A Note from the Editorial Desk

In an era of information overload, one of the most important things we can do is help you spend your reading time well. This guide is not a news summary — it is a curated framework for anyone who wants to understand the deeper forces at work in the world right now. We've organised it around five essential questions that we believe define the current moment.

1. How Did We Get Here? (Historical Foundations)

Informed engagement with the present requires a grounding in the recent past. We recommend prioritising:

  • The post-Cold War order — Understanding the assumptions that shaped the 1990s and 2000s is essential for understanding why so many of those assumptions are now contested. The period from 1991 to roughly 2008 established frameworks in trade, security, and international law that are now under significant strain.
  • The rise of China — The single most consequential geopolitical shift of the past three decades. Any serious reading programme should include serious engagement with China's economic transformation, its evolving political system, and its increasingly assertive foreign policy.
  • The fracturing of liberal democratic consensus — The rise of populist and nationalist movements across Europe, the Americas, and beyond is not a series of isolated events. It reflects structural pressures in democratic societies that demand analysis, not dismissal.

2. What Are the Key Fault Lines? (Current Tensions)

Several overlapping tensions are defining global affairs in 2025:

  1. US–China strategic competition across technology, trade, and military domains — particularly in the Indo-Pacific.
  2. The war in Ukraine and its implications for European security, NATO's credibility, and the future of the rules-based international order.
  3. The Middle East's shifting alignments, including evolving relationships between Gulf states, Iran, and major external powers.
  4. The Global South's growing assertiveness — a diverse coalition of nations pushing for reform of international institutions and rejecting the framing of great power competition as a binary choice.

3. What Technologies Are Reshaping Power? (Emerging Forces)

Technology is not a neutral backdrop to geopolitics — it is an active driver of it. Essential areas to follow:

  • Artificial intelligence and the competition for AI supremacy between the US and China
  • Semiconductor supply chains and why Taiwan's chip industry sits at the centre of global strategic competition
  • Cyber warfare and the blurring of peacetime and wartime operations in digital domains
  • The energy transition and how the shift away from fossil fuels is redistributing geopolitical power

4. What Human Stories Are Being Underreported?

International affairs coverage tends to cluster around the same handful of major powers and crises. We consistently urge readers to seek out reporting on:

  • The Sahel region of Africa, where state collapse, jihadist insurgencies, and great power competition intersect with humanitarian catastrophe
  • Latin America's democratic stress tests, from institutional erosion in established democracies to authoritarian consolidation in others
  • Climate-vulnerable small island states, whose existential concerns receive disproportionately little coverage relative to their stakes

5. How Should We Read the News? (Media Literacy)

Finally, we recommend developing a critical practice around news consumption itself. Ask of every source: Who funds this? What is the editorial line? What perspectives are systematically absent from this coverage? Cross-reference across outlets with different perspectives and different national vantage points.

The goal is not to arrive at perfect certainty — that is not available to anyone — but to hold your understanding with appropriate humility, always open to revision in light of new evidence.

Coming in Future Briefings

In coming issues, we will publish focused reading guides on specific regions and topics, beginning with the Indo-Pacific and the economics of the energy transition. If there are topics you'd like us to cover, reach out through our contact page.