Paraguay is a landlocked country with no oil, no gas, and no coastline, so it has built its leverage another way, by selling electricity and through diplomatic strategy. But why does Paraguay exist to begin with, and what does it have to offer the rest of the world?
Read MoreNatural Resources
Why is resource-rich Papua New Guinea so poor?
If you were to look at a breakdown of Papua New Guinea's natural resources, you'd see vast reserves of gold, copper, and natural gas at the top of the list. But PNG faces severe poverty, terrible infrastructure, and human development ranked 154th out of 193 countries. So why isn't Papua New Guinea rich?
Read MoreWhy is diamond-rich Botswana going broke?
in Africa
Botswana’s entire economy rests on a single commodity. Diamonds long provided about a third of the government's revenue, and they're still around 80% of its exports, but the collapse of demand for natural diamonds globally has triggered Botswana's worst financial crisis in decades, and perhaps a geopolitical overhaul. So why is Botswana so reliant on the diamond trade, and how is it trying to move on?
Read MoreHow long can the US and Canada keep sharing the Great Lakes?
What if the Great Lakes had US and Canadian warships circling each other for control of the largest freshwater system on earth? There's no structural reason they shouldn't. What stops it is a series of agreements that have made these lakes arguably the most successful binational commons on the planet. But you probably don't know that those treaties are now under tremendous stress. So how do the Great Lakes fit into geopolitics, and how are their dynamics evolving?
Read MoreHow does Mongolia stay free between China and Russia?
in Asia
Mongolia is a genuine multiparty democracy wedged between two enormous authoritarian powers in the form of Russia and China. So how has Mongolia managed to stay free and independent?
Read MoreWhy is Siberia Russia’s greatest strength and weakness?
Siberia makes up over three quarters of Russia’s territory but has only one quarter of its people, and its vast landscape serves as a massive treasury of resources, including oil, palladium, gold, diamonds, and timber. In fact, Siberia is in many ways the reason Russia is considered a great power. So how has Russia’s exploitation of Siberia shaped its geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreWhy isn’t modern Egypt powerful like Ancient Egypt was?
in Middle East, Africa
Egypt has been a recognizable geopolitical entity for about 5000 years. You’d think from its geographical position and its history that it would be far more powerful than it is. But Egypt today faces constraints that have made stability very difficult to achieve. So why hasn’t modern Egypt been able to achieve the power Ancient Egypt once had?
Read MoreHow does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics?
in Africa
South Africa controls 83% of the world’s platinum, metals your phone and your car can’t work without. It sits on minerals valued at over 2.5 trillion USD, and yet it has the world’s worst inequality, unemployment over 30%, and until recently, it couldn’t even keep the lights on. None of this is bad luck. South Africa was built piece by piece over nearly 400 years. So how does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics today?
Read MoreWhy is uber-wealthy Brunei at risk of crisis?
in Asia
Brunei is a tiny absolute monarchy split into two halves on the island of Borneo, bordered on land entirely by Malaysia with its only open frontier facing the South China Sea. It’s the surviving piece of a once vast maritime empire, but today it is approaching a serious economic and political crisis. So why did Brunei shrink to a fraction of its former self, and what is putting its remaining future at risk?
Read MoreWhy is South Sudan on the verge of collapse?
in Africa
South Sudan became an independent state in 2011, and since then it has experienced a violent civil war, persistent ethnic violence, and rampant human rights abuses that you might have heard about. But you probably haven’t heard about the fact that South Sudan is collapsing. The 2018 power-sharing agreement between the government and the opposition is falling apart, putting the country on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict. But why?
Read MoreWhy has the DRC experienced Africa’s deadliest conflicts?
in Africa
There’s a country in the middle of Africa whose sprawling, jungle-covered territory produces about 73% of the world’s cobalt, without which your phone, your laptop, and your car wouldn’t be able to exist. But the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, has also experienced the deadliest wars ever on African soil. So how are these two facts connected, and what impact does the DRC ultimately have on geopolitics?
Read MoreWhy is Suriname one of South America’s strangest countries?
In 1667, the Dutch and the English signed a treaty that traded one piece of land for another. The English kept a swampy little outpost we now call Manhattan. The Dutch kept a sliver of South American coast that they considered the better deal. It’s called Suriname, and 350 years later that piece of land hosts roughly 750m barrels of recoverable oil, a Chinese-owned gold mine, the highest proportion of Muslims of any country in the Americas, and the political afterlife of a criminal dictator. So with all that in mind, how does Suriname fit into geopolitics today?
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