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South Sudan, created in 2011 on a wager of hope, is sliding toward a renewed civil war while absorbing the world’s largest outflow from its burning northern neighbor. In Upper Nile and Jonglei, mothers queue at malnutrition clinics as hospitals run out of drugs and staff strike after months without pay; aid rations buy almost nothing against galloping inflation. New reporting from the field paints the picture plainly: refugees staggering in from Khartoum’s front lines arrive to shuttered wards, empty dispensaries, and food distributions that exclude half of those in need. The humanitarian metrics are flashing red. Analysts warn that famine-level pockets are likely to persist in Upper Nile; UN snapshots show more than 600,000 people affected by this year’s floods, compounding displacement and harvest loss; child malnutrition remains staggering at national scale. Even as agencies triage the most vulnerable, funding shortfalls have forced deep cuts, leaving clinics to “do more with less” as caseloads mount. The crisis is not an abstraction of numbers, it is a queue at dawn for a sack of sorghum and a few dollars that no longer stretch a week. Politics is pouring fuel on the fire. The suspended first vice-president, Riek Machar, now stands trial on treason and crimes-against-humanity charges tied to militia violence; his prosecution has become a lightning rod in a capital already frayed by rival armed camps and defections. Observers warn the case risks detonating the fragile 2018 truce, with fresh clashes reported in the Upper Nile corridor and security services stretched thin by the spillover from Sudan’s war. In Juba, each courtroom hearing reverberates like an artillery round. Regionally, South Sudan is being crushed by geography. Sudan’s carnage pushes civilians south; floodplains and shattered roads trap them in aid-deserts; and shrinking donor pipelines leave local systems to fail in place. WHO’s latest risk analysis and field bulletins converge on the same diagnosis: without fast, sizable injections of food, health supplies, and flood-resilient infrastructure, paired with security guarantees for access, acute malnutrition and preventable deaths will climb through the dry season. This is what state failure looks like from the bedside: pneumonia where there should be oxygen, severe wasting where there should be milk, and a government unable to stabilize either prices or peace. The next moves matter. International actors pressing ceasefire formulas in Sudan should simultaneously firewall South Sudan’s humanitarian lifelines and incentivize Juba to keep security forces out of clinics and corridors. Absent verifiable protection for civilians, restored funding for nutrition and health, and credible political guarantees around the Machar process, today’s “near-war” will harden into tomorrow’s war. South Sudan’s people have already paid for one independence with blood; it would be an indictment of our era if they must pay for a second.

Continuing Conflicts

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The Sahel’s jihadist insurgency is no longer a distant brushfire; it is advancing down the forested corridors and parklands that stitch the region to the Atlantic, pulling Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana into the blast radius. Analysts trace the southward seep to a mix of permissive terrain and political rupture: the W-Arly-Pendjari conservation complex provides concealed movement and revenue streams, while the collapse of regional trust, after Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger broke with ECOWAS to form their own bloc, has hollowed out cross-border intelligence and joint operations. In effect, geography offers the routes and politics opens the gates. The consequences are no longer hypothetical. In April 2025, al-Qaeda-linked JNIM carried out Benin’s deadliest attack to date, killing at least 54 soldiers near the tri-border zone, exactly where WAP’s tracks converge with militant supply lines, and Togo has since reported a drumbeat of lethal incursions in its far north. These are not one-off shocks but part of a campaign testing weakly governed spaces from eastern Côte d’Ivoire to northwestern Benin, where outposts, roads, and rangers are picked off in order to secure taxation and transit. Data bear out the strategic shift. The Sahel remains the global epicenter of terrorism, responsible for more than half of worldwide terror deaths, with JNIM and Islamic State affiliates driving both lethality and geographic spread. As coastal states harden borders, militants adapt, skirting checkpoints through protected reserves, exploiting rural grievances, and bargaining with local economies that cannot afford to lose the informal trade they control. The result is a front line that looks like a dotted line: porous, transactional, and primed for ambush. Authoritarian drift in the Sahel magnifies the danger. With juntas in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey privileging sovereignty over coordination, security cooperation with neighbors has atrophied, and foreign mercenary deployments have deepened cycles of abuse and retaliation that militants exploit for recruitment. Coastal governments are mobilizing—Benin has surged troops north, Ghana and others are tightening patrols, but without restored regional mechanisms and shared targeting, they will keep paying retail for a problem sold wholesale from the Sahel’s interior. What follows if nothing changes is predictable: more raids into border communes, more pressure on fragile trade arteries, and a slow normalization of “exception” zones where law is suspended and armed actors arbitrate daily life. The fix is unglamorous, credible intel-sharing between ECOWAS members and the AES capitals, joint operations focused on the WAP corridor, and civilian protection paired with livelihoods, yet it is precisely the kind of bureaucratic muscle memory despots disdain. Until that political work is done, the coast will remain downstream of the Sahel’s wars.

Europe

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Russia opened the winter campaign with a saturation strike aimed not just at Ukraine’s grid but at ordinary life. Through the night, more than 450 drones and 45 missiles tore across multiple regions, collapsing power and water systems and ripping open homes; in Dnipro, a drone punched into a nine-story apartment block, killing at least three and injuring others as rescuers hauled families from shattered floors. Kharkiv went dark enough to halt the metro and cut water, while rail lines in Poltava snarled and Kremenchuk reported a full blackout as “Points of Invincibility” ad-hoc warming and charging hubs, reopened for another hard season. Kyiv frames the barrage as a campaign to weaponize winter. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for sanctions to hit the entirety of Russia’s energy sector and for Europe to move on frozen assets, arguing that each strike on transformers and thermal plants should carry a financial cost Moscow cannot ignore. The pattern is familiar from last year’s blackouts, but the scale—hundreds of drones layered with cruise and ballistic missiles, signals a renewed attempt to exhaust air defenses and civilian endurance at once. For people living under bombardment, the abstractions fall away: buses replace trams in a darkened Kharkiv; generators thrum in Kyiv and Poltava; families in Dnipro climb through dust to daylight while crews fight fires and cold. Ukraine continues to push back with deep-strike drones against Russian energy sites, but until sustained protection and pressure converge, more interceptors, tougher sanctions, real costs for targeting homes, winter remains the battlefield and civilians the terrain.

Asia

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A Washington Post investigation traces a roaring meth surge across Asia to a permissive upstream trade in China’s vast chemicals sector and a downstream statelet in Myanmar that thrives on impunity. Licensed Chinese firms openly market meth precursors and “non-listed” substitute chemicals, bundling shipping, mislabeling, and crypto payments; consignments then slip through Thailand and Laos toward eastern Shan State, where the United Wa State Army presides over the world’s densest meth complex. Thailand’s frontline officers can seize finished drugs by the ton, but their mandate often stops at the warehouse door when the cargo is “only” acetone, sodium hydroxide, or propionyl chloride. The result is a supply chain calibrated to stay legal just long enough to turn lawless. On the ground, the human cost is starkest in border towns like Tachileik, described by locals as a “mafia town” where casinos double as logistics hubs and overdose victims are dumped in public view. Since Myanmar’s 2021 coup gutted economic life and governance, production has accelerated: meth prices have halved in parts of the region even as purity holds, wastewater surveys show rising use from Australia to South Korea, and Thai laboratories now process “routine” multimillion-pill seizures stamped with the “999” hallmark of Shan State labs. The same Chinese brokers whom U.S. agencies linked to fentanyl precursors in the Americas appear in Southeast Asia’s meth pipeline, underscoring a single, globalized synthetic-drug economy. The authoritarian mechanics are depressingly familiar: Beijing touts targeted crackdowns yet under-utilizes pre-export controls; provincial police and marketplace platforms intermittently prune bad actors while replacement shell firms spring up with fresh licenses and wallet addresses. In Myanmar’s rebel-administered enclaves, armed groups extract rent and provide “security,” so long as drugs flow outward and not back into China. Smaller neighbors, Thailand and Laos, bear the brunt of enforcement without leverage to compel upstream compliance, a structural asymmetry that despots and their proxies exploit. Security implications radiate outward. Precursor interdiction, rather than chasing bricks of pills, has become the critical chokepoint, but regulators are outpaced by chemists synthesizing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from benign inputs. With Latin American cartels probing Asia for partnerships, the Shan networks could pivot from meth to synthetic opioids; the factories, routes, and payment rails already exist. Unless major chemical exporters meet international verification standards and empower transparent, real-time tracking of non-scheduled precursors, the region risks sliding from a meth glut into a broader synthetic-drug era, one engineered in the gray zones where authoritarian convenience meets criminal innovation.

Africa

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Fresh from its grisly triumph in El Fasher, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces are pushing east into Kordofan with the same repertoire of starvation sieges, summary executions, and terror against civilians. Rights monitors and the UN warn of mounting killings and mass displacement as RSF columns redeploy toward El-Obeid, tightening encirclement with artillery and drones while residents of previously captured towns report bodies left in homes and streets. The operational pattern is identical to Darfur: hold populations under blockade, force flight, then film the cruelty. The fall of El Fasher after an 18-month siege freed RSF units to accelerate this offensive and shift the war’s center of gravity. ACLED analysts describe a strategic inflection: with Darfur largely under RSF control, the front lines now hinge on Kordofan’s cities and road hubs, where a successful RSF advance would bring the paramilitary closer to Khartoum and further unravel any prospect of civilian protection. Reports from Bara and surrounding districts, taken amid this eastward push, underscore how battlefield gains are paired with deliberate violence against non-combatants. Airpower is amplifying the atrocities. U.S. and independent reporting indicate the RSF has fielded Chinese-made combat drones and heavier artillery—capabilities that have enabled strikes on funerals and urban fringes and helped reverse earlier RSF setbacks around the capital. Washington has repeatedly linked these systems to Emirati supply networks, allegations the UAE denies even as international outrage over El Fasher has grown. Whatever the precise chain of custody, the effect is unmistakable: increasingly precise firepower in the hands of a militia already implicated in mass murder. Human rights groups are blunt: without immediate pressure to halt RSF operations in Kordofan, El Fasher’s horrors will be replayed city by city. Amnesty International and the UN rights chief have urged urgent action to prevent another mass atrocity episode, noting that civilians remain trapped and aid access is perilous to nonexistent. In parallel, mediators are again testing ceasefire formulas, but absent verifiable pullbacks from population centers and credible accountability mechanisms, truces risk becoming pauses between pogroms. For Sudanese living under RSF rule, this is the authoritarian logic of conquest: sieges as policy, filmed executions as propaganda, and foreign-sourced weapons as leverage over terrified communities. Unless external backers face tangible costs, and unless any talks hard-wire civilian protection and unfettered relief, Kordofan will become the next proving ground for a militia that treats law as a tactic and civilians as terrain.

Middle East

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Saudi Arabia’s marquee fantasy, the 170-kilometre mirrored city called The Line, has been cut down to size by physics, finances, and fear. A sweeping Financial Times investigation details how engineers and executives, boxed in by a 500-metre height decree and shifting whims from the palace, shrank the scheme from dozens of modules to just a few, with senior managers branding it “uninvestible.” The Public Investment Fund has already booked multi-billion-dollar writedowns on giga-projects and is refocusing toward sectors with quicker, more plausible returns like logistics, AI, data centres, and religious tourism, an implicit concession that spectacle can’t substitute for solvency. Behind the renderings lies a harsher ledger: demolitions of villages on the Neom site, mass arrests and death sentences for members of the Huwaitat tribe resisting eviction, and a climate of intimidation around decision-making that pushed consultants to “mimic whatever he had to say.” Rights experts warned as early as 2023 about imminent executions linked to Neom; local reporting has since catalogued forced removals, degrading work conditions, and at least one worker death with scant accountability. The image of futurism rests on a foundation of coerced consent. The labour market has felt the chill as well: amid delays and design retrenchments, Neom has weighed axing roughly a fifth of its staff and relocating hundreds more, a visible downshift that tracks with the fund’s broader pivot and declining tolerance for sunk-cost grandeur. Taken together, layoffs, asset impairments, and a strategic swerve, the pattern is clear: the mega-city is no longer the axis of Vision 2030 but a cautionary exhibit within it. For citizens and migrant workers, authoritarian hubris has predictable costs: dispossession packaged as “national transformation,” dissent criminalised as sabotage, and safety corners cut to hit impossible timelines. Even scaled back, The Line exemplifies a governance model where spectacle outruns institutions, and where those who bear the burdens are the least consulted. The mirrors may yet rise in fragments, but they reflect a simple truth: when accountability is the missing module, even limitless budgets build on sand.

Americas

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In Peru’s capital and along its battered transport routes, extortion has matured into a daily counter-economy run at gunpoint. Nearly 70 bus drivers have been murdered this year for refusing “protection” fees, a shift from petty theft to systematic assassination that ripples through every rung of the sector: owners receive the WhatsApp ultimatums; drivers receive the bullets. Demands scale from micro-tolls of a few soles a day to five-figure “initials” and monthly tributes that small firms cannot absorb. The state of emergency has not altered the calculus; crews simply board as passengers, issue deadlines, and return to enforce them. The terror now defines ordinary commerce. Corner shops and bodegas, half a million across Peru, shutter under threats calibrated to their margins, while survey data suggest half of Lima knows a nearby business that closed for fear of hitmen. Artists have joined the casualty list: bands perform in ballistic vests after targeted killings and concert-hall shootings, and promoters quietly factor “paid protection” into riders alongside sound checks. Extortion has adapted to cash-heavy, fragmented markets and the visibility of entrepreneurs on social media, turning informal hustle into vulnerability. This is what authoritarian failure looks like without a dictator: criminal syndicates carve parallel authority as police capacity and prosecution falter. The result is a privatized tax on mobility and joy, collected at gunpoint, normalized by impunity. Unless the government can pair fast, technical fixes, cashless fare systems, integrated route concessions, vetted investigative units, protected witness pipelines, with real protection for victims who report, Lima’s buses, bodegas, and bandstands will remain fronts in a quiet war where civilians pay to live another day.

Despot of the Week


President Samia Suluhu Hassan

 

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