Showing 1 - 10 of 59
Somaliland: Mixed motivations
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/01/2026
» Last week Israel was the first country in the world to establish diplomatic relations with Somaliland. Not Somalia, a wreck of a country on the East African coast that has been mired in civil war for the past thirty-five years, but Somaliland, a different country just north of there that has been peaceful, relatively prosperous and even democratic for all those years.
Arab fraternity weakens and hegemons rule
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/11/2025
» 'This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper," wrote T S Eliot in 1925, probably responding to the profoundly unsatisfactory aftermath of World War I (although with a poet, you never really know). At any rate, it's happening again, this time in the Middle East.
Symbolic acts won't create a real Palestine
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 25/09/2025
» Ten more countries are recognising Palestine as a sovereign state in the course of this week. That brings the total up from 147 to 157. It's a big deal to an extent because for the first time it includes quite a few big, rich Western countries (France, the UK, Canada and Australia). But it is not unified, and it still controls no territory.
No 'New World Order', only global disorder
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/09/2025
» There is no "New World Order", although there is certainly a new world disorder.
Today, Tuvalu. Tomorrow, the entire world
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 15/07/2025
» Some big changes arrive with a bang, but usually they sort of sneak in and you barely notice them at first. Last month's big change saw the creation of the world's first climate-change visas. It's a way of giving potential climate refugees some hope and some dignity, and it would certainly be an improvement on the current migration mess.
Theatre of white refugees from South Africa
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 16/05/2025
» As my flight landed in South Africa on Sunday, I looked in vain for the plane that was due to take off with the first 49 white, Afrikaans-speaking "refugees" of the many thousands who are supposedly going to find safety from racist persecution in Donald Trump's United States.
Sudan's war and the Africa we don't see
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/04/2025
» Last Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: "Many have given up on Sudan, but that is wrong. It's morally wrong when we see so many civilians beheaded, infants as young as one subjected to sexual violence, more people facing famine than anywhere else in the world.... We simply cannot look away."
Syria needs another miracle for peace to stay
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/12/2024
» They're still celebrating the miraculous fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, and the killing has stopped in Syria except for parts of the north, east and south. So what are the odds that the man whose fighters brought down the regime, Ahmed al-Sharaa, can bring peace, prosperity and even democracy to Syria?
Syria receives another chance with Assad gone
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 10/12/2024
» Take a moment, first, to celebrate the fall of a regime of surpassing evil even by the demanding standards of the Middle East. Father and son, the Assad regime oppressed and abused the Syrian people for 53 years, and now it is gone in a week. Even the American-backed puppet regime in Afghanistan did not fall that fast.
The link between climate and talk of 'remigration'
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/10/2024
» 'Remigration": the word had a harmless origin, as a term academics used to describe the phenomenon of migrants who failed to thrive in their new home and decided to go back to their birth country.