The joint declaration adopted by BRICS at its 17th summit in Rio de Janeiro calls for an immediate, permanent and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied Palestinian territories, and a global framework for governing artificial intelligence.
This infographic maps the complex operational picture in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility, where the United States confronts China.
The International North–South Transport Corridor is an ambitious 7,200-km multimodal route from St Petersburg to Mumbai. Because every branch of it runs through Iran, the country has become the corridor's pivotal link.
The British diplomat Lord Ponsonby set out the main principles of war propaganda in his 1928 book Falsehood in War-Time.
Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) was a Swedish geographer and political figure who considered himself a pupil of Friedrich Ratzel. His doctrine treated the state as a living organism and defined the great powers by three spatial factors.
Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) was born in Munich, Germany, into a professor's family. He served in the army for more than 20 years and became the author of an original theory of the continental bloc and of pan-regions.
This map shows the territories countries hold in the Arctic, a region now at the centre of economic and geopolitical competition between the United States, Russia and China.
The European Union's Global Gateway strategy aims to speed up digital, energy and environmental transformation in emerging and developing economies, mobilising €300 billion of investment by 2027.
The Development Road international transport corridor (ITC) is intended to link the Persian Gulf with Europe through Iraq and Türkiye.
The Panama Canal is a lock-type waterway owned by Panama that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It carries 2.5% of world maritime trade a year and 40% of US container traffic.
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a flagship of Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, linking Pakistan's Gwadar and Karachi ports to China's Xinjiang region. Its cost has risen from an initial $46 billion to $65 billion.
Pakistan's location makes it a natural bridge between landlocked Central Asia and the Arabian Sea, according to The News on Sunday. Regional trade integration could add up to 1.7% to Pakistan's GDP.
Work on the multimodal Belarus–Russia–Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan corridor to Indian Ocean ports began in August 2022. Pakistan signed up in September 2024, and the route is meant to give landlocked Central Asia access to the sea.
The eastern sea corridor linking the Indian port city of Chennai with Vladivostok, Russia's largest Pacific port, is back in service. It cuts cargo delivery times from 40 to 24 days compared with the Suez Canal route.
In 2023 US military spending came to $860 billion, or 68% of NATO's total military spending of $1.3 trillion.
The Chagos Archipelago, some 500 km south of the Maldives, hosts the Diego Garcia base, which lets the United States and Britain control sea lanes between South-East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In October 2024 Britain agreed to hand sovereignty over the islands to Mauritius while keeping the base for 99 years.
In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, the United States, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the EU announced plans for the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor (IMEC). It is meant to speed up trade and deepen economic integration between Asia, the Gulf and Europe — but war in the Middle East now threatens it.
The Jerusalem Post, citing Iranian state media, reports that Iran's foreign minister has held talks with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as part of a drive to deepen trade and transport ties across Central Asia and offset its losses from severed ties with the West.
Russia and Iran are preparing to sign a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership during the Iranian president's visit to Moscow within one or two months, Iran's foreign ministry says. The treaty would cover energy, transport, industry, agriculture, science, technology and defence.
Iran's foreign minister says Tehran and Moscow will sign a comprehensive cooperation agreement within one or two months, during the Iranian president's visit to Moscow. A deal planned for the BRICS summit in Kazan in October 2024 was not signed.
A further instalment on the thinkers of the German school of geopolitics, this time Friedrich Naumann's wartime vision of a German-led Mitteleuropa.
The Middle East is not only the world's larder, with its vast oil, gas and uranium wealth, but also the most important intersection of global transport corridors. What happens if war closes the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal?
Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) was a Swedish geographer and political figure who coined the term geopolitics. His doctrine treated the state as a living organism and ranked the great powers by space, cohesion and freedom of movement.
Friedrich Ratzel is regarded as the founder of geopolitics as a scientific discipline. His doctrine of the state as a living organism that must expand its living space justified German territorial expansion.
The 16th BRICS summit ran in Kazan from 22 to 24 October this year under Russia's chairmanship. No new members were admitted, and the group ruled out a single currency.
An aircraft carrier is a floating airbase that projects a country's military and economic power at sea. Eleven countries operate carriers today, and NATO members together with Japan have 20 between them.
According to the American analytics and engineering firm BryceTech, SpaceX has tripled its rocket launches over the past two years and leads the world, while China, Russia and India are all stepping up their programmes.
The Wakhan Corridor is a narrow strip of land in the Wakhan region of Badakhshan Province in eastern Afghanistan.
On 12 September 2000, at the second Euro-Asian Transport Conference in St Petersburg, Russia, India and Iran signed an intergovernmental agreement to create the International North–South Transport Corridor.
Defence spending rose at its fastest rate in a decade in 2023, reaching $2.443 trillion worldwide, with NATO accounting for 55% of the total.
Poland spends the most on defence of any NATO member, at 3.9% of GDP, while the US is the main beneficiary of rising allied defence budgets.
