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Talking about climate change is never easy. The issue is complex and upsetting. Headlines bring bad news way more often than good ones.

Techniques based on the extensive analysis of theories and research from social psychology, sociology, environmental and media studies can pave the way for a consistent approach to climate action commitment and citizen empowerment.

Here are five ways to communicate climate stories in a way that keeps people engaged and motivated to take positive action.

1. Give people agency

According to the seminal research published in 1974 by the Canadian-American social psychologist Albert Bandura, humans are capable creatures who can overcome fears and lead happier, motivated lives when led correctly. He conducted a famous experiment with people who were afraid of snakes.

In one scenario, an assistant was holding a snake in their hands or keeping it in a cage, while the scared person was watching. In another scenario, the person was given a snake to hold, in a controlled environment, with the assistants eager to take the snake back at any signs of the person’s discomfort. Bandura discovered that looking at someone holding a glossy, hissy reptile did not improve one’s sense of empowerment much.

However, actually handling the scary creature allowed people to feel more in control – and more likely to overcome their fear. This approach is known for boosting people’s sense of agency. By tackling the problem with one modest action at a time, a person is likely to become more reassured in their capacity to challenge larger issues.

In terms of climate communication, we need to be able to control at least small bits of the situation in order to be psychologically equipped to tackle bigger challenges. Climate communicators can give practical suggestions on lifestyle amendments, feasible activism techniques, political involvement – to nourish the sense of empowerment in the audience.

2. Localise the issue

While researching for my new book, Effective Climate Communication, I discovered that many countries with fewer resources struggle to present local stories related to climate change. They tend to rely on the western agenda of UN climate summits or global reports.

The shortage of correspondents on the ground (see studies on Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria and South Africa, countries in South America and Asia), makes many media in the developing countries ignore the very local consequences of the global heating. When people are less prepared for extreme weather, they’ll be less empowered to demand change from their governments or invest in weather-resilient crops and other prevention techniques.

By capturing perspectives from the local businesses and scientists, people can talk more easily about the direct effects of climate change on the local environment.

For instance, Greenpeace Indonesia focused on three themes on their Instagram page: the imagery of floods and humans affected, the call to switch to renewable energy, and the argument against the “omnibus” bill, which allows coal companies renew their licenses easily every ten years.

Connecting the local impact of climate change with the possible solution – reducing coal mining – brought a considerable number of clicks and comments to the stories. Although the link between Instagram and public opinion is hard to prove, the omnibus bill is still widely contested by Indonesian society.

3. Make stories relatable

Unless you’re called Elon Musk, Bill Gates (the co-founder of Microsoft) or Ursula von der Leyen (president of the European Commission), you don’t have a direct control over the management of climate change at a global level. Yet, it would be amazing to hear more stories of people who may be giving up long-haul flights, rejecting meat and divesting their pension from the fossil fuel funds. There are so many stories that can be told to inspire feelings of connection and hope.

Stories must be made relatable to engage a wider audience in positive climate conversations.
fizkes/Shutterstock

According to classic “social proof” theory, if we can be sure that any new behaviour is the social norm, then we’ll be more eager to change. The moment people consider that refraining from eating meat, flying and buying unnecessary stuff are common patterns in their social circles, they will find it easier to follow suit, as shown by this study on the flying intentions of Germans, or research on the effect of social communities on pro-climate decisions in Europe.

4. Avoid ‘doomism’

Effective Climate Communication is published by Palgrave Macmillan Cham.

Watching thrillers about the end of the world on the TV screen can be escapist and weirdly soothing. But witnessing the apocalypse unfold in front of us, through multiple news notifications and social media posts, is less gratifying. The narratives that compare climate change to the end of the humanity are supposed to incite action – but more often than not they lead to freeze or withdrawal reactions.

In some newsrooms, the practice of “the three Ds” flourishes in the face of the planetary problem – denial, delay-ism and dismissal. Doomist storytelling opens the doors for fake prophets and self-proclaimed superheroes who promise to fix the problem but end up in populism and scapegoating.

Avoiding doomism allows for “stubborn optimism”, a concept endorsed by Christiana Figueres, the ex-head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016. It is the dual approach of acknowledging the severity of the issue and the cost of the delays to action, but looking at the present state of affairs as an opportunity to avoid bigger damage and focus on the near-term solutions.

5. Create a new normal

Having a special climate change section within a media publication is a nice sign that the organisation cares about the problem. But how likely are people to click on it just to discover another ambush of negative stories? Including climate references in the majority of stories, from fashion to travel, helps normalise climate change as a backdrop to all aspects of our lives.

There’s no need for preaching. Nobody wants to be patronised for their decision to take a flight to see the family that lives far away. But subtle travel listicles about local destinations, creative meat-free recipes or an imaginative reinvention of fashion advice as restyling, not buying, can offer up alternatives in creative ways.

It should not be a taboo topic at dinner parties or social events. Avoid “othering” the climate change issue and help people stay aware and committed to tackling the elements of it.

Being aware of climate change as a new norm is healthier than trying to push it away and deny it’s happening. Engagement with the biggest story of our time is the best catalyst for change that we have.

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Jimmy Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981, considered the treaties signed in 1977 to cede control of the Panama Canal to Panama, ending over a century of strained relations, one of the crowning achievements of his administration.

Today, Panamanians are uncertain whether Donald Trump will abide by these treaties – and are nervous about what could happen next. Panamanian journalists that I have spoken with are increasingly concerned that the US will invade.

Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out using the US military to seize the Panama Canal, if necessary, despite boasting that he had an impeccable record of not starting any new wars.

While this appears to be a huge departure in US foreign policy towards Latin America, the US has had a long history of invading, meddling, supporting coups and offering clandestine support to violent non-state actors in the region.

One historian has noted that the US participated (directly and indirectly) in regime change in Latin America more than 40 times in the last century. This figure does not even take into account failed missions that didn’t result in regime change, such as the US’s orchestrated invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961.

When the US is not intervening, its approach to the region has been described as “benign neglect”. During these interludes, Latin America was mostly ignored while the US prioritised other geopolitical interests.

Return to the old ways?

But Trump’s latest threats to Panama are a return to the paternalistic era of US foreign policy towards Latin America. This arguably started with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 — a framework that aimed to protect US interests in the region from European aggression. Latin America essentially became the US’s backyard. At the time, the Monroe Doctrine received some support from Latin American countries that were hoping for independence from Europe and republican forms of government.

Read more:
US pressure has forced Panama to quit China’s Belt and Road Initiative – it could set the pattern for further superpower clashes

But this would change with the increasingly interventionist posture of US president Theodore Roosevelt during his two terms from 1901 to 1909. On November 18 1903, when Panama was just 15 days old, Roosevelt signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty , in which the US promised to support Panamanian independence from Colombia in exchange for rights to build and operate the Panama Canal. Reportedly the deal was engineered by a Frenchman, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, and no Panamanians were involved. This was the era of “big stick diplomacy” where the US would muscle its way into getting what it wanted with a series of credible threats.

Hyotographics/Shutterstock

During the cold war, Washington’s stance in Latin America became even more interventionist. The US backed authoritarian rule by right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguary and Honduras.

The US government provided organisation, financial and technical support for military regimes that were disappearing, kidnapping, torturing and murdering their political opponents, during Operation Condor in the 1970s. Democratically elected leaders Jacobo Árbenz and Salvador Allende were removed from power with the help of US covert action in Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, respectively.

Read more:
Operation Condor: why victims of the oppression that swept 1970s South America are still fighting for justice

The US was also responsible for funding and training violent non-state groups such as the Contras, a rebel force which was set up in Nicaragua to oppose the Sandinista government. The US also supported the right-wing Arena government which was accused of setting up death squads during the bloody civil war in El Salvador) in which thousands of civilians were killed.

With the Carter administration’s human rights-focused foreign policy, the US finally did the right thing when it came to returning the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. To accomplish this, Carter had to work hard to build bipartisan support to see the long-term benefits of improving US-Panamanian relations and improving US relations with Latin America more generally.

From the US standpoint, the canal was no longer economically important. At the same time, the canal had become an issue of national pride in Panama, with mass student-led protests breaking out on January 9 1964 when Panamanians were barred from flying their national flag in the US-controlled canal zone. The day became known as Martyr’s Day after 21 Panamanians were killed by US troops.

Relations improved after the Carter-Torrijos treaties were signed. But the US returned to an interventionist strategy when it send nearly 26,000 troops to invade Panama during Operation Just Cause in 1989 – the largest US deployment since the Vietnam war.

Though the goal to remove Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega (who had formerly been on the CIA payroll) was achieved, more than 500 Panamanians were reportedly killed. Unofficial estimates suggest there may have been as many as 2,000-3,000 deaths.

Six months after the 1989 invasion, I went to Panama for the summer, and saw first-hand the destruction caused. Looting had been rampant, with millions of dollars worth of goods stolen. There were concerns that the economy in Colón (Panama’s second largest city) wouldn’t be able to recover.

The impoverished neighbourhood of El Chorillo in Panama City was overwhelmed by a massive use of firepower, including F-117 stealth bombers, Blackhawk helicopters, Apache and Cobra helicopters, 2,000-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles.

In spite of the devastation, the US could, at least, argue that it invaded in order to restore democracy in Panama. But fast forward to today and Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t care about democracy and human rights. He does care, however, about increasing Chinese economic influence in Latin America – and this high-profile pushback is actually about bullying the Panamanian government to stop doing deals with Beijing.

And while the seizure of the Panama Canal would probably make very little difference to the US economy, it would make a huge impact to the economy of Panama. The Panamanian government astutely made important investments to enlarge the canal from 2007-2016, and today the canal’s revenues are worth US$5 billion (£3.9 billion), or about 4% of Panama’s GDP.

The “America first” agenda fails to understand how long-term alliances work, how soft power works, and the importance of having credibility and a vision. In the past, the US has often been aggressive, assertive and interventionist in Latin America, with Trump it looks like all these qualities are back. Läs mer…

After months of wrangling over public debt and spending decisions, the German government collapsed in November 2024. Among the many disagreements between the parties which made up the governing coalition was how to pay for measures to combat climate change.

Seeking to take advantage of disillusioned voters (who in recent years showed record support for the Greens), populist parties have since cast doubt on the idea of tackling environmental issues at all.

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for example, the rightwing party which denies the existence of man-made climate change, has raised concerns about energy security and the economic cost of green alternatives.

If the AfD’s broader aim was to take green issues off the political agenda, the plan appears to be working. In the run-up to the general election on February 23 2025, migration and the economy are the most important issues for voters (each on 34%), with climate change lagging far behind (13%).

Nor has the environment been a priority in the parties’ election campaigns. In the first TV debate between the chancellor, the social democrat Olaf Scholz, and his most likely successor, the conservative Friedrich Merz, the topic was ignored almost entirely. A lack of political will and fear of losing voters appear to have relegated environmental policies to the sidelines.

Others want it back at the top of the agenda. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, for example, describes the climate crisis as one of the major risks facing the country, alongside terrorism and war.

Business associations have urged the next government to address climate change mitigation for the sake of German jobs. The Federation of German Industries has demanded an increase in public spending on climate change of as much as €70 billion (£58 billion). Younger voters have called for a nationwide protest to bring the subject back into politicians’ minds.

So have German voters really become sceptical about dealing with climate change?
In a recent study, we found that people who planned to vote for the AfD and the leftwing populist BSW party are indeed sceptical of the need for far-reaching climate policies.

Among voters of these two parties, only 23% (AfD) and 41% (BSW) think that an energy transition is necessary to achieve national climate goals. For Green party voters that figure is 93%, and for SDP supporters it’s 83%.

Voters across the political spectrum have different priorities when it comes to energy supply. For populist party supporters, energy costs trump everything, with only 12% of AfD and 20% of BSW voters considering low emissions important.

These voters are also less likely to assume the energy transition would have positive effects on jobs, and are more likely to fear rising energy costs and security of supply. In short, they are afraid of the social and economic consequences of the energy transition. It is this fear that the far right appears to have been able to mobilise.

Climate costs

Our results are backed up by other research which shows that poorer voters are concerned about the potential costs associated with net zero ambitions.

There is also uncertainty about the possible effects on employment. Many people in Germany believe there will be job losses in their local community as a result of the transition to green energy, and 25% worry they will lose their job.

Climate change protest in Berlin in 2024.
D Busquets/Shutterstock

While these results may seem gloomy, we also found majority support – even among AfD voters – for climate change policies where communities benefit financially from local renewable energy projects, and where citizens feel they have more of a voice in how the energy transition comes into effect.

People want to be heard and participate in a potential transformation. Previous research in psychology has shown that participating in processes and a perception of fairness can increase acceptance.

Research also shows that people fear the effects of climate policies on their personal finances, and that these perceived costs inhibit environmentally friendly behaviour.

But the climate crisis won’t go away, no matter who governs Germany in the coming years. More “once-in-a-century” floods and droughts will hit the nation and bring the climate crisis back to the top of the political agenda.

When this happens, politicians need to ensure they have a positive and credible vision of the future ready to present to voters – where the costs are shared fairly. This will make it harder for populist parties to play on economic worries, and easier to persuade German voters to prioritise the climate crisis. Läs mer…

On entering the Saatchi Gallery’s latest exhibition, which is simply titled Flowers, you might think that you have just walked into a supersized florist’s shop, surrounded by bunches and bunches of blooms.

The aroma of dried flowers comes from Rebecca Louise Law’s monumental arrangement La Fleur Morte (2025), which was created through workshops with people from the local community. As in a flower shop, the viewer is overwhelmed by a heady mix of colour, shape and smell.

Flowers offers an overview of flora not only in contemporary art but in their wider cultural significance. Rooms are loosely organised by theme and medium, with an occasional nod to more serious subjects, such as eroticism, death, danger or decay.

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The first room, Roots, offers historical context for the show, from Van Gogh to William Morris’s floral designs. Dutch 17th-century paintings are recreated for the digital age in Bob and Nick Carter’s video work Transforming Flowers in a Vase (2016).

The irreality of their digitally revived bunch of flowers, presented in a heavy wooden frame, reminds us that those masterly paintings were themselves a construct.

Sunflowers by Jim Dine (2011).
Courtesy the artist

Painters have often arranged flowers that bloomed at different times of the year together in one image. As Bart Cornelis, curator at London’s National Gallery, explained when discussing Dutch flower paintings in 2017, these arrangements are “not realism [but] ”a construct … In a sense, that’s what makes it art”.

In the next space, In Bloom, Jim Dine’s black-and-white lithograph Sunflowers (2011) stands out amid the profusion of bright yellows, reds, greens and pinks. With the colour stripped away, the eye is drawn to the flowers’ structure and their dark-seeded heart.

Speaking about the connection between plants and people, artist and subject, Dine has said that “if my personality is revealed in a plant drawing … it would be just the emotion and the way I felt when I depicted it at that moment, that day – or as the days go on, the building up of layers like the unconscious”. This work feels deeply connected to those early Dutch paintings and their small, often-missed memento mori.

Extra-Natural (1) by Miguel Chevalier (2024).
Software by Cyrille Henry/Antoine Villeret. Courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London

In the same room, a whole wall is dedicated to an image of Jeff Koons’ two-storey sculpture Puppy (1992), a dog covered in bedding plants.

Koons’ notorious overt commercialism leads the viewer back to the sense of being in a shop – this time offering high-end floral fashion and jewellery. In one corner, glass display cases hold jewelled brooches by “curatorial partners” Buccellati. Next to them are Marimekko prints in an oversized poster display rack.

Beauty and danger

Stepping into the next room, the viewer moves from shopping arcade back into a gallery to look at flowers in photography and sculpture. Here are more decadent arrays, where visitors are drawn like pollinators to William Darrell’s trippy kinetic sculpture The Machinery of Enchantment (2025).

Passing Through by Orlanda Broom.
Courtesy the artist

By the nature of its subject, this show is full of colour and form. It is a reminder that, as art writer Patrick J. Reed explained in relation to photographer and painter Edward Steichen’s 1936 exhibition of freshly cut bouquets of Delphiniums:

The significance of flowers, then as now, is linked to traditions, tastes and class distinctions. To appreciate fine vegetation means to understand, if not possess, ‘well-bred’ decorum; to understand when and how to navigate manicured botanical refreshment.

With Flowers, the Saatchi Gallery offers visitors this opportunity in abundance.

Upstairs, the exhibition is more conceptually curated. The true symbolic power and pervasiveness of flower imagery comes to the fore in a room full of film posters, album sleeves and book covers.

Calyx by Rebecca Louise Law (2023).
Courtesy the artist

Among them are the disturbingly beautiful posters for Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest by Neil Kellerhouse. Images from the film spring to mind: the garden next to the concentration camp; the profusion of flowers fertilised by ashes from the ovens. Monstrous actions are shielded by nature.

Read more:
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The relationship between beauty and danger becomes more overt in one of the final rooms, Science: Life or Death. Suddenly, we are amid less decorative fare. Here, under glass domes, are Emma Witter’s exquisitely intricate sculptures of flowers – chillingly, all made of tiny bones.

Anemoia by Kasia Wozniak.
Courtesy the artist

These sculptures sit in stark visual juxtaposition to Banita Mistry’s minimal line paintings, which recall modernism yet are hand-drawn with Henna. These contrasting approaches to similar themes sit opposite historically laden botanical illustrations. Darker themes re-emerge and open up thoughts of the importance of contemporary artists engaging in debates around decolonisation.

So, among the seductive splendour of form and colour lurks the reality of depictions of flowers in the contemporary art world. A construct balanced between the need to reflect on human frailty through the relationship with delicate mutable blooms and the harsh edge of producing seductive profitable goods.

Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture is on display at London’s Saatchi Gallery until May 5 2025. Läs mer…

Three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world now knows the exact price for American military support of Ukraine. During a recent interview with Fox News, United States President Donald Trump put a $500 billion price tag on American aid to the war-torn country.

But there was a catch: the exchange should be made in the form of Ukraine’s valuable natural resources, including rare earth minerals. “We have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money,” Trump said in the interview.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since told his aides to reject the proposal.

Given the dizzying pace of events that have unfolded since the Trump interview, it’s unclear now whether any deal with Ukraine on its rare earth minerals will ever come to pass. This is especially true given Trump’s subsequent surprise phone conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and ongoing peace talks between the U.S. and Russia that have excluded Ukrainian and European Union officials.

But there’s little doubt Ukraine’s natural resources will be an important element in future diplomatic negotiations.

Always a strategic factor

Ukraine’s rich natural resources have always been a strategic factor in the war. To some extent, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was driven by the interest to capture and control these resources — including critical minerals, fertile farmland and energy reserves.

Ukraine’s previous attempts to develop its mineral deposits and energy reserves — such as oil and gas privatization in 2013 and later attracting investments for the development of its mineral resource extraction in 2021 — were cut short first by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then by the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.

In 2021, the European Union signed a strategic partnership with Ukraine to include “activities along the entire value chain of both primary and secondary critical raw materials and batteries.”

The timing of the military campaign against Ukraine may not have been determined solely by the country’s attempts to develop its natural resources, but they have certainly been a factor. Most of these deposits, including oil and gas fields, are located in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, which are currently either under Russian occupation or near the front line.

Ukraine’s mineral wealth

Ukraine’s mineral wealth amounts to about 20,000 mineral deposits and 116 types of minerals. Most of these deposits are unexplored, with only 15 per cent of all the deposits active prior to the Russian invasion.

Rare earth minerals are among this mineral wealth as demand for them has skyrocketed in the past several years.

According to recent estimates, Ukraine has the largest titanium reserves in Europe and seven per cent of the world’s reserves, as well as the largest lithium reserves in Europe. It also has significant production capacity when it comes to rare earth minerals.

Miners extract ilmenite, a key element used to produce titanium, at an open pit mine in the central region of Kirovohrad, Ukraine, on Feb. 12, 2025.
(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ukraine also has confirmed deposits of beryllium, uranium and manganese. Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s fifth-largest producer of gallium and is a major producer of neon gas.

In addition, Ukraine also has large reserves of nonferrous metals, including copper, zinc, silver, lead, nickel, cobalt, as well as one of the largest global reserves of graphite.

Estimates vary, but Ukrainian critical mineral deposits could be worth trillions of dollars.

These resources are important from a geopolitical perspective: China has become the major supplier of rare earth minerals on the global market. Not only has China led in the extraction of these minerals, but it also has the largest production and refinement capacity.

As reliance on Chinese supply has increased, China used it as leverage during the U.S.-China trade dispute in 2019 and stopped rare earth exports to Japan in 2010.

China’s dominance in this sector means diversifying the supply of rare earth minerals has geopolitical importance, especially for the U.S. and the EU. They want to ensure the supply comes from a strategic partner — Ukraine.

Ukraine’s natural wealth

Ukraine’s natural riches go beyond critical minerals and include large deposits of hydrocarbons, particularly natural gas. Ukraine ranks second for natural gas reserves in Europe and fourth in terms of natural gas production.

Ukraine’s fertile soil — or chernozem, humus-rich grassland soils used extensively for growing cereals and raising livestock — is also economically and strategically important, making the country one of the largest exporters of food globally.

In 2021, Ukrainian wheat exports accounted for 12 per cent of the global wheat supply, 16 per cent of the global corn supply, 18 per cent of the global barley supply and almost half of the global supply of sunflower seeds, mainly to developing countries.

A mill worker shovels wheat at a granary in Sataniv in the Khmelnytskiy region of Ukraine in August 2024. The eastern and southern areas of Ukraine, where much of the country’s wheat production takes place, have been the targets of Russian bombardments.
(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Last but not least, Ukraine’s biodiversity, landscapes and ecosystems — some of which have been severely damaged due to the war — are invaluable to the country’s natural environment and essential for the health and well-being of Ukrainians.

The country’s nuclear facilities and radioactive sites are also at risk of being compromised, which would result in severe environmental and health ramifications in the region. In fact, a recent Russian drone attack reportedly damaged part of the Chernobyl nuclear facility.

What’s next for Ukraine’s natural resources

The fate of Ukraine’s mineral riches will largely depend on how the conflict and post-conflict processes unfold.

But their existence has already proven to be of strategic importance in the war — first, to Russia, and now to the U.S. as well.

Ukraine’s natural wealth and how it features in current conversations about the future of the conflict reminds us about the central role resource politics can play in shaping war and peace. Läs mer…

It’s no longer speculative to ask how the post-Second World War world order, led by the United States, will end. It’s apparently already ended.

The U.S. has snubbed its NATO partners and Ukraine itself from purported “peace talks” to end the three-year-old war in Europe in favour of direct bilateral talks between American and Russian officials hosted by Saudi Arabia.

President Donald Trump has actually described Ukraine’s widely admired wartime President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a dictator” and falsely claimed he started the war.

These lies came directly after Vice President JD Vance’s recent broadside against NATO partners at the Munich Security Conference in which he downplayed the threat of Russia and China to the western alliance and suggested instead that liberal centrism was the real threat.

His remarks were widely regarded as an intervention on behalf of the European far right, particularly far-right political parties in Germany ahead of upcoming elections in that country.

Dreaming of a Gaza takeover

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz and 36 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are in the midst of new crimes against humanity, new forms of ethnic cleansing and even, potentially, genocide.

In a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump mused about an American takeover of the Gaza Strip by removing its occupants to neighbouring countries and developing the region as a seaside resort. This would very likely constitute a war crime.

White House national security adviser Mike Walz and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles listen as President Donald Trump elaborates on his proposal for the U.S. to take over Gaza on Feb. 4, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Snubbing international law

Trump’s return to the American presidency marks a normalization of this type of threat.

Instead of embracing the international rule of law in the post-Second World War spirit of avoiding another devastating global conflict, the U.S. is building new walls rather than tearing them down while at the same time threatening to annex other sovereign nations and amass new territory.

Trump is obviously unsentimental about America’s longtime allies, including the innermost circle of English-speaking democracies — the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australian and New Zealand — that make up the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.

A group of countries that wouldn’t normally be fussed about the transition from one American president to another is now very nervous about how far Trump is going to go.

Read more:
Allies or enemies? Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland put NATO in a tough spot

Anarchy, colonialism

During the first angry weeks of Trump’s second presidency, the U.S. appears to be signalling a return to an anarchic and explicitly colonial imagining of the world. In this regard, Trump’s disdain for the rule of law at home tracks a potentially even greater disdain for the international legal order, one that’s existed since 1945.

The only real connection between the past and contemporary times predates the American-led post-war order of the past eight decades and harkens further back to America’s imperialist and expansionist past and ideas like Manifest Destiny from more than a century ago.

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How the U.S. could in fact make Canada an American territory

Trump, not historically much of an imperialist in his rhetoric, has now doubled down on classical imperialist threats as he repeatedly proposes expanding the physical map of the U.S., musing in particular about Greenland, Panama, Canada and now Gaza.

Greenland holds a strategic interest for the U.S. — there’s already an American airbase on the island — since its location is increasingly important as the Arctic ice melts and amid greater competition from Russia and China.

Panama has been in America’s imperialistic sights more often than Greenland, and was even invaded by U.S. forces in 1989.

Protesters burn posters depicting U.S. President Donald Trump during a rally against Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Panama City on Feb. 2, 2025.
(AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Canada as a 51st state

But Canada? At least Trump agreed at a news conference before taking office that military force was off the table. Instead, Canada only had to worry about “economic force” being used to annex it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told business leaders that Trump’s talk about annexing Canada is “the real thing,” aimed at obtaining Canada’s critical minerals.

Donald Trump’s threats about annexing Canada and Greenland are causing widespread alarm among NATO allies. This is an AI-generated image Trump posted to his Truth Social account.
(Donald Trump/Truth Social)

Trump’s interactions with Denmark, Canada and Panama all demonstrate a disdain for basic principles of the rule of law at the international level, which is underpinned by the sovereignty of states.

His musings on Gaza, which led United Nations Secretary General António Guterres to warn him specifically against endorsing ethnic cleansing, demonstrate a willingness to break completely with international legal norms.

He’s not only peacocking on the global stage, he is also telegraphing that he holds international legal norms in even lower esteem than the norms of his own country, where he is a convicted felon. This situation is as alarming as it unprecedented.

Read more:
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s gift to Donald Trump, he could be barred from Canada as a convicted felon

America now a threat

Right now, cognitive dissonance in the form of status quo bias poses a real danger in terms of Trump’s dismissal of the rule of law. This means that folks are somehow convincing themselves that the undoing of the global rules-based order in real time is just a blip; things will somehow ramp down and return to normal.

But the evidence is glaringly to the contrary.

Trump is plainly communicating his wishes: a new age of American imperialism. At first few took him seriously. Now we all are. Canada, due to its proximity to and reliance on the U.S., must especially face a new reality in which an American president casually and repeatedly threatens its sovereignty.

Canada, America’s closest ally in terms of shared language, culture and geography, should be the first and not the last to start believing Trump’s threats to annex it.

Read more:
Allies or enemies? Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland put NATO in a tough spot

Even when Trump is no longer in office, neither Canadians nor any of America’s other allies can be certain someone just like him will not be returned to power by the U.S. voters. That means America’s western allies, like Canada and Denmark, must learn the lessons Latin American and Middle Eastern countries learned along time ago: America is a threat.

The Democratic Party must also figure out how it’s going to effectively resist Trump over the next four years.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Martin Heinrich hold a news conference following President Donald Trump’s announcement he was freezing all federal grants and loans on Jan. 29, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Only an American concern?

Some might ask: Aren’t these American problems for the American people? As Canadians can attest, no. Trump poses grave dangers to the rest of the world due to the unique place the U.S. occupies in the geopolitical system.

Nothing about Trump’s second presidency bodes well for America’s allies and friends, including Canada.

A kleptocrat who regards friends and allies as transactional customers and for whom everything is “just business,” including national security, Trump poses an existential threat not only to America, but to the international world order. Läs mer…

It has been an eventful and, for Ukraine and its European allies, alarming past week or so. First they heard that the US president, Donald Trump, had spent 90 minutes on the phone with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. In one stroke, Trump upended three years in which his predecessor, Joe Biden, had sought to isolate Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On the same day, February 12, Trump’s newly installed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, told a gathering of senior defence officials in Brussels that Europe would no longer be the primary focus for US security policy, and that Ukraine could not hope to regain the territory Russia had illegally occupied since 2014, nor join Nato.

Hegseth added that not only would the US not contribute to any peacekeeping force in Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, but that any European peacekeeping operation would not be done under the protection of Nato’s Article 5.

This was soon followed by the US vice-president, J.D. Vance, telling the Munich Security Conference that it was Europe, not Russia or China, that was the main security threat – the “enemy within” that fostered anti-democratic practices and sought to curtail free speech.

This week, a US team led by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, sat down with their Russian opposite numbers led by the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to discuss peace negotiations. Ukraine was not represented. Nor was Europe. Following that, and perhaps taking his cue from Hegseth, Lavrov declared that Russia would not accept any European peacekeepers in Ukraine – deal or no deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has taken to his TruthSocial media platform to repeat several favourite Kremlin talking points. Ukraine was responsible for the war, he said. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a “dictator” who had cancelled elections, and whose popularity with his own people was now as low as 4% (it’s actually 57%, at least 10 points higher than Trump’s rating in the US).

Trump also mocked Zelensky’s concern at his country’s exclusion from the Riyadh talks, telling reporters: “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

This leads us back to the Istanbul communique, produced at the end of March 2022 after initial peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Antalya, Turkey. Some US commentators have suggested Ukraine could now be better off had it signed this deal.

Istanbul communique

What happened in Istanbul, and how close Russia and Ukraine were to an agreement, has been hotly debated, with some arguing a deal was close and others refuting this.

Ukraine reportedly agreed to a range of concessions including future neutrality, as well as giving up its bid for membership of Nato. Russia, in turn, would apparently have accepted Ukraine’s membership of the EU. This concession, incidentally, is still on the table.

But there were sticking points, primarily over the size of Ukraine’s armed forces after a deal – Kyiv reportedly wanted 250,000 soldiers, the Kremlin just 85,000 – and the types of weaponry Ukraine could keep in its arsenal.

There were also issues about Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territory, particularly Crimea – this was projected to be resolved over 15 years with Russia occupying the peninsula on a lease in the meantime. Another Kremlin demand was for Zelensky to stand down as president, with the presidency being taken up by the pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.

Negotiations continued through April 2022, only to break down when Russian atrocities were reported in Bucha, a town Ukrainian troops had retaken as part of their spring counter-offensive. But the fact is, an agreement was never really close.

The UK’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, has taken much flack over reports that he urged Zelensky not to accept the deal. But there was never a realistic chance this deal would be acceptable to Ukraine. A neutral Ukraine with a reduced military capacity would have no way to defend itself against any future aggression.

Had Ukraine done a deal based on the Istanbul communique, it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia – led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with western countries. As for joining the EU, it was the Kremlin’s opposition to Kyiv’s engagement with the EU in 2013 which provoked the Euromaidan protests and led to Russia’s initial annexation of Crimea the following year.

What next?

Kyiv signing the Istanbul communique may have quickly stopped the war and the killing. But the Kremlin has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted to adhere to agreements – you only have to look at the way it repeatedly violated the Minsk accords of 2015, which attempted to end hostilities in eastern Ukraine.

Further, a deal that rewards Russian aggression by agreeing to its taking of territory and demanding the neutrality of the victim would undermine global security, and encourage other illegal foreign policy adventurism.

If the Trump administration has the blueprint of a fair peace deal, it’s hiding it well at this point. Instead, European leaders have been put in a position where they must face the prospect of having to fund Ukraine’s continued defence, while coping with a US retreat from its security guarantees for Europe as a whole.

Either that or, as my University of Bath colleague Patrick Bury wrote on X this week, accept some pretty dire consequences.

Europe is facing a crisis that it could have prepared for after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. With Trump back in power, the relationship between the US and Europe appears increasingly fractured. But Europe too is bitterly divided over how to approach this crisis.

Britain and France initially talked up the idea of providing troops as peacekeepers in Ukraine – but Germany adamantly refused to go along with that plan. Both Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer have since rethought the idea (although there is a report that the UK prime minister has considered a scheme for a 30,000-strong “monitoring force” away from the ceasefire line).

The Kremlin reacts to signals. While it was clearly preparing for the invasion in late 2021, Joe Biden’s statement that he would not send troops to defend Ukraine showed the limits to US involvement. A message that Europe is prepared to dispatch peacekeepers to Ukraine now would send a strong signal to Putin – and the Trump administration – that Europe is serious. Läs mer…

Captain Ibrahim Traoré is the interim leader of Burkina Faso, having taken over the position following a coup which he led against Lieutenant Colonel Paul Henri Damiba in September 2022. The 37-year-old captain had supported Damiba, his commanding officer, in a putsch earlier that year against former president Roch Marc Kaboré.

Since Traoré has been in power, Burkina Faso has played a key role in the withdrawal of three west African states from the regional body Ecowas. Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali have formed an alternative, the Alliance of Sahel States. The Conversation Africa asked researcher Daniel Eizenga where the country was headed under Traoré’s leadership.

Who is Ibrahim Traoré?

Traoré was born in 1988 in Bondokuy, a small town on the route connecting Burkina Faso’s second city – Bobo Dioulasso – and its fourth largest, Ouahigouya. He completed secondary school in Bobo Dioulasso, then moved to the nation’s capital, where he studied at the University of Ouagadougou.

After completing his undergraduate education, Traoré joined the army in 2010 at the age of 22. He undertook his officer training in Pô at the Georges Namoano Military Academy, an officer school for the Burkinabe armed forces. He graduated as a second lieutenant in 2012 and served as a peacekeeper in the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission to Mali (Minusma) after being promoted to lieutenant in 2014.

After his stint with Minusma, Traoré took part in missions in northern Burkina Faso as part of a special counterterrorism unit. He was promoted to captain in 2020 at the age of 32.

Damiba led a coup against Kaboré in January 2022. He then assigned Traoré as chief of an artillery regiment in the North Central region of Burkina Faso.

As it became clear that Damiba was losing popularity within the junta, Traoré and a group of junior officers organised a coup. They seized on public and military outrage around an ambush that left 11 soldiers and dozens of civilians dead.

What has been the response to his rule in Burkina Faso?

Some media reports suggest that the young captain and his junta enjoy popular support throughout the country. Some have even drawn comparisons between Traoré and Burkina Faso’s earlier leftist revolutionary military leader, Captain Thomas Sankara. It’s true that the two captains did take power at the age of 34. But the comparisons end at their rank and age.

During the 1980s and nearing the end of the cold war, Sankara came to power as ideological division split the Burkinabe armed forces. Officers supporting Sankara led a coup in 1983. Viewed as a Marxist revolutionary, Sankara attempted to enact political reforms. They included policies to boost public political participation, empower women, address environmental degradataion and reduce inequalities.

Traoré’s position is much more precarious. Most military officers did not participate in either his coup or the one led by Damiba, underscoring the fragmented state of Burkina Faso’s armed forces. Traoré’s junta has claimed there have been multiple attempts at destabilisation or coups. This highlights the arbitrary means by which power has changed hands and the inherent instability present under junta rule.

To shore up his position, Traoré has launched a restructuring drive. This has included redirecting revenues from taxes, the mining sector, and other sources of public revenues into defence coffers. He has also mobilised volunteers to fight violent extremists as part of the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, a junta-sponsored civilian militia. There are reports that forced conscription has been used to send “volunteers” to the front lines of battle. The conflict data indicate that the strategy is not working.

Traoré may not be as popular among ordinary people as he is often portrayed. This is inferred from the violent repression of critics, multiple alleged coup attempts as well as the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis. He has cracked down hard on independent voices. Journalists, civil society leaders, political party leaders and even judges have been targeted by the junta with its forced conscription tactics and other forms of violent repression.

What about external players?

The September 2022 coup d’état got the attention of Russian foreign information manipulation and interference campaigns. The campaigns were linked to the shadowy Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group. Other Russian information campaigns employed fake social media accounts that pose as Africans with a genuine interest in Burkina Faso. These accounts promote divisive rhetoric that places blame on France and other western countries for local grievances such as ongoing insecurity.

Aiming to boost support for himself immediately following the coup, Traoré trained his sights on capturing the anti-French sentiment. He blamed the French for many of the country’s woes and cast Damiba as a close French ally. Within a few months, Traoré demanded the French withdraw its security presence from Burkina Faso altogether.

Since the French withdrawal, Russian mercenaries have been seen providing protection for Traoré and reportedly supporting operations near the border with Mali. However, only some 100-300 Russian forces have gone to Burkina Faso. This suggests that the focus is on regime security for Traoré and his junta.

What does the future hold?

Traoré’s actions have not improved the security situation in the country. There have been at least 3,059 violent events linked to militant Islamist groups since he came to power in October 2022. This is a 20% increase in comparison to two years preceding the coup. The number of fatalities linked to militant Islamist violence nearly doubled from 3,621 in 2022 to 6,389 in 2024.

The violence has also spread throughout the country to affect nearly every region and increased along Burkina Faso’s southern border. It’s likely that the data is under-reported.

The junta has claimed to have foiled several coup plots since Traoré’s power grab. A foiled plot came in September 2024 only a few weeks after the deadliest massacre the country has ever suffered. Violent extremists killed hundreds of civilians outside the town of Barsalogho. Civilian fatalities linked to militant Islamist groups have increased from 721 in 2022 to 1,151 deaths in 2024.

Perhaps more worrying are the civilian fatalities linked to the military or its sponsored militia.

The violence in Burkina Faso presents an alarming outlook in which the collapse of the country cannot be ruled out. The military has reemerged as the principal political actor. By some counts the military has been directly or indirectly in power for 45 of the 65 years since Burkina Faso became independent.

All the while, the militant Islamist insurgency embroils more and more of the countryside at great human cost. Some estimates place the number of people displaced by violence as high as 3 million, though the junta will not provide an official figure. That is more than 10% of the population of some 24 million people. Another million or more students may not be in school due to conflict and ongoing insecurity.

Despite the effort to present Traoré as a bold reformer and saviour, the political, security and economic ramifications from his junta rule will reverberate through Burkina Faso for decades to come. Läs mer…

Victims and survivors of gender-based violence have increasingly started naming perpetrators in public. This phenomenon has gained traction through movements such as #MeToo, the #RUReferenceList and #AmINext.

However, there has been a significant backlash. Men identified as perpetrators are turning to the courts to silence those who accuse them of rape and abuse, usually by bringing defamation cases.

In South Africa, in addition to defamation cases, men accused of rape are applying for protection orders under the Protection from Harassment Act.

In a recent paper I analyse a high court ruling which deals with whether publicly naming someone as a rapist constitutes harassment under the act. The court held that it did not amount to harassment.

Based on my experience as an academic as well as an advocate of the high court of South Africa, I argue that the judgment in LW v KA provides a road map for dealing with applications for protection orders against women who publicly name perpetrators. It points to a fundamental shift in the law around the Protection from Harassment Act.

This affects other cases involving the public naming of perpetrators. It makes it clear that identifying a person as a perpetrator is not unreasonable, and does not constitute harassment.

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I conclude from my analysis that the judgment is an important development in the case law around gender-based violence.

The law

South Africa’s Protection from Harassment Act was designed to address stalking and harassment. The act was part of a suite of legislation enacted to protect victims and survivors of gender-based violence, a vast proportion of whom are women facing abuse from men.

Among its provisions is that a court can issue a protection order. Protection orders are used to prohibit the accused person from engaging in harassment, enlisting another person to engage in harassment or any other conditions imposed by the court.

But recently the courts have been approached by a number of men who have been publicly named as perpetrators of gender-based violence. These men have asked for protection orders against the women who accused them.

In two cases that I have personally worked on, South Africa’s magistrates’ courts have granted protection orders to individuals seeking to silence women from speaking out against gender-based violence.

As I argue in my paper, this means that the law is being used to threaten and gag women. This is a perverse inversion of the purpose of the act.

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Magistrates’ courts are the place where most people in South Africa encounter the justice system. These courts deal with a majority of the country’s criminal and civil cases, but can only apply the law and not develop the law. Matters in the magistrate’s court can be sent on appeal to the high court and thereafter to the supreme court of appeal and finally the constitutional court.

Striking a balance

This is not to say that men should not be able to use the Protection from Harassment Act. This legislation is intended to provide relief to anyone who has faced harassment, regardless of their gender. Men accused of rape are not barred from applying for protection orders if they face harassment, and nor should they be.

However, it is crucial that courts approach these cases with a full understanding of the purpose of the act and the context in which these cases are being brought.

It is important to strike a balance in these matters. On the one hand, the interpretation of “harassment” must be flexible enough to allow anyone who has been the target of this harm to find relief under the act. On the other hand, courts must avoid the exploitation and appropriation of the legislation by men to threaten and silence their accusers.

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Undressing for redress: the significance of Nigerian women’s naked protests

The answer to this lies in a proper analysis of what is meant by “harassment” in the act.

There is little guidance in the legislation itself. Nevertheless, the question came before the Gauteng high court in 2023 in LW v KCA. The court held that identifying someone as the perpetrator of gender-based violence was not in and of itself harassment. It ruled that:

If any provision of the {Protection from Harassment Act} can bear more than one constitutionally compliant interpretation, that which better allows victims to speak out is to be preferred.

In other words, if a judge is deciding between two different interpretations of the act, they should choose the interpretation that promotes victims’ rights to freedom of expression. In deciding whether some act constitutes harassment, they should favour the interpretation which allows victims to speak out about their experiences.

The importance of this finding cannot be overstated. It creates a fundamental shift in the law not only around the act, but also in respect of all cases involving the public naming of perpetrators of gender-based violence.

In the judgment, the high court provides a road map for dealing with applications for protection orders against women who publicly name their perpetrators. The court:

underscored the importance of taking a balanced and reasoned approach to a situation where men use the Protection from Harassment Act to silence those who accuse them of rape
found that it is not enough to ask whether the conduct constitutes harassment; one must also ask whether the conduct was reasonable in the context of gender-based violence in South Africa
made it clear that the most constitutionally compliant interpretation of the act is the one which allows victims to speak about their experiences.

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Importantly, this finding by the high court has set a precedent which all magistrates and high court judges must take into consideration when hearing matters involving harassment. This matter has not been appealed to a higher court. Läs mer…

Urban parks in Kumasi, the capital city of Ghana’s Ashanti region, are fast disappearing or in decline. Kumasi was designed 60 years ago as a “garden city”, with green belts, parks and urban green spaces. These have been encroached on by developments and are in a poor condition.

Like other cities in Ghana, Kumasi has been growing. According to the latest population data from Ghana’s Statistical Service, the population of Kumasi in 1950 and 2024 was 99,479 and 3,903,480 respectively. The city’s current annual population growth rate is 3.59%.
This growth is a challenge for city authorities.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that in Ghana, political authorities and traditional leadership exist together. It’s the capital of the Ashanti Region and the capital of the ancient Ashanti Kingdom. Most of the land is owned by the traditional authority. This makes it difficult sometimes for city authorities to enforce planning regulations.

We are urban planners who have conducted research on environmental planning, urban informality and inclusive city development. We studied the extent to which areas demarcated as urban parks in the Kumasi Metropolis have been rezoned, and why there’s been encroachment into urban parks.

Our study showed that 88% of the 16 parks studied in the Kumasi Metropolis had either been rezoned or encroached upon by other land uses. This was done in an unplanned way. Zoning regulations have not been enforced and urban sprawl has not been controlled. Part of the reason is that land scarcity drives up its value and customary authorities have an incentive to allow other uses. As a result, the city has lost green spaces that are important for their environmental, traditional and recreational functions.

Decline of urban parks in Kumasi Metropolis

To understand why Kumasi has been losing its green spaces, our study looked at 16 parks across six communities within the Kumasi Metropolis.

The World Health Organization recommends there should be 9m² of green space per city dweller. We calculated that Kumasi currently has only 0.17m² of green space per city dweller.

We also noted significant changes in land zoned for parks. This was mainly due to the politics of land ownership and administration. Other social factors played a part too. The results of the research showed that out of the 16 existing parks studied, 14 (88%) had been rezoned to residential or commercial use or encroached upon by other uses.

The rezoning of parks was gradual, unapproved by local planning authorities, and unplanned. Existing land tenure arrangements and laxity in the enforcement of laws are some of the barriers affecting park development and management in the city.

An official of the city’s Physical Planning Department indicated that places zoned as parks were supposed to be owned, controlled, managed and protected by the state. But this was not the case, because of the complex land tenure arrangement of the city, where most land is customarily owned.

Though Ghana’s land tenure system recognises customary ownership, the determination of land use remains the responsibility of local planning authorities. Land sold for physical developments must conform to an approved scheme prepared by the Physical Planning Department. In most cases, the parks rezoned by the customary owners were in contravention with spatial planning laws (such as the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act, 2016).

The representative of the planning department noted that even though it prepared layouts that made provision for parks and open spaces, it was often helpless when it came to enforcement and other land use regulations. We were told that information about the land ownership and transfer process between government agencies and customary landowners was not made available to the department.

Due to poor coordination and increased demand for land for development, about 88% of land demarcated for park development across the study communities had been leased or sold to private developers by the customary landowners.

Our study also revealed a lack of funding for parks development and management. All the agency officials confirmed that parks were planned for but the funds to support their development and management were inadequate. They explained that property values rose as a result of urban development, leading to intense competition among various land uses. We were told that landowners were willing to sell any land available in their community at a higher value without considering its use in the community.

Bringing back the green

The once green city of Kumasi has lost much of its foliage. We suggest that this decline can and should be stopped.

City authorities can incorporate cultural elements that highlight the identity of neighbourhoods to promote ownership and a sense of place in the design of parks. Local planning institutions, custodians of land and residents should collaborate so that plans meet everyone’s needs.

Traditional authorities, together with relevant city authorities, should consciously ensure that parks are developed, protected, managed and sustained. Laws and regulations which guide park use and protection should be enforced strictly.

Finally, parks and green spaces can only survive if there is sustainable funding. City authorities could consider green taxation and charges. For example, they can fine residents whose activities threaten the environment, and use the money to fund parks and green spaces. A percentage of property tax can be dedicated to the protection and development of green spaces in the city. Läs mer…