadam, 2021). The ambition is genuine and the gap it targets is real: no existing English-language monograph attempts quite this span for quite this set of movements. Whether the book fully delivers a synthetic argument commensurate with that ambition—rather than a well-organized sequence of six strong but discretely bounded chapters—is the question on which its ultimate contribution will turn, and it is a question this reviewer looks forward to answering once the full manuscript is in hand.


References

Beinin, J., & Vairel, F. (Eds.). (2013). Social movements, mobilization, and contestation in the Middle East and North Africa (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press.

Ennaji, M. (2014). Multiculturalism and democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring. Routledge.

Ennaji, M. (2017). [Review of the book Democratisation in the Maghreb, by J. N. C. Hill]. Review of Middle East Studies.

Ennaji, M. (2026). Social movements and democratization in North Africa, 1912–2024. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hill, J. N. C. (2016). Democratisation in the Maghreb. Edinburgh University Press.

Mako, S., & Moghadam, V. M. (2021). After the Arab uprisings: Progress and stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Morocco World News. (2026, July 28). Moha Ennaji explores North Africa’s social movements in new book. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2026/07/331597/moha-ennaji-explores-north-africas-social-movements-in-new-book/

Sadiqi, F. (2014). Moroccan feminist discourses. Palgrave Macmillan.

Waltz, S. (1995). Human rights and reform: Changing the face of North African politics. University of California Press.

About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.
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Taiwan Tests Economic Leverage After Papua New Guinea Closes Representative Office – Analysis


File photo of an LNG carrier

July 31, 2026
 RFA
By Taejun Kang

Key Takeaways:

Taiwan has halted spot purchases of LNG from Papua New Guinea. The move follows Port Moresby’s decision to close Taipei’s trade office in order to align more closely with Beijing’s One-China policy.

The step is framed as calibrated diplomatic signaling rather than full economic coercion. Analysts say it warns other partners that downgrading unofficial ties with Taiwan may carry costs, while stopping short of a complete trade rupture.

Energy security considerations limit how far Taiwan can escalate. PNG supplies about one-third of its own LNG exports but only around 8% of Taiwan’s imports; a full break would pose greater risks to Taiwan’s energy diversification than to PNG’s revenues.

Taiwan has halted spot purchases of natural gas from Papua New Guinea as a response to Port Moresby ordering the closure of Taipei’s trade office in the South Pacific country.

The decision followed Taipei’s review on imports originating from PNG of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and the move amounts to a warning that countries with ties to Taiwan could face consequences rather than full-scale economic coercion, experts told Radio Free Asia.

“It functions as immediate diplomatic signaling, but also sits within an emerging, if still constrained, strategic adjustment,”Jozef Huljak, a PhD candidate in political science at Constantine the Philosopher University in Slovakia whose research examines Taiwan’s cultural and public diplomacy, told RFA when the decision was in its review stage.

Huljak explained the immediate message was that Papua New Guinea’s decision would not be “cost-free,” while also signaling to other governments that downgrading unofficial ties with Taiwan could carry consequences.

“The LNG review is primarily a signal, but one embedded in a gradual shift toward more calibrated responses as Taiwan’s informal diplomacy comes under sustained pressure,” he said.

Downgrading ties

Papua New Guinea on July 16 announced that it would close Taiwan’s representative office in Port Moresby, saying that the move was meant to align with its “One-China policy” and to deepen trust and economic ties with Beijing.

Port Moresby has never recognized Taiwan since gaining independence in 1975 and establishing relations with China the following year. The Taiwan trade office, which opened in 1990, served as Taipei’s de facto diplomatic mission while facilitating trade and investment.

Taipei blamed the decision on Chinese political and economic pressure, while the United States expressed concern. Beijing, meanwhile, praised the move.

Two days after the announcement, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung said the country was reviewing its broader economic exchanges with Papua New Guinea, including LNG imports of about 1.2 million metric tons a year – roughly one-third of Papua New Guinea’s LNG exports – while stressing that Taipei’s agricultural and fisheries cooperation had also supported local development.

On Tuesday, Lin said that the country would stop spot purchases of LNG from PNG, AFP reported. Spot purchases are one-off arrangements to cover immediate needs rather than long term agreements for periodic deliveries.

Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is Papua New Guinea’s largest export commodity, accounting for roughly half of its overall exports.

While Taiwan is the destination for about a third of PNG’s LNG exports, that only accounts for about 8% of Taiwan’s imports of LNG.

Stopping the spot purchases is somewhat of a departure from Taipei’s previous course.

Taiwan has traditionally sought to distinguish itself from China by presenting itself as a reliable partner that does not use trade or investment as political leverage.

Beijing, meanwhile, has repeatedly been accused by Western governments and observers of employing economic coercion against countries that challenge its interests.

The stoppage of LNG spot purchases, however, is not the first such move by Taiwan – it also recently removed Cambodia from visa facilitation programs after Phnom Penh publicly backed Beijing’s position on Taiwan.

Together, these moves suggest Taipei is becoming more willing to attach consequences to governments that reduce cooperation with Taiwan, even if the measures stop short of outright retaliation, Huljak said.

Tit for tat?

Still, analysts cautioned that Taiwan’s options remain constrained.

“I think … comments made by Foreign Minister Lin still should be primarily viewed as first and foremost diplomatic signaling,” William Yang, a Northeast Asia analyst at the Belgium-based International Crisis Group, told RFA, also while the decision was still in the review stage.

“It’s a warning or it’s a reminder, rather than Taiwan already embracing the idea about weaponizing its existing trade link and relationship with other countries to counter their willingness to … give in to Chinese pressure,” he said.

Yang said Taiwan was also likely examining its energy relationship with Papua New Guinea not just as a form of leverage, but also as a legitimate precaution due to its heavy reliance on LNG.

Taiwan imports about 95% of its energy, and if Beijing is able to influence countries supplying critical resources, “Taiwan will have to also take a precautionary look and examination of its existing trade relationship with a particular country that has shown the willingness to actually bow to China’s pressure,” he said.

Despite PNG accounting for less than one-tenth of Taiwan’s LNG imports, it provides an important source of supply diversification at a time when natural gas generates nearly half of Taiwan’s electricity following the shutdown of its last nuclear reactor in 2025, according to Huljak.

“A full break would therefore carry higher costs for Taiwan’s energy security than for PNG’s export revenues,” Huljak said. “The review is real, but escalation is structurally constrained.”

Message to other partners

The episode nevertheless carries broader implications beyond Papua New Guinea, analysts told RFA.

The impending trade office closure suggests Beijing is increasingly targeting Taiwan’s informal international presence rather than focusing only on the island’s dwindling group of formal diplomatic allies, Huljak said.

“If left unanswered, Papua New Guinea risks becoming a template,” he said. “Governments could align with Beijing, accept economic incentives, and assume that Taiwan lacks the capacity to respond.”

Taiwan’s objective, he said, is to challenge that assumption by demonstrating that even unofficial relationships have value and that ending them may carry opportunity costs.

Meanwhile, Yang believes any decision by Taiwan to reduce LNG imports from Papua New Guinea would resonate beyond the immediate dispute.

“If Taipei does follow through on … reducing or ending its LNG trade with PNG, it obviously will be sending a signal to the rest of the Pacific countries,” he said.

“It would not simply just sit idly and allow these countries’ decisions to further shrink Taiwan’s international diplomatic space,” Yang added, describing it as a demonstration of Taipei’s resolve to protect its interests and sovereignty.


About RFA
Radio Free Asia’s mission is to provide accurate and timely news and information to Asian countries whose governments prohibit access to a free press. Content used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036.
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Graham Sanctions Bill Has Bite, Trump Will Use It To Terrorize India – OpEd


US President Donald Trump with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo Credit: POTUS, X

July 31, 2026
By M.K. Bhadrakumar

Key Takeaways:

A US Senate bill advancing secondary sanctions threatens 100% tariffs on major buyers of Russian oil, including India. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 has strong bipartisan support and could soon reach Trump’s desk for discretionary enforcement.

India already faces competitive disadvantages under existing US tariffs. New Section 301 duties and the lack of textile quota exemptions leave Indian apparel and other exports more expensive than those from Bangladesh, Mexico, and some ASEAN competitors.

The measure is seen as pressure on India’s strategic autonomy. Critics argue the bill aims to force Delhi to cut Russian energy imports and that evasive official responses risk subordinating national interest to US demands.

The Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal’s characterisation of the reports suggesting the US could impose a 100 percent tariff on countries such as India that import Russian oil as speculative cannot be taken as a statement of fact. “We don’t comment on speculation,” he told the media. On closer look, it is an evasive remark.

What is absolutely certain is that the US Congress will pass the bill. In the amended form, the bill, named The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, tightens US sanctions against Russia and Iran. It passed its second procedural vote in the US Senate on Wednesday. Eighty-four senators voted to launch debates on it, while 12 were against.

The final voting can even be expected by the end of the week. The bill envisages restrictions on Russia and Iran’s political and military leaders and state-owned companies as well as secondary sanctions against the two countries’ trade partners. Senators also proposed a 100% tariff for the five main buyers of Russian oil.


Earlier on Wednesday, President Donald Trump actually supported the bill and remarked that he saw no need for the House of Representatives to interrupt the parliamentary recess in August to review the bill. The bill is a veritable reality now. It is upto Trump’s discretion entirely to decide on the implementation of the sanctions.

Equally, it remains a pious hope still that the first tranche of India’s trade agreement with the US, announced by Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 3, will materialise soon.

The catch is, Delhi is pinning hopes that Trump accedes to our wish to be granted a comparative advantage over our competitors, namely, countries in our neighbourhood, the ASEAN region “and other nations with whom we compete,” as Goyal remarked yesterday.

Meanwhile, although the US’ temporary 150-day 10% global tariff expired on July 24, Washington immediately replaced it with permanent Section 301 forced-labor duties of 10% to 12.5% targeting over 60 trading partners, including India.

Unlike competitors such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia, India did not receive a textile and apparel tariff-rate quota (TRQ) exemption for using US-origin cotton, putting Indian apparel exports at a relative price disadvantage. Also, products already governed by Section 232 such as steel, aluminium, and copper continue to face separate existing structural tariffs ranging from 25% to 50%.


Curiously, under the new Section 301 rules effective July 24, India actually faces severe competitiveness disadvantages in its key export sectors when compared to Mexico and Bangladesh. While all three nations technically occupy the baseline 10% tariff tier, specific country exemptions for the other two countries leave India uniquely exposed.

Bangladesh has secured a specialised Textile TRQ Mechanism, whereby a specific volume of Bangladeshi apparel is allowed to enter the US free of tariff, provided they use US-sourced raw cotton and fibre. Whereas, India did not receive a textile mechanism or quota exception. Consequently, Indian ready-made garments face an additional 10% duty stacked on top of regular MFN rates, making Indian textiles significantly more expensive than Bangladeshi exports in the US market. So much for our insistence on preferential tariffs vis-a-vis competitors!

The most controversial element of the Russia sanctions bill in the Congress is the possibility of Washington imposing duties on countries purchasing Russian energy resources (so-called secondary duties). Indeed, Trump has already used secondary tariffs against Indian the past. On August 6, 2025, he signed an executive order “Countering Threats to the United States by the Government of the Russian Federation.” An additional punitive tariff of 25% was imposed on India, effectively increasing the then-current tariff rate on India to 50%. Therefore, in effect, the Graham bill effectively restores Trump’s ability to impose tariffs above 15%.

Ivan Timofeev, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council (an affiliate of Russian foreign ministry) has compared the bill to a gun that Trump could keep on the table and brandish to extract concessions from the other side. Timofeev emphasised: ”Trump’s support for the law is unlikely to have any impact on Russian policy. Perhaps it will add a psychological effect. Even from a purely pragmatic perspective, what’s the point of seriously considering this factor in political calculations if it doesn’t change anything de facto?”


Arguably, the bill is supposed to be another way to pressure Russia to extract further concessions in the Ukrainian conflict. However, the ground reality is that Russian policy has hardened lately and is now focusing on a military solution that ensures there won’t be another war. Trump cannot but be aware of it too.

Addressing a meeting of naval officers in St. Petersburg recently, Putin hinted at what Eurasia’s map would look like in a conceivable future: “I am confident that sooner or later Ukraine will lose these western territories [west of Dnieper River], lands that once belonged to Poland, Hungary and Romania. It may not happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It may take one year, two years, 10 years or 15 years, but history will ultimately put everything back in its place.

“There was only one guarantor of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It was Russia. But they decided it was necessary, possible and beneficial for them to declare Russia their enemy,” Putin sardonically noted.

It is plain to see that the bill’s real objective is to derail India’s strategic partnership with Russia and force Delhi to cut back its oil imports from Russia. Lindsey Graham never really cared to hide this unpleasant truth. Make no mistake, this is a bipartisan legislation which has had strong backing from members in both parties for over a year. And it advanced on an 86-12 vote in the 100-member senate.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the co-author of the bill, said the measure is intended to punish China and India for financing Russia’s war with their purchases of Russian energy. As he put it, “To be really blunt, China and India are the main culprits here. They purchase the vast majority of oil and gas. They are fuelling Russia’s war machine and they are doing us no favours anywhere else in the world.”

China should have been a ‘natural ally’ for India in countering the US pressure going forward. On the contrary, the government threw its weight with gusto behind the recent US-led statement by a clutch of western countries to reaffirm the 2016 ruling against China’s South China Sea claims. What was the urgency? Beijing has reacted sharply.

Goyal’s evasive remark is shocking. A comprador mindset is tantamount to betraying national interest. India’s continued import of Russian oil once again becomes the litmus test of the country’s strategic autonomy and independent foreign policy.

About M.K. Bhadrakumar
M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat.
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Turkey’s Former PM Davutoglu Quits Politics After Failing To Unite Conservatives


Turkey's Ahmet Davutoglu. Photo: Future Party.

Balkan Insight
By Hamdi Firat Buyuk

Key Takeaways:

Former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is dissolving his Future Party and quitting party politics. He cited the need to avoid a “polluted political climate” after the party failed to attract significant conservative support.

The party never gained traction as an alternative to Erdoğan’s AKP. Founded in 2019 mainly by ex-AKP figures, it entered parliament in 2023 only through an alliance with the CHP and currently holds just four seats.

Davutoglu remains a notable figure for his earlier foreign-policy legacy. As the architect of the “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine and author of Strategic Depth, he shaped Turkey’s regional soft-power outreach before falling out with Erdoğan and resigning as prime minister in 2016.

Former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced on Wednesday that he is leaving politics and is dissolving his failing Future Party.

“We have decided to withdraw from party politics and bring the Future Party’s political activities to an end, in order to avoid becoming part of the polluted political climate,” Davutoglu said in a statement.


The party currently has four seats in parliament. The party was established in 2019 with high hopes and entered parliament in 2023 thanks to a political alliance with the main opposition Republican People’s Party, CHP.

However, it failed to become a popular choice among conservative and Islamist voters, who are seen as the bastion of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP.

According to Davutoglu, his party tried to gather conservative forces together but did not succeed.

“From the outset, we sought to unite this new group internally first and then, if possible, merge it with the other conservative parties into a single party. Where that was not possible, we aimed to build a close, organic alliance. However, those efforts were ultimately unsuccessful,” he said.

Davutoglu was an architect of an AKP foreign policy that has seen Turkey extend its influence across the former Ottoman lands of the Balkans and the Middle East.

Known as the policy of “zero problems with neighbours”, Davutoglu developed the strategy while working as a professor of international relations at institutions including the prestigious Malaysian Islamic University.

In 2003, he was appointed an ambassador by then Prime Minister Abdullah Gul before going on to become chief foreign policy advisor to Gul’s successor, Erdogan, and then foreign minister in 2009.

The neighbourhood policy was outlined in his 2001 book, Strategic Depth, which advocated greater Turkish engagement and influence in the region, focusing on the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia.

His star rose when he was appointed prime minister in 2014, when Erdogan moved into the presidency. But a number of disagreements between the two and Davutoglu’s efforts to play a more visible role in domestic and foreign policy led to his resignation in 2016, under pressure from Erdogan. He finally resigned from the AKP in 2019.


Davutoglu saw the Balkans as a “natural and historical hinterland” for Turkish foreign policy given the strong bonds forged through centuries of Ottoman domination.

His promotion of Turkish ‘soft power’ saw the growth of government-backed bodies such as the Turkish aid agency, TIKA, the Yunus Emre cultural institutes, Turkish universities in the Balkans, media outlets and the Turkish Religious Authority, Diyanet.

Davutoglu founded the Future Party mainly with former AKP figures in a bid to challenge the President. According to recent opinion polls, however, the party had lost support.

The four Future Party MPs are expected to join the AKP or remain independent in parliament.

Despite his fading career in politics, Davutoglu still sounded a proud note. “This is not a decision of surrender. It is a decision to draw a moral line. This is not an abandonment of politics; it is a call for everyone to rethink politics.” Davutoglu wrote.

About Balkan Insight

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.
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Soft Power And Strategic Ports: China’s Expanding Media Presence In Panama – Analysis



August 1, 2026
Diálogo Américas
By Paolo Manzo

Key Takeaways:

China pairs economic investments in ports, telecom, energy, and logistics with coordinated media and digital campaigns that portray it as a reliable development partner and reduce scrutiny of strategic dependencies.

In Panama, after the country left the Belt and Road Initiative and a court struck down Chinese-linked port concessions, Beijing’s messaging shifted from cooperative to confrontational, framing the decisions as U.S. pressure rather than independent national choices.

Similar influence efforts appear across Central America and the Caribbean, integrating infrastructure projects with narratives that can normalize dependencies; analysts recommend stronger independent media, fact-checking, and transparency to counter them.

In recent years, China has paired its economic expansion with growing media and digital influence efforts, using strategic communications to strengthen its presence in key sectors such as ports, telecommunications, energy, and logistics. Through state media, embassies, social media platforms, and local partners, Beijing promotes narratives that portray China as a reliable partner and a driver of development.

These campaigns are not solely intended to improve China’s image. They also seek to shape the political and social environment in which projects involving strategic infrastructure are debated. The goal is to build support for Chinese investments while reducing public scrutiny of potential risks related to economic dependencies, control of critical infrastructure, and security concerns.


“Beijing has progressively shaped public debate and policy orientations in ways that discourage critical examination of strategic dependencies, governance risks, and security concerns associated with major Chinese investments,” Martin Vladimirov, program director at the Europe-based Center for the Study of Democracy, told Diálogo.

Panama offers a particularly revealing example of how this strategy has evolved. For years, China’s presence at the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal was accompanied by narratives emphasizing cooperation, modernization, and economic growth. But after Panama withdrew from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Supreme Court declared the Panama Ports Company concessions unconstitutional, Chinese messaging became noticeably more confrontational, raising questions about how Beijing may respond when its strategic interests are challenged in the region.
The battle over the ports narrative

The dispute surrounding the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal marked a turning point in China’s communications strategy in Panama. Following the country’s withdrawal from the BRI, the strengthening of ties with Washington, and the January 2026 ruling against Panama Ports Company, controlled by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, messages from Chinese state media and diplomatic channels adopted a much more confrontational tone.


According to Beijing’s narrative, Panama’s decisions were not the result of an independent national choice but rather the product of pressure exerted by the United States. At the same time, CK Hutchison was portrayed as the victim of an injustice and a violation of the rule of law, while Chinese authorities emphasized the need to protect the company’s “legitimate rights and interests.”

As Vladimirov noted, “In Panama, Beijing has portrayed criticism of Chinese involvement in strategic infrastructure as politically motivated or driven by geopolitical competition.”

This approach represents an evolution of the model identified in a 2025 report by Expediente Abierto. The study identified three pillars of Chinese messaging in Panama: China as a historic partner through the presence of the Chinese-Panamanian community for more than 170 years; China as a driver of economic and infrastructure development; and China as an alternative to U.S. influence.

Through a network that includes Xinhua, CGTN Español, the Chinese Embassy, and a range of local amplifiers, port and logistics investments were presented as tools for growth and modernization. While the port concessions dispute has not altered the fundamental objectives of China’s communications strategy, it has changed the tone. Themes of national sovereignty and historic U.S. interference, already present in earlier messaging, have become central to the debate.


Vladimirov believes this phase may be temporary. “Over time, I expect China to rely instead on economic incentives, trade partnerships, and diplomatic engagement to preserve its position,” he said. Panama remains too important as a logistics and commercial hub for China.

The Panama case is particularly significant because it combines critical logistics infrastructure, global maritime connectivity, and a geographic position of strategic importance to international trade. In this context, debates over ports, concessions, and investments extend beyond economics and become closely linked to sovereignty, institutional resilience, and the protection of strategic infrastructure.
A strategy that extends beyond Panama

Panama’s experience is not unique. Across Central America and the Caribbean, China’s economic expansion has been accompanied by communications efforts designed to strengthen its political and social legitimacy.

In El Salvador, for example, construction of the new National Stadium and the La Libertad tourist pier has been presented as tangible evidence of China’s contribution to the country’s development. Chinese official messaging has also highlighted cooperation with the Salvadoran government in the areas of security, technology, and education.

In Costa Rica, meanwhile, the strategy has focused on cultural diplomacy, academic exchanges, and telecommunications. The controversy surrounding Huawei and other Chinese providers’ exclusion from the country’s 5G network has often been portrayed by media outlets and voices aligned with Beijing as an example of geopolitical pressure. Costa Rican authorities, however, have argued that the restrictions stem from cybersecurity regulations requiring suppliers of critical telecommunications infrastructure to originate from countries that are parties to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, a criterion that China does not meet.

Cuba offers another important example. On the island, China’s presence extends to telecommunications through companies such as Huawei and ZTE, as well as to port and airport infrastructure and the energy sector, where Beijing has invested in power grid modernization and new solar energy projects. This has been accompanied by close media cooperation between Cuban and Chinese state media organizations, including content-sharing agreements, co-productions, and converging narratives.
Infrastructure and information

According to analysts, one of the most significant aspects of China’s strategy is its ability to integrate economic and informational influence. Investments and narratives advance in parallel.


Alongside its commercial expansion, Beijing has built a network that includes embassies, state media outlets, cultural institutes, universities, research centers, and local interlocutors. Together, these actors help disseminate favorable messaging about Chinese investments and reinforce the image of the People’s Republic of China as a reliable and indispensable development partner.

According to Vladimirov, Chinese influence is typically exercised through a mutually reinforcing network of actors. “State media and embassies partner with local political figures and commercial stakeholders to amplify narratives that promote Chinese investments and portray China as a reliable development partner,” he said.

Experts warn that the primary concern is that these narratives may normalize strategic dependencies and limit public debate about the geopolitical, economic, and security costs associated with control of critical infrastructure. As Vladimirov noted, “These dependencies can eventually become economic and political levers that are difficult to remove.”

To counter propaganda and influence campaigns, Vladimirov argues that it is essential to strengthen independent media and promote fact-checking mechanisms capable of identifying coordinated or misleading narratives. Increasing transparency regarding who funds and disseminates certain content, as well as developing institutional capabilities to monitor foreign influence operations, is equally important.

This article was published by Diálogo Américas

About Diálogo Américas
Diálogo Américas is a professional magazine published by U.S. Southern Command as an international forum for security issues in Latin America.
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How France’s Fall Signals China’s Rise In The Sahel – Analysis

Captain Ibrahim Traoré inaugurated the Chinese-backed Sino-Burkina Ciments SA (CISINOB) industrial company at a 2025 ceremony in Burkina Faso. 

(Source: commerce.gov.bf)

July 31, 2026
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
By Raghvendra Kumar

Key Takeaways:

Burkina Faso severed diplomatic ties with France in June 2026. Ouagadougou accused Paris of neo-colonial interference and supporting subversive networks, completing a process that began with the expulsion of French troops in 2023 and diplomats in 2024.

The break is part of a wider Sahel realignment. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have withdrawn from ECOWAS and the Rome Statute while consolidating the Alliance of Sahel States under Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s rotating presidency.

China has rapidly become the central external partner. Through arms deliveries, infrastructure financing, mineral access, and flexible terms, Beijing is filling the vacuum left by the West and advancing a broader strategy linking the Sahel hinterland to Atlantic coastal access.

(FPRI) — In a disturbing, though predictable, move, Burkina Faso severed diplomatic relations with France on June 26, 2026, accusing its former colonial ruler of pursuing “neo-colonial ambitions,” and maintaining “subversive networks,” and even supporting terrorist groups against the Burkinabè state. Paris describedthe decision as “hostile and unfounded.” Ouagadougou, however, called it long overdue, citing France’s alleged interference in Burkina Faso’s internal affairs along with the absence of trust, mutual respect, and respect for sovereignty that serve as the basis of normal diplomatic relations. The inevitability of this severing of the last institutional thread was predictable, as French troops were expelled from Burkina Faso in 2023, followed by French diplomats in 2024.

The diplomatic rupture is accompanied by a broader regional realignment. In June 2026, Burkina Faso, along with with Mali and Niger, formally withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), arguing that the regional bloc had increasingly come to serve the interests of France and other Western partners at the expense of their own national interests and sovereignty. Viewed alongside their decision to also withdraw from the Rome Statute, these moves signal a broader effort by these states to de-Westernize the normative architecture of the post-Cold War international order.


These decisions also reinforced these three states’ commitment to consolidating the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), whose rotating presidency is held by Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré in 2026. The AES was established through the Liptako-Gourma Charter, signed on September 16, 2023, creating a confederation that spans approximately 2.8 million square kilometers and is home to nearly 75 million people. Although initially conceived as a mutual defense and collective security pact, the alliance has since evolved into a broader political, security, and economic framework.

The diplomatic rupture should therefore be understood as a part of a broader geopolitical realignment rather than simply another de-Westernization surge in the coup-détente dominated politics of the Sahel region in response to Western calls for democratization. Two factors help explain this shift.
The Region’s History Makes What Is All Too Predictable

First, the ongoing push for de-Westernization in Sahelian states such as Burkina Faso is deeply rooted in the region’s colonial history and enjoys significant, materially grounded popular support. Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s military ruler and interim president, has consciously and effectively utilized this sentiment by invoking the anti-imperialist legacy and iconography of Thomas Sankara, the country’s revered revolutionary and president, who was assassinated in 1987. Regarded as the “Father of the Burkinabè Revolution,” Sankara is often described as “Africa’s Che Guevara.”


Traoré has transformed Sankara’s legacy into a powerful instrument of political mobilization. His message has been further amplified across Africa and its diaspora through a dense digital ecosystem of sympathetic—and, at times, coordinated and inauthentic—media networks supported by non-Western partners.

Unlike earlier forms of rhetorical Third-Worldism—a movement advocating for solidarity and unity of developing, decolonized nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America against both Western capitalist influence and Soviet-style communism, prioritizing economic self-sufficiency and anti-imperialism during the Cold War period—or dependency-driven critiques of the West, the current sovereignty narrative in Burkina Faso seeks to translate de-Westernization into tangible economic and political outcomes.

The question of whether the de-Westernization narrative is successful or not does not matter as long as it is presented as delivering real nationalistic gains. For example, the nationalization of gold reserves, a billion-dollar agro-pastoral program, is yielding huge benefits. As a result, rice imports were suspended following record domestic cereal production, and a massive push of infrastructural development, including the construction of roads, dams, and food processing plants, are presented as evidence that self-reliance can be achieved without IMF-backed structural adjustment conditionalities in exchange for emergency financial assistance, such as fiscal austerity, privatization, and market deregulation.


However, much Western analysis continues to interpret the Sahel’s realignment through the lens of how authoritarian regimes in these states work towards junta survival and military rule. But in doing so, this analysis ignores the domestic demand for beneficiation, sovereignty, and development that also drives these shifts. Meanwhile, the West’s repeated use of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation risks strengthening the very anti-Western sentiment it seeks to counter.
China Seizes the Opportunity

The second factor has a wider geopolitical significance. As the Sahel in general, and Burkina Faso in particular, have become the laboratory of Africa’s de-Westernization movement, China has seized the opportunity to embed itself deep into the region’s political, economic and security structures, using the moment to expand its sphere of influence and strategic depth. Burkina Faso, a landlocked and war-torn state, is central to Beijing’s strategic ambition in the region. Sitting at the center of West Africa, Burkina Faso connects the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea’s hinterland. As such, nearly every commercial network and trade route from the ports of Abidjan, Lomé, and Cotonou to the Sahelian interior runs through Burkina Faso or its AES partners, making the confederation a strategically important hub.

Moreover, Burkina Faso is also Africa’s fourth-largest producer of gold, recording a record 94 tons in 2025. Recent finds of lithium, rare-earth elements, and cobalt reserves have further positioned the country at the center of the global critical mineral landscape, which is of interest to the US, China, and other powers. At the same time, Burkina Faso has also emerged as the epicentre of jihadist violence in the Sahel. The Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, for example, is estimated to contest control over nearly 60 percent of the country’s territory through a sustained violent insurgency, making the country one of Africa’s most fragileand conflict-prone states. This deteriorating security landscape contributed to Burkina Faso being ranked as the world’s second-most terrorism-affected country in 2025. For Traoré, this is his single biggest challenge. As such, whoever helps him fight Ouagadougou’s battles gains strategic leverage over the entire Sahelian heartland—and over the logistics corridors that link it to the Atlantic seaboard. As such, China has gone all out in providing the financial, military, diplomatic, logistical, and technological support that has sustained Burkina Faso’s efforts to combat jihadist groups.

The Traoré government, however, has not simply exchanged one external patron for another. Rather, Burkina Faso is pursuing a strategy of polyalignment, simultaneously cultivating functionally differentiated partnerships with multiple non-Western powers simultaneously in order to maximize strategic autonomy. Each partner serves distinct strategic needs. Russia, for example, provides the political and security pillar through the foundational bilateral agreement signed between the two countries in Moscow in February 2026. The agreement envisages the deployment of Africa Corps personnel for regime protection, cooperation on Rosatom’s proposed civil nuclear program, and networked support to the information ecosystem that reinforces the Traoré government’s narrative of sovereignty and de-Westernization. In addition, Turkey has emerged as a crucial defense and critical infrastructure partner, supplying Traoré with armed drones while expanding its role in the country’s energy sector. One example is the Turkish-built 119 MW power plant, financed by the Africa Finance Corporation, which is expected to become Burkina Faso’s largest electricity facility when it becomes functional in 2027. Investments from the Gulf states, meanwhile, fill important financing gaps across various sectors.


Nonetheless, Russia’s economic constraints and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict have posed severe structural limitations on Moscow’s ability to maintain long-term support. According to SIPRI, Russian arms exports declined by roughly 64 percent between 2015–19 and 2020–24, highlighting Russia’s diminishing capacity to sustain long-term economic and security partnerships abroad. Although Russia can reinforce the politics of geopolitical realignment, it lacks the economic depth to finance Burkina Faso’s developmental and defense ambitions. Against this backdrop, China assumes far greater significance than any other country engaging with Burkina Faso. Beijing can serve as the one-stop solution, capable of combining capital for long-term financing at scale, infrastructure, industrial capacity, defense equipment, and information ecosystem. These comprehensive offerings have positioned China as the material center of gravity in Burkina Faso’s evolving network of external partnerships.

China has moved swiftly moved to fill the vacuum that the West never managed to fill. Since restoring diplomatic relations with China in 2018 after severing ties with Taipei, Burkina Faso has witnessed a deep and rapid strengthening of its strategic partnership with Beijing. The relationship has built momentum following a recent multi-phase defense agreement with the PRC-owned arms conglomerate NORINCO in 2024, aimed at boosting the Traoré government’s defense capacity. Since then, Ouagadougou has received successive deliveries of Chinese defense equipment, including VP11 and CS/VP14 mine-resistant armoured vehicles, VN22B fire-support platforms, PLL-05 self-propelled gun-mortars, SR5 multiple rocket launchers, and other advanced military platforms. This technology has provided Burkina Faso’s forces with long-range strike capabilities, significantly enhancing its firepower and mobility for the first time against JNIM. More importantly, these defense systems were delivered in months rather than years and are reportedly financed through flexible arrangements that are backed by future gold exports, without the political and structural economic conditionalities that usually accompany Western security assistance.

Arms Transfers Database for Burkina Faso

Source: SIPRI

It is therefore unsurprising that China now accounts for roughly 26 percent of West African arms importsand has displaced Russia as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest weapons supplier. However, the partnership extends well beyond weapons. Beijing has also become a major development partner, funding energy projects, critical infrastructure, and digital connectivity, in addition to the extraction and processing of critical minerals, a sector in which China holds a global monopoly. Technology transfer (which France never provided over six decades), satellite communications systems, the Smart Burkina urban policing and security program, Chinese state-owned enterprise Yunhong’s involvement in rare-earth exploration, and the appointment of Chinese businessman Li Yubao, who acquired Burkinabè citizenship, as a special adviser to the president, indicates the growing institutionalization of the relationship between Ouagadougou and Beijing. The relationship provides both capacity and capability rather than a purely transactional exchange. For instance, Beijing has provided more than US$30 million in grant aid to Burkina Faso and brought the country within the implementation framework of the 2024–27 Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Action Plan. This framework has paved the way for deeper institutionalized cooperation in security, infrastructure, and development, reflecting Beijing’s strategic ambition to position Burkina Faso as a model of its integrated security-development approach in the Sahel.


To view China’s Sahel engagement as merely continental or country-centric is to overlook its most consequential dimension: Beijing’s geo-economic strategy. For Beijing, strategically located, landlocked, resource-rich states in the Sahel region are not ends in themselves but cartographic means in order to gain strategic access to the Atlantic coast. China’s template is now becoming predictable and clearly visible. In the Indian Ocean, China translated more than two decades of ports, pipelines, and undersea cables projects investment in Djibouti into a naval base and logistics nodes to facilitate the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) “far seas defense” doctrine. As such, the strategic and tactical depth that China has gained in the western Indian Ocean region is now being replicated, more quietly and with less international scrutiny, on West Africa’s Atlantic-facing seaboard. The substantive evidence is quite visible, as the Chinese-built Niger-Benin pipeline, a 2,000-kilometer pipeline built at a cost of roughly US$6 billion and one of the longest on the continent, does not just terminate in the Sahel; rather, it terminates at the Atlantic export terminal of Sèmè-Kraké.

Furthermore, China’s state-owned defense giant NORINCO’s newest African primary support and service office is located in Dakar, Senegal, an important Atlantic connectivity hub, and is strategically positioned to service and cater for the arms supply ecosystem of all three AES militaries through personnel training, maintenance, and logistical support in the heart of West Africa. Beyond defense and security cooperation, Chinese-financed strategic port infrastructure now stretches from the re-expanded Friendship Port in Nouakchott, Mauritania, through the Gulf of Guinea, which US strategic planners have identified as consistent with Beijing’s strategy to establish a permanent naval facility on the eastern flank of the Atlantic. In January 2026, the first- ever BRICS-plus naval exercise was conducted off South Africa’s Western Cape in Atlantic waters involving Chinese, Russian, and Iranian warships. These developments suggest that China’s deeper engagement in the Sahelian interior is part of a larger strategy to weave a strategic corridor from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, connecting gradually—corridor by corridor and contract by contract—to an emerging Atlantic maritime network that could provide PLAN strategic and tactical depth in “far off seas.”


The strategic implications are difficult to ignore. Since the Second World War, the Atlantic has largely remained the strategic heartland of Western (primarily US) maritime power—a maritime space where NATO and the US have enjoyed overwhelming naval dominance. An expanding Chinese strategic presence along Africa’s Atlantic rim—supported mostly by strategic Chinese investments in commercial ports with potential dual-use functions, integrated defense logistics, digital and satellite infrastructure, and access to the resource-rich Sahel—would provide Beijing with strategic options comparable to those created through its investment in Djibouti and Gwadar in the Indian Ocean. Such a network will give PLAN the capacity to sustain a long-term presence along critical sea lines of communication, broaden the geographical scope of strategic competition beyond the Indo-Pacific, and incrementally overturn the balance of power. In this respect, Burkina Faso is a critical frontier when viewed through Alfred Thayer Mahan’s famous observation that, “sea power begins ashore.” Burkina Faso, a landlocked country, may never host a Chinese naval base, but it provides Beijing with inroads that gradually shape and anchor strategic geography for greater maritime influence in the Atlantic.

However, China’s Sahel strategy also faces significant constraints. In Niger, for instance, Beijing has faced severe headwinds when Niger expelled Chinese oil executives and unilaterally revised the contractual terms governing Chinese National Petroleum Company’s operations. Its investment in the Niger–Benin oil pipeline has also come under severe strain due to repeated attacks by the Front patriotique de libération, an anti-junta rebel group. In Mali, the government has recently summoned the Chinese ambassador over deep concerns relating to illicit artisanal and illegal mining, a sector which has come under attack from JNIM. Across Africa, particularly among military regimes, governments have increasingly applied their resource nationalism clause in equal measure to Beijing as to Paris. Moreover, Chinese-supplied military platforms have not fundamentally altered the security balance, as JNIM still continues to expand its operational reach despite successive arms acquisitions by Sahel military governments. As such, China’s expanding footprint in this part of Africa is often described by strategists as built on politically fragile and highly contested ground.


Nonetheless, the broader direction of China’s expansion is becoming increasingly clear. The West has relied heavily on sanctions, the suspensions of diplomatic ties, and political and economic conditionality, a strategy that has, in many respects, done more harm than anticipated by further accelerating the very geopolitical realignment it sought to prevent. Consequently, non-Western democracies and responsible middle and emerging powers have become increasingly relevant to this evolving geopolitical landscape. However, they will need to compete on the scale and speed of delivery, infrastructure, finance, technology transfer, and credible partnerships, rather than relying primarily on normative messaging. In this context, India and other Global South middle powers have the opportunity to provide Ouagadougou with additional strategic options to de-risk and diversify without prescribing whom it should choose. Through demand-driven development finance partnership, capacity building and capability enhancement, technology transfer, resource beneficiation, and digital public infrastructure offered as sovereign public goods, they can strengthen Burkina Faso’s genuine strategic autonomy while ensuring that every external partner, including China, operates within a competitive environment rather than assuming the role of another neo-colonial actor. Ultimately, the defining moment in Africa’s quest for de-Westernization in an emerging multipolar order will hinge largely on whether the process produces genuine strategic autonomy and multilateral alignment rather than merely reproducing another cycle of dependency.

About the author: Raghvendra Kumar is a Non-Resident Fellow in FPRI’s Asia Program and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of International Relations and Peace Studies, Nalanda University.

Source: This article was published by FPRI

About Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Founded in 1955, FPRI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests and seeks to add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.

 

Logging Operations Leave Distinct Damage Patterns In Nepal’s Sal Forests

Damage to residual plants during felling and timber extraction on Sal (Shorea robusta Gaertn. f.) dominant forest in Nepal CREDIT: Nisha Dhungel, Rajeev Joshi, Jeetendra Gautam, Aman Prabhakar, Saraswoti Adhikari, Tek Maraseni & Han Zhang

 August 1, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Key Takeaways:

• Timber felling and extraction damage residual plants differently in Nepal’s Sal forests: felling mainly harms mature trees’ crowns, while extraction causes more severe injury to seedlings by bending, crushing, or uprooting them.
• Seedlings are especially vulnerable during log extraction, with over half of damaged seedlings suffering medium- or high-severity injuries that can hinder natural regeneration.
• Practical steps such as directional felling, carefully planned extraction routes that avoid dense seedling areas, and simple post-harvest damage monitoring can substantially reduce ecological harm while supporting sustainable timber harvesting.

Timber harvesting supports local economies and supplies essential forest products, but the process can also harm the plants left behind. A new study in Nepal has revealed that tree felling and timber extraction affect different parts of the forest in different ways, highlighting practical opportunities to reduce ecological damage during logging.

“Our findings show that sustainable harvesting is not only about deciding which trees to cut. It is also about protecting the seedlings and trees that will form the next generation of the forest,” said corresponding author Rajeev Joshi. “Better planning, directional felling, carefully designed extraction routes, and operator training can substantially reduce avoidable damage.”

The study examined Sal forests dominated by Shorea robusta, an ecologically and economically important tree species in Nepal. Sal forests provide timber and other resources, store carbon, support biodiversity, and contribute to the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities.

Researchers conducted field assessments in the Saraswati Community Forest and the Belakatari National Forest in Udayapur district. They established 30 circular plots around trees selected for harvesting and assessed another 30 transects along timber extraction routes. Vegetation was inspected before harvesting so that newly caused damage could be distinguished from existing injuries.

The results showed a clear difference between the effects of felling and extraction. Among damaged seedlings, 45.41% of the damage was associated with timber extraction, compared with 43.35% from felling and 11.24% from other human activities. In contrast, 58.06% of damage to residual trees was caused by felling, while extraction accounted for 22.58%.

Seedlings were especially vulnerable to being bent, crushed, or uprooted. During felling, 44.4% of damaged seedlings were bent down, 38.4% experienced stem damage, and 17.2% were uprooted. During extraction, bending remained the most frequent injury at 47.1%, followed by stem damage at 29.6% and uprooting at 23.3%.

The remaining mature trees displayed a different pattern. During felling, crown damage accounted for 61.1% of recorded tree injuries, probably because falling trunks and branches struck neighboring canopies. During extraction, 71.4% of damaged trees experienced injury around the butt end, or lower trunk, often caused by dragged logs striking standing trees.

Although most damage to residual trees was classified as low severity, the researchers found greater concern among seedlings. During extraction, 53.4% of damaged seedlings experienced either medium or high-severity damage, suggesting that timber movement can interfere with natural forest regeneration even when mature trees appear relatively unaffected.

The authors recommend several measures to reduce these impacts. Before harvesting, forest managers can map areas with dense regeneration and plan extraction trails that avoid them. Workers can use precision directional felling to guide trees toward existing gaps rather than neighboring crowns or seedling patches. Machinery should remain on designated trails, and logs can be winched toward those trails instead of being dragged through larger areas of the forest.

The study also recommends adding simple post-harvest damage records to Nepal’s existing forest management registers. Such monitoring could help community forest user groups and government offices adjust future harvesting plans based on observed ecological impacts.

Protecting residual plants is essential because today’s seedlings and surviving trees determine the structure, productivity, carbon storage, and resilience of tomorrow’s forest. The findings provide a practical basis for reduced-impact logging and more sustainable management of Nepal’s Sal forests.