• President’s Take: Europe Contends with a United States Unbound
• Colombia’s Polls Mark a Forking Path in Peace Talks
• Managing Georgia’s Turn against the EU
• Weighing the Cost of Libya’s Smuggling Racket
• Recalibrating Diplomacy with Myanmar after Election Seals Military Control
• Halting South Sudan’s Slide into War

What a year it has already been. The first three months of 2026 have seen a decade’s worth of shocks to the European security and global orders. With U.S. President Donald J. Trump pivoting away from scepticism about foreign entanglements toward the open embrace of armed intervention, Washington’s European allies must confront the consequences of U.S. military adventures undertaken without their input, by a White House indifferent to their interests and largely dismissive of international norms.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran is at the core of the chaos Europeans are facing right now, but this crisis arrived in steps. Indeed, the beginning of 2026 has offered more or less a textbook example of what a slippery slope looks like when it comes to degradation of the international rule of law, with much of the world scurrying to react to an ever more emboldened Trump administration. 

It started on 3 January with a U.S. raid to remove Venezuela’s head of state, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him to the United States to face criminal charges in a New York court. Most European governments were uncomfortable with the Trump administration’s dubious legal justification for the action, but Maduro was sufficiently disliked, Trump’s potential retaliation against critics sufficiently feared and the U.S. operation sufficiently surgical (it left the government in place under Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president), that most of them offered only faint protest. 

Instead of rewarding their forbearance, Trump pivoted almost immediately from Caracas to Nuuk – voicing annexationist ambitions for Greenland that Denmark (which has sovereignty over the island) took seriously enough that it began putting in place elements of an armed defence even as it tried to talk Washington down. EU member states fended off U.S. pressure by rallying around Denmark and Greenland, meeting its threats with counter-threats of economic retaliation and rattling the markets, which in turn unnerved Trump. But the episode only widened the transatlantic rift, making clear to U.S. allies across Europe that relations with Washington were doomed (at least for the remainder of the Trump presidency) to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Then, on 28 February, the slide got steeper. The U.S. and Israel launched a coordinated attack on Iran, killing the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, eliminating other senior regime officials, degrading its defence industry and taking out much of its military capability. The U.S.-Israeli campaign was not exactly a surprise to anyone – President Trump had been intimating that he might attack Iran ever since the regime brutally cracked down on popular protests that shook the country over the winter, and the U.S. had spent weeks amassing a huge naval force in the region. Yet the onset of hostilities still jolted European leaders: from their perspective, the U.S. had rushed into a war with enormous implications for their security and prosperity without any consultation with NATO allies, a clear sense of objectives or a discernible exit strategy – much less a meaningful effort to reconcile its actions with international law regulating the use of force.  

It has been rough going. Perhaps Trump expected a reprise of the June 2025 twelve-day war, in which the U.S. played a brief but substantial role before declaring the conflict over a few days later, or the lightning-fast Maduro raid. But Iran had broadcast that, as Trump was talking of regime change, this time would be different – warning that renewed attacks would result in a “regional war”, spreading out the pain to hurt U.S. Gulf Arab partners and, by extension, the global economy. As the pain sharpened, Trump has on several occasions suggested that he would like to cut a deal with a regime insider, as he did with Rodríguez, and bring an end to the war. But since the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the campaign’s opening act, the regime has appeared more inclined to close ranks than to offer concessions.

Thus, more than three weeks into a war whose footprint continues to grow, Trump finds himself hopscotching between escalatory and de-escalatory postures – making declarations of near victory that focus on the success of the campaign (or “excursion” as he has called it) at degrading Iranian capabilities; importuning NATO allies and others to help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz; lambasting them as “cowards” when they refuse; and threatening to attack power plants and perhaps even put U.S. boots on the ground to commandeer Kharg Island (a key node in Iran’s energy export apparatus) in endeavours to secure the Strait or Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. In the latest twist, Trump has been touting the possibility of diplomacy with Tehran, postponing the threatened strike against Iranian energy infrastructure, even as the U.S. dispatches additional forces to the region. On 24 March, he asserted that Tehran had given the U.S. a “gift” that was “oil and gas related”. Details, however, remain unclear as the Islamic Republic maintains the U.S. and Israeli-linked vessels may not traverse the Strait of Hormuz, and overall traffic through the chokepoint remains depressed.

Meanwhile, the EU, member states and other NATO allies have been left scrambling to protect their interests however they can. At the most basic level, they have had to find ways to safeguard tens of thousands of stranded European nationals and defend their troops and assets – some of which have come under Iranian attack both in the Middle East and farther afield. But that is just for starters.

There are economic worries. High energy prices caused by the war and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz (through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil is shipped in normal times) are hitting fragile European economies hard. Several European states got a substantial portion of their liquid natural gas from Qatar in 2025 – in Italy’s case, it was 30 per cent – and Qatari authorities are now declaring that it will take up to five years to repair the damage done to its gas facilities during the war. EU member states tend to be more exposed to these price hikes than the EU’s top economic competitors. The U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum. China has significant reserves, and it appears to have negotiated the safe passage of some ships through the strait with Tehran. 

Then there is the humanitarian angle. Beyond concern for the desperate straits of civilians caught in the crossfire, many European leaders fear a greater displacement crisis sending high numbers of migrants and refugees toward their countries’ borders. They worry that, as happened during the Syrian refugee crisis in the 2010s, large numbers of displaced seeking safety in Europe could roil domestic politics, particularly given the gains by the anti-immigration far right in several EU member states.

Security is also a major concern – first and foremost the new war’s implications for Ukraine, which has just entered its fifth year of fighting off Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion. Most EU leaders fear that high energy prices, as well as a U.S. decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil in an effort to stabilise energy markets, will help Moscow finance its Ukraine war and ease the effects of European economic pressure on Russia. The new Middle East war also appears to be absorbing key military supplies (particularly Patriot air defence interceptors) that could otherwise have been purchased by NATO allies and provided to Kyiv, whose stocks risk running perilously low in the months to come. Meanwhile, U.S.-brokered talks between Moscow and Kyiv – already stuck before the U.S.-Israeli campaign began – are seeming even more so as Washington fixes it gaze on the Middle East. Beyond Ukraine, Europeans worry too about the threat to regional and global stability that an aggrieved Iranian regime might pose in the conflict’s aftermath. 

Finally, there are issues of principle. At the very core of the post-World War II international legal order, which the EU has vocally championed, is a prohibition – enshrined, among other places in the UN Charter, – of waging non-defensive war. Though never perfectly observed, the principle has helped define international relations by narrowing the range of options that states normally weigh when considering how to pursue their interests, as well as by creating political and reputational costs for aggressors. EU member states have traditionally seen their interests as deeply intertwined with this norm. But, at least in the opening days of the Middle East conflict, most of them (with the notable exception of Spain) were reluctant to censure Washington for attacking Iran without a serious effort to offer a legal justification. One can imagine that this reticence (mirrored widely around the world) reflected anger at the repressive regime in Tehran or anxiety that criticism of a prickly White House could jeopardise the U.S. security umbrella or cause Trump to wind down U.S. arms sales and intelligence support for Ukraine. Yet deference to norm-busting has a cost. State practice shapes international law, and the failure of states to stand by its principles when under pressure risks their further erosion, which can only make the world a more dangerous place. 

As the EU and member states try to manage their exposure to the new Middle East war and begin work on a new security strategy, as announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to help them get through future crises, EU governments are in an undeniably tough spot. No playbook exists for how to mitigate the costs of a war started by a revisionist superpower that is also Europe’s most important security partner. For the most part, it is an exercise in needle threading – trying to keep NATO out of the war, while trying to keep the U.S. in NATO; providing support to Gulf partners under Iranian attack; and looking for ways to help bring the war to an end sooner than appears likely at present.

How to do that in practice? For the most part, Washington’s European allies, after struggling to get their bearings, appear to be on the right path. They have deflected President Trump’s pressure to escalate the conflict by joining it, telling the White House that NATO has no role in reopening the Strait of Hormuz because it is a defensive alliance. (Some, like France, have entertained the prospect of participating in a post-conflict naval coalition.) That said, as a practical matter, bilateral basing and other arrangements, and a desire to avoid a NATO rupture, mean that the U.S. has reportedly used bases on European allies’ territory for a range of operations relating to the war, with Spain an outlier in wholly denying access. 

As for diplomacy, it seems unlikely that either the U.S., Israel or Iran would welcome European mediation when it comes to ending the conflict, but there may be space for indirect efforts to nudge potential peacemakers toward brokering an immediate mutual ceasefire – which, as Crisis Group has argued elsewhere, is the best among messy options for ending hostilities and setting the stage for diplomacy to pursue a more durable peace. The most promising candidates for this job are likely the same Middle Eastern and other Muslim leaders who persuaded Trump to strong-arm Israel into a Gaza ceasefire in September 2025. Under fire from Iran, some of the Gulf Arab capitals will likely resist entreaties to try to end the war in a way that would not leave Iranian arsenals further degraded, but they should surely also consider the risks of continuing the escalatory spiral. European states with strong regional channels might explore whether the Gulf capitals could support or at least not oppose Pakistan’s effort to broker talks (as some already appear to be doing) – or throw their weight behind any other viable format that might emerge. Other countries with influence over Tehran, which seems increasingly committed to fighting an attritional war, will need to engage in a reciprocal effort. 

While EU member states may also struggle to influence the course of the subsidiary conflict in Lebanon, particularly while Hizbollah is firing on Israel and rejecting calls for restraint, they should at least press Israel on how the war is conducted, focusing in particular on the need to minimise the impact of its military campaign on ordinary Lebanese and desist from hitting Lebanese public infrastructure. The EU and member states should also be as generous as possible with the provision of humanitarian assistance in support of those displaced by the fighting – a priority throughout the region, as Brussels recognises. The bloc has already pledged over €450 million in additional humanitarian contributions for Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan. 

The EU and member states can also do more to stand up for international law, in part by registering more clearly when they believe there have been significant violations – including by allies. Doing so will not change the fact that Russia, China and the U.S., all permanent members of the UN Security Council, are firmly in the revisionist camp, or mitigate the need for U.S. European allies to develop new military capacity to deter the threats they are facing from Moscow in the east and (stunning as it is to say) potentially Washington in the west, even as they seek ways to continue to support Ukraine in what will surely be difficult months to come. But it could help preserve a legal order that, when it is working, narrows the options that responsible states consider for advancing their interests and maintains costs for scofflaws. In the same vein, European voices are still far too quiet in their condemnation of Israel’s unlawful de facto annexation of the West Bank, its obstruction of efforts to reach a durable peace in Gaza and its treatment of Palestinians overall. Using the leverage they enjoy to press Israel on these issues would help show that European capitals will hold all countries, including a longstanding security partner, to the same standards when it comes to international law. 

Finally, the EU and its member states should be attentive to hotspots that might otherwise go ignored as the eyes of the world are on the Middle East. This Watch List thus highlights select flashpoints and regions (as always a non-comprehensive list) where the EU can make a difference and advance its interests. These range from situations in the EU’s immediate neighbourhood (Libya and Georgia) to others farther afield (South Sudan, Myanmar and Colombia). What links them for present purposes is that they are all places where the EU and its member states have tools at their disposal that can help mitigate the risk of conflict and promote stability in an increasingly unstable world. 

Colombians will vote for a new president on 31 May (a run-off will take place on 21 June if no one gains more than 50 per cent), following a campaign that has showcased starkly different visions for how to tackle the country’s burgeoning internal conflict. For the last four years, left-leaning President Gustavo Petro has sought dialogue with all remaining armed and criminal groups – a policy known as “total peace”. Iván Cepeda, the candidate on the left with the greatest chance of succeeding Petro, promises to double down on negotiations, despite the mixed results of the talks to date. But with insecurity regularly polling among the top voter concerns, nearly every other candidate affirms that they will end dialogue with armed outfits and instead endeavour to attack them with stronger military force. As the first round of voting approaches, these differences are likely to be aggravated by U.S. scrutiny of Colombia and pressure to align with Washington’s hardline counter-narcotics agenda, which could arguably play to the advantage of either left or right.

Whoever triumphs in the presidential contest would be wise to adopt a combination of tools in trying to quell Colombia’s increasingly fragmented and criminalised conflict. Force and diplomacy should both have a place, along with a more decisive return to the roadmap laid out in the 2016 peace agreement that saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once the country’s largest insurgency, lay down its arms. That accord included steps to address the inequality and state weakness that criminal groups prey upon to recruit, control territory and extract illicit rents. The European Union and its member states have supported the 2016 accord for a decade and had a front seat in several recent negotiations, enabling them to provide nuanced advice on security policy, while investing in rural infrastructure and development and backing long-term reforms.

The electoral cycle began with the assassination of right-wing presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe in broad daylight during a June 2025 campaign stop in a Bogotá neighbourhood. The attack raised the spectre of a return to the sort of high-profile political violence that once afflicted Colombia. Since then, authorities have warned of plans to target other politicians. As of early February, the Mission for Election Observation, a Colombian NGO, had recorded 415 cases of political violence, including an attack that killed a senator’s bodyguards near the border with Venezuela and the separate kidnappings of three politicians – a senator, a mayor and a legislative candidate – all in the south-western department of Cauca. Voting in the 8 March congressional and primary elections nevertheless went smoothly, with only a couple of isolated incidents. 

Violence is a concern that extends far beyond electoral politics. Armed groups have ballooned in size, with an estimated 27,000 fighters throughout Colombia at the end of 2025, up roughly 5,000 from a year before. Many of these new recruits are children, lured into joining by false promises of wealth or protection. Uribe’s assassin was fifteen years old at the time and had been paid by a network of criminal groups to pull the trigger. Civilians are feeling the impact: reports of kidnapping and extortion doubled between 2024 and 2025. While homicide rates saw only a slight increase nationwide, murders in conflict-affected areas rose markedly; in Cali, the third-largest city, murders were up 14 per cent. Cases of sexual violence continue to rise year on year.

Candidates are pitching markedly different approaches to voters as to how they might curb this violence. The right has blamed Petro’s peace talks for rising crime and has called for mano dura, or a heavy-handed crackdown. Paloma Valencia, the candidate of ex-president Álvaro Uribe’s Democratic Centre party, has repeatedly praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s counter-narcotics policy and called for closer alignment with Washington. Hard-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, a newcomer to national politics, has promised to carry out airstrikes on the rebel National Liberation Army (ELN), with U.S. support, from the moment he takes office. Several candidates have drawn inspiration from El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whose mass and often indiscriminate arrests have reduced lethal violence, albeit at the cost of violating due process and creating a huge prison population. Even centrist candidates such as former Medellín mayor Sergio Fajardo insist that the military must move onto the front foot.

These proposals contrast sharply with the approach adopted by Cepeda, of the left coalition Historic Pact, who wants to persevere with Petro’s attempts at dialogue and is leading the polls. The Historic Pact has already clinched the largest share of seats in the legislature, giving it a firm foothold from which to shape policymaking in the next administration. While critical at times of the outgoing government’s management of “total peace”, Cepeda remains staunchly committed to negotiations as the primary means of winding down conflict. He has opposed Petro’s limited military escalations, including restarting airstrikes on certain armed factions in mid-2025. 

The scale of political polarisation has paved the way for Petro to question the credibility of the voting system, with the president repeatedly launching attacks on its reliability. Despite rebuttals from electoral authorities and civil society groups, Petro’s comments suggest that he or his supporters may seek to cast doubt on the outcome if the results go against them. 

Stark differences on security are the culmination of a quarter-century of experimentation in how to tackle armed conflict. Government strategies have fluctuated between more and less hardline approaches, with the militarised policy known as “democratic security” taken during the two-term presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) at one pole and Petro’s negotiation-focused “total peace” at the other. Neither of these extremes has been able to staunch the bloodshed, though each has notched successes. The most pronounced reduction in Colombia’s conflict, however, involved a combination of military pressure and negotiation: the first ended the tactical stalemate between the former FARC and the Colombian state, while the second led to the 2016 accord that resulted in a drastic drop in homicides, displacement, recruitment and kidnappings.

Those achievements began to unravel well before Petro took office in 2022. When the former FARC guerrillas withdrew from their rural strongholds a decade ago, they left behind lucrative assets, including drug trafficking routes, illicit crops, illegal mines and land for farming or ranching. Other armed groups, such as the ELN and the organisation known today as the Gaitanista Army of Colombia (EGC), fixed their gaze on those resources and moved quickly to claim them. New criminal groups emerged, too, notably a menagerie of so-called FARC dissident factions, led mostly by former mid-level commanders but staffed with new recruits. 

Petro was voted into office with a clear-eyed diagnosis of this challenge. State institutions and services had been slow to fill the areas vacated by the FARC in 2016. Instead, demobilising just one group had created new opportunities for others to gain strength. At first, Petro was sceptical of the merits of military firepower. As a senator, he had been a fierce critic of Uribe’s reliance on the armed forces, which led to serious violations of human rights and some of the darkest episodes of the war, as right-wing paramilitaries fought insurgents in coordination with local battalions and regional elites. Petro also pointed to former President Iván Duque’s inability to stem violence with a reassertion of military force from 2018 to 2022. 

A demobilised guerrilla fighter himself, Petro hoped that his administration’s leftist agenda would inspire confidence and quick deal-making with insurgents and criminals. He moved swiftly to sit down with myriad groups. To pave the way for dialogue, Petro’s government asked armed groups not to kill, torture or “disappear” people in exchange for a reduction in military pressure up to and including a ceasefire. At the “total peace” approach’s peak in 2023-2024, Bogotá was engaged in well over a dozen sets of peace talks. Many of his supporters – including residents of the most conflict-affected areas – expressed optimism. Even some military officers whispered relief that the government would involve other state institutions in resolving conflict, rather than relying solely on front-line combat to push back armed groups. 

Four years later, however, it is plain that “total peace” has come at a high cost. Armed and criminal groups did not come to the table in good faith. Instead, they took advantage of the breathing room offered by pauses in military operations to grow stronger. Combat among armed outfits also rose markedly; less concerned about state military pressure, groups fought turf wars with one another to carve out fiefdoms.

Over its last year in office, the Petro administration has had to recalibrate. Bogotá has sharply increased offensive operations and even revived controversial tactics such as airstrikes on armed and criminal groups. As one senior military officer described it, “we are only just clawing back momentum”. 

Even so, security improvements have remained elusive. The armed and criminal groups that dominate certain areas of Colombia today are no longer hierarchical rebel movements with political ambitions. Instead, they are factionalised local outfits seeking to dominate specific zones and assert control of illegal rents. Combatants do not always wear uniforms and can easily hide among civilians when state forces appear. Built over decades to combat large insurgencies such as the former FARC, the military now finds itself struggling to adapt to counter groups with diffuse leadership structures and profit-making goals. The tactics that pushed the former FARC to lose ground, such as bombardments, targeted killings and high-level captures, no longer have the same effect.

Whoever assumes the presidency in August will need to take immediate decisions regarding Colombia’s conflict. Several sets of peace talks are still under way, including with the largest armed organisation in the country, the EGC. Ending those discussions would almost certainly cause a short-term spike in violence. Keeping talks open, however, will require spending significant political capital to assemble majority support in Congress: without a new law, the legal framework permitting dialogue will expire in November. 

Nor is deploying an all-out military strategy likely to yield the results that some candidates promise. At the end of Petro’s administration, and after U.S. pressure to clamp down on drug trafficking, the military is already running on all cylinders. But ageing equipment, lower recruiting numbers, stagnant budgets and an overstretched officer corps mean there is little room to ratchet up pressure. 

Candidates are not the only ones shaping the debate about how to proceed. Colombia’s election is under close scrutiny from the U.S. The White House, which has not hidden its dislike of “total peace”, has already pressed the Petro government to make major policy concessions, including promises to capture and extradite key armed group leaders, several of whom are involved in talks. Bogotá will also launch a drone-based fumigation program targeting coca crops, the raw material used to produce cocaine. The U.S. has made it clear that it will flex its muscles to guarantee that whoever takes office will toe Trump’s line. 

Colombia’s new president will need to rethink how best to allocate limited resources to deal with a fragmented criminal landscape. Bogotá could carve out a narrow path forward that channels U.S. counter-narcotics funding into supporting its long-term goal of gaining ground against armed outfits. Better intelligence, operations focused on territorial control rather than individual targets, judicial investigations and asset seizures could all help put the squeeze on armed and criminal groups. But Colombia’s history has repeatedly shown that the military alone cannot end the war. Negotiations are an essential method of unwinding conflict, so long as talks have a clear roadmap and are paired with pressure.

The European Union and its member states have invested heavily in peace in Colombia, and their voices have proven critical in ensuring that the 2016 accord remains on successive governments’ agendas. The EU also monitored Colombia’s congressional and presidential elections in 2022, and it has deployed an election observation mission again in 2026. European diplomatic backing, including support for civil society groups, will be more important than ever as the U.S. pulls back from providing foreign aid. EU investment mechanisms such as Global Gateway can also provide critical public-private financing for long-term development projects. 

The EU and a number of member states have also served as guarantors or observers in “total peace” dialogues. This role has given the EU’s delegation, as well as certain embassies, special insight into both the progress made at the negotiating tables and the missteps that have proven costly during Petro’s term. European allies have vital institutional knowledge that can be deployed to support future dialogue and avoid past pitfalls. 

European countries also have strong domestic reasons to cultivate good relations with Colombia. The last decade has seen a rapid increase in cocaine shipments moving from South America to European shores. Port cities where the drugs arrive have begun to experience some of the same security threats that have long affected Latin America: criminal penetration of state institutions, coercion of port workers, recruitment of young people and violence. 

In response, the EU and its member states are dedicating more resources to fighting organised crime, with several European countries bolstering their cooperation with Colombian security and intelligence agencies. Under the aegis of its latest drug strategy, which lists international coordination and partnership as one of five pillars, the EU has opened negotiations to strengthen investigations and extradition cooperation between Colombian judicial authorities and Eurojust, which manages internal European legal cooperation. The EU has funded programs such as the Europe Latin America Programme of Assistance against Transnational Organised Crime (El PAcCTO) and the Cooperation Program between Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union on Drug Policy (COPOLAD) to boost the capabilities of Latin American state and law enforcement agencies in the fight against crime. Colombia, for its part, is in a strong position to offer its European partners a wealth of experience in how to limit the violent fallout of criminal trafficking. 

The EU and its member states should:

• Serve as a trusted, credible voice in election monitoring. The EU’s election observation mission offers a critical backstop for Colombia’s ballot. As they did in the legislative vote, the mission can communicate with electoral authorities and, if needed, the public, to reassure voters that the electoral system is robust. The mission should continue to support efforts by state agencies to promote a peaceful campaign and handover of power. This task will be particularly important if the U.S. or others seek to influence the vote’s outcome – or if any party questions the results.

• Continue to push for fulfilling the terms of the 2016 peace agreement, which outlines steps to chip away at the inequalities that fuel cycles of violence and keep groups such as women and ethnic minorities at a political and economic disadvantage, as well as to bring better services to rural areas. Inclusive rural development is a central component of the accord, and the EU’s Global Gateway initiative could seek to fund opportunities in infrastructure and rural services, as it has already done supporting rural mobile connectivity and renewable energy.

• Diplomatic efforts, meanwhile, should also seek to safeguard the principle of negotiations with armed and criminal groups as a way to reduce violence and end conflict. The EU can continue to advocate for talks focusing on issues such as an end to child recruitment and protection of social leaders. The EU and its member states should continue to make the case in their capitals that their support for civil society is critical, particularly now that the demise of USAID has taken away a lifeline for these groups. 

• Boost judicial and security cooperation. EU programs like El PAcCTO 2.0 and COPOLAD provide critical technical assistance to Colombian security forces and judicial authorities on best practices for unravelling organised criminal networks, reducing prison violence and increasing intelligence cooperation. A forthcoming agreement between Eurojust and the Colombian penal system should also improve coordination on investigations and extraditions. Now is a critical moment for Europe to invest in Colombia’s security, as the country looks to lessen its historical dependence upon the U.S. 

The entry on Colombia is also available in Spanish.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Georgia has shifted its foreign policy dramatically. Soon after applying for and receiving European Union candidate status in 2023, its relations with the bloc ruptured, as did its ties with the U.S.; it sought out new partners in Asia and the Middle East; and it struck an informal accommodation with Russia to minimise any blowback from the Ukraine war. Georgia’s foreign policy turn has been accompanied by a steadily intensifying domestic crackdown. The government has heaped pressure on U.S.- and European-funded NGOs and the strongly pro-Western political opposition, accusing them of being tools in the hands of forces in the West who want to use Georgia as a weapon against Russia, heedless of the consequences to Georgians themselves. The ruling party, called Georgian Dream, argues that its foreign and domestic policies are part of a single strategy aimed at ensuring the survival of the state. Critics argue that the party is instead interested only in consolidating its grip on power.

Georgia’s foreign policy shifts have direct implications for the country’s relationship with the EU and for European security as a whole. Even as prospects for Georgia’s integration into the bloc rapidly recede, it remains in the EU’s interest to maintain working relations with a country on Europe’s doorstep, at a time when the South Caucasus is undergoing a sweeping geopolitical reconfiguration. The EU should look to scale down tensions with Tbilisi and cooperate in a pragmatic spirit, irrespective of the EU accession process.

Four years on, the war in Ukraine continues to dominate the strategic thinking of Georgia’s government. News of Russia’s initial onslaught jolted the country, which suffered its own Russian invasion in 2008, and caused the government to fear that Georgia might be the next target. 

Both the U.S. and Europe immediately sought to enlist Georgia in resistance to the Russian invasion. The U.S. sent private requests for Georgia to aid Ukraine in some way – by supplying weapons from its stockpiles to Kyiv (which Washington would then replace) or by imposing bilateral sanctions on Russia. Brussels also repeatedly urged Georgian Dream to align its foreign policy with that of the EU. Georgia, however, perceived these entreaties to help Ukraine as an effort to exploit the country’s pro-Western orientation, at a potentially ruinous cost to Georgians themselves. The U.S. may not have thought its requests were provocative, since they were making similar appeals to partners around the world, but officials on both sides now say Washington failed to take Georgia’s unique sensitivities into account.

Georgian Dream, which has moved sharply to the right during its time in power, has depicted these entreaties as the work of a shadowy “global war party” based in Western capitals, which wishes to turn Georgia into a “second front” in a conflict with Russia. The government turned down the requests, instead seeking to avoid antagonising Russia while opening the door to deeper economic ties with its neighbour, re-establishing direct flights to Russian cities and increasing oil and gas purchases.

Georgian leaders’ caution was rooted primarily in their perception that Russia would likely have the upper hand in the war in Ukraine, in contrast to more optimistic projections from Washington and European capitals. Georgian officials believe their approach has since been vindicated by events on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine and in negotiations between the U.S. and Russia, which they believe will culminate in defeat for Kyiv. An end to the war on Russia’s terms would dramatically reshape the region, potentially enabling a victorious, battle-hardened Russia to impose a new sphere of influence, which by dint of history and geography would most likely include Georgia. At the same time, some in Tbilisi believe that EU leaders will eventually be discredited by what they expect to be their ineffectual backing of Ukraine. They foresee that the balance of power within Europe will shift to conservative, sovereignist forces that will be more sympathetic to Georgian Dream. 

While they may have misread the heights of Georgian paranoia in the initial post-2022 period, U.S. and European policies toward Georgia were on the whole measured and sympathetic to its vulnerable position. But Georgia’s attempts to stay out of the Ukraine war drew acerbic criticism of Tbilisi in a number of European Parliament resolutions as well as in isolated comments by U.S. and EU lawmakers. While EU officials have insisted these remarks do not reflect official EU policy, both sides of Georgia’s political divide have seized upon them as representative of the EU stance toward Tbilisi, driving a series of crises. For the opposition and critical NGOs and media, Europeans’ disapproval of the direction Georgia has taken fuels hopes of outside intervention against the ruling party. For Georgian Dream, on the other hand, it has spurred fearmongering about a supposedly organised push to drag Georgia into war. Leaders of the party, above all its founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, have long resented what they perceive to be support in Western capitals for opposition politicians, who are political descendants of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, and believe these forces have goaded the U.S. and EU into more aggressive positions against Georgian Dream by portraying the party as “pro-Russia”. 

Claiming that its government is under attack by a campaign coordinated by Western powers, the Georgian Dream government passed laws restricting funding of NGOs and media in the country, (both civil society and media are heavily dependent on grants from the U.S. and Europe). It has jailed several leaders of opposition parties, mostly for refusal to testify in 2025 parliamentary hearings aimed at blaming the former government for provoking the 2008 war with Russia. It has also threatened to ban opposition parties outright, though it has yet to follow through. 

EU officials, who felt they had already overextended themselves in granting Georgia EU candidate status, have responded with shock and a sense of betrayal. Whereas the EU membership process requires deep political reforms aimed at reinforcing democracy and the rule of law, the new NGO legislation drew comparisons to “foreign agent” laws that Russia had adopted a decade earlier. That the government has launched a vitriolic campaign against the EU leadership in general – and certain ambassadors in Tbilisi in particular – has only made matters worse. The bloc suspended high-level contacts with Georgian officials and announced that Georgia’s candidacy had come to a de facto halt.

Parliamentary elections in October 2024 further heightened tensions. Ahead of the vote, European and U.S. officials made statements that, in effect, recommended to Georgian voters that they not re-elect Georgian Dream, breaking a long practice of declining to pick favourites in Georgian politics. EU officials also began mooting suspension of the visa-free regime that Georgian citizens enjoy with the EU. Georgian Dream eventually won the election by a sixteen-point margin. While observers assessed that there were more irregularities than in past elections, EU officials acknowledged that they could not prove that a cleaner election would have led to a different result. In any event, the opposition and critical NGOs urged European and U.S. policymakers not to recognise Georgian Dream as the legitimate government, citing violations of electoral rules. While European leaders did not publicly withdraw their recognition of the government, many maintained a deliberate ambiguity as to whether it was legitimate or not. That ambiguity was accentuated by the previous no-contact policy: every meeting with or apparent snub by a European or U.S. official became a hotly contested political issue in Georgia. 

Rhetoric aside, in practical terms Georgia’s foreign policy remains largely unchanged. Despite the scale of domestic acrimony over the issue, Georgia still has no official contact with Russia; the authorities say they cannot re-establish relations with Moscow until it ends what they call its “occupation” of the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Working-level cooperation between Georgian officials and their counterparts at the EU, NATO and the U.S. remains good, by all accounts, even if high-level contacts are suspended. Operations of the EU monitoring mission along the de facto boundaries of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (EUMM) continue unaffected. Lastly, while measures of Georgia’s alignment with EU foreign and security policy have declined (see chart), the dropoff has not been precipitous (alignment was never total, even when EU-Georgia relations were much stronger). Georgian officials themselves deny that they have made a fundamental shift: instead, they describe what they have done as an act of self-defence, involving short-term moves designed to help them survive a turbulent period. 

Even as Georgia’s leaders spar with EU leaders, they continue to seek practical cooperation with the bloc and its member states. Georgian leaders have watched as the Ukraine war spurred the EU into becoming a more dynamic geopolitical force and strengthening ties with less democratic neighbours such as Azerbaijan and Türkiye. Tbilisi believes that it, too, should be able to shape its ties with Brussels around shared interests rather than shared values. It wants these bonds to be centred on exploiting Georgia’s location to establish a “middle corridor” of trade and energy flows between Europe and Asia via Georgia and bypassing Russia. 

While those plans are certainly a priority for the EU, European officials believe that Georgian leaders are overplaying their hand and exaggerating their country’s geopolitical weight. Whatever Europe’s reliance on Georgia has been, it has been diminished by a U.S.-brokered agreement to create transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which, if realised, could provide an alternative route between Europe and Asia that bypasses Georgia. As it develops a Caucasus transit strategy, the EU has been conspicuously leaving Georgia out of the discussion.

While it seeks a relationship with Europe that is more geared to shared geopolitical interests, Georgia has also tried to strengthen its ties with other powers. China, which has its own interest in new transit routes to Europe, signed a strategic partnership agreement with Georgia in 2023. That said, the signature Chinese infrastructure project in Georgia, a deep-sea port at Anaklia on the Black Sea, is apparently stalled, raising questions about the extent of Beijing’s interest in Georgia as a transit node. Georgia is seeking new partners in the Middle East, too, though its ties there remain embryonic. 

Perhaps ironically, given how it blamed Washington for pushing it toward war in 2022, Georgia is now pinning its biggest hopes on the U.S. Brussels and Washington have coordinated their policies toward Georgia for years, and the U.S. has in fact levied the most serious punishments on the country: in the last weeks of President Joe Biden’s administration, Washington suspended its strategic partnership with Georgia and imposed sanctions on officials including Ivanishvili. (While some EU member states have also sanctioned Georgian officials, the bloc itself has not, hamstrung by Hungary’s veto.) 

Georgia now hopes to revive its ties with the U.S. on a new foundation. Georgian Dream leaders openly expressed their hopes that Donald Trump would win the 2024 election, believing that his inclination toward right-wing, socially conservative parties in Europe would benefit them. The U.S. under Trump has certainly desisted from putting pressure on Georgia; but it has not reversed the sanctions from the Biden administration. Nor has it sought a reset with Tbilisi. For the last year, Washington has simply ignored Georgia, once the centrepiece of U.S. policy in the South Caucasus. When Vice President JD Vance visited Armenia and Azerbaijan in February, he skipped Georgia, underscoring how far Tbilisi’s stock has fallen. Georgia has lost its once-close ties with the U.S. and the EU, and thus far it has not gained much in exchange. 

The Georgia conundrum has created a dilemma for EU leaders: whether to keep imposing punitive measures in an attempt to steer Georgia’s foreign and domestic policy back to the path toward membership, or to put membership on the back burner in favour of regional cooperation and broader geopolitical interests. EU member states are split. The dominant camp, largely representing northern member states and EU institutions themselves, takes a hardline approach. They hope that increased pressure will force Georgian Dream to return to a more EU-friendly track or enable a more compliant government to take power. The other camp, consisting mostly of southern member states, adopts a more pragmatic approach. These states tend to have closer bilateral ties with Georgia than do northern states: they often buy natural gas from Azerbaijan that transits through Georgia, they host large numbers of Georgian migrant workers and they want constructive ties with Tbilisi, any political differences notwithstanding. In the opinion of these governments, the current hardline EU approach damages European interests in the region. 

The cold shoulder given to Georgian leaders stands in stark contrast to the warm relations that EU officials have with neighbouring governments that have much worse records on democracy and human rights, like Azerbaijan and Türkiye, which also remains a candidate country even though its accession process is frozen. EU officials justify what seem to be different rules in two ways. One is that Georgian Dream itself has asked to be judged by higher standards in seeking EU membership and by continuing to tell voters that membership remains a realistic goal. The other is the perception, rooted in realpolitik, that Azerbaijan and Türkiye are much more important to Brussels: Azerbaijan for its role in supplying non-Russian energy to Europe, and Türkiye for cooperation on migration, Ukraine, Syria and several other critical issues. Unlike Georgian Dream, finally, Turkish and Azerbaijani leaders have not sought to intimidate European diplomats.

Yet even among the Europeans most critical of the Georgian authorities, there is recognition that isolation and pressure have not yielded the desired effects, and a sense that new ideas are needed to break the impasse. France, for instance, has evinced fresh interest in engagement with Tbilisi after previously showing little inclination to soften its stance toward Georgia. 

The EU and its member states should: 

• Seek rhetorical de-escalation. From the EU side, a shift in rhetoric to take the focus away from attacking Georgian Dream and toward encouraging concrete reforms could go a long way toward creating the right environment for dialogue. Brussels should make this shift as a reciprocal gesture for a similar reduction in hostile rhetoric from Tbilisi. As crises in EU-Georgia relations have often been sparked by the pointed remarks of MEPs, EU bodies should make clear that, while often highly visible, European Parliament resolutions and public statements by MEPs are largely declaratory and do not reflect official EU policy toward Georgia. More broadly, the EU should recognise that the fear of war in Georgia is genuine, not feigned or oversold, and a fundamental element of Tbilisi’s strategic calculations. It can coexist with overwhelming support for EU membership among the population.

• Separate EU enlargement from cooperation on regional priorities. Though Georgia’s current foreign policy understandably disappoints EU officials and diplomats, the country’s status as an EU candidate should not block all other areas of cooperation. While remaining firm on compliance with its accession rules and obligations, EU officials could draw a distinction between issues that are related to that process, like the visa-free regime – which entail higher standards for Georgia than for non-aspirants – and those that are not connected, like cooperating on transit routes. Likewise, cooperation on the EUMM should continue, as it has done so far despite diplomatic tensions.

• Re-engage Georgia on transit issues. The EU could also re-engage Georgia on issues of transit through the Caucasus. Excluding Georgia from these discussions is not just counter to the EU’s own interests in fostering connectivity, including through its new Black Sea Strategy. It also risks squandering a chance to boost greater cooperation inside the Caucasus. With the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process making progress, there is real potential for the first time in the region’s post-Soviet history for trilateral integration initiatives – and all three states have themselves made small movements in that direction. The EU’s regional policies in the Caucasus should seek not to foster competition, but to encourage the emergence of new forms of cooperation. 

Though Libya’s deadly civil war ended in 2020, the country remains divided between two rival governments, based in Tripoli and Benghazi, respectively, and each backed by its own military coalition. The post-2020 peace is fragile, but it holds, relying largely for its survival on the willingness of both sides to share revenue from oil sales as well as turn a blind eye to other sources of unofficial income that both tap into. These include the smuggling of imported fuel, which is purchased by Libyan authorities at international prices, sold at heavily subsidised prices locally and then resold on the black market abroad. While these practices shore up the peace in Libya, they come at huge cost to the country’s coffers, stunt economic growth and entrench the two competing sets of elites by removing all incentives for reunification. The fuel smuggling racket, along with other embezzlement schemes, also indirectly undermines international mediation initiatives aimed at ending the country’s longstanding division.

Given its geographical proximity to Europe, and its dual role as a transit country for migrants heading across the Mediterranean and a hydrocarbons supplier, Libya remains strategically important for the European Union. Brussels and EU member state capitals should strive to help improve management of Libya’s public finances and create the conditions for eventual political reunification by reinforcing efforts to stop fuel smuggling and train Libya’s maritime security forces. To achieve these goals, the EU and its member states should aim to strengthen the EU’s naval mission in the Mediterranean. 

Fifteen years after Muammar al-Qadhafi’s fall, Libya remains divided between an internationally recognised government in Tripoli, headed by Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dabaiba, and a rival executive based in Benghazi, led by Osama Hamad. In practice, however, power in the east rests with Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his sons.

Though the two camps present themselves as adversaries, behind closed doors they maintain a transactional relationship based on shared oil revenue and, especially in the country’s east, off-the-books funding schemes. These financial flows allow them to bankroll their administrations, pay salaries, buy political loyalty and consolidate authority in their respective zones. This arrangement appears to suit both sides well. It also removes any real urgency from the pursuit of difficult compromises on elections and reunification.

While large-scale war has not resumed and, for now, Libya’s rival leaders appear reluctant to rekindle violence, insecurity remains widespread. In western Libya, the Tripoli-based government has gradually brought more armed groups under its control, yet deadly clashes between rival militias competing for local influence and resources still erupt. In the east, forces led by Haftar, now known as the Libyan Arab Armed Forces, govern with a heavy hand, as reports of arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings have shown. In the south, armed groups loosely affiliated with either side periodically confront one another, while criminal networks involved in drug and fuel trafficking, as well as migrant smuggling, operate with total impunity.

The lingering insecurity has combined with economic mismanagement to worsen living conditions. Misallocation of public funds and gross overspending are draining the state treasury, which depends almost entirely on hydrocarbon revenue. Parallel financing mechanisms established by the eastern authorities, who have issued unauthorised treasury bills to cover their expenses, are depleting hard currency reserves, forcing the Central Bank to devalue the dinar. Devaluation has in turn driven up living costs and eroded purchasing power in Libya’s import-dependent economy. Roughly one third of the population in this oil-rich country struggles to make ends meet.

Prospects for change appear slim. The UN-led political mediation process, supported by the EU and its member states, seeks to unify the country through nationwide elections, but has made no meaningful progress in five years. Elections were to have been held in 2021. But they were derailed by legal disputes over whether to appoint a new unified government before voting or wait for the results at the ballot box to form a new executive; and whether to hold both presidential and parliamentary elections, and, if so, in what sequence, or simply opt for a legislative ballot. These same disagreements continue to block consensus. The eastern parliament’s July 2025 decision to establish a rival Supreme Constitutional Court in Benghazi, challenging the writ of the Supreme Court in Tripoli, is the latest in a long series of rifts that have dimmed the prospect of holding national polls. With no recognised high court covering the whole of Libya, credible judicial oversight of any vote would appear impossible.

Constitutional and judicial disputes benefit Libya’s current leaders by delaying elections and silencing calls for political renewal. Numerous rounds of UN-led mediation over the past decade have focused on laying the groundwork for nationwide polls, either by drafting a new constitution or agreeing on electoral laws. Aside from a brief interlude in 2021 that saw Dabaiba appointed prime minister of a UN-mediated unity government – an arrangement that later collapsed – the emphasis has mainly been on preparing the ground for a national vote. The underlying assumption has been that Libya’s rival governments have lost legitimacy, either due to overstaying their mandates or lacking full recognition, and that only a popular vote can restore it.

The UN has generally encouraged members of the rival assemblies to lead discussions in this direction, but to little avail. In its most recent initiative, the Structured Dialogue launched in late 2025, the UN attempted a novel approach, bringing together experts and representatives from different parts of the country to discuss four tracks: governance, economy, security and reconciliation/human rights. Though it has produced recommendations, ruling elites have been indifferent to the initiative and little action has been taken. These developments have eroded the public’s confidence that polls will take place. Many Libyans have grown disillusioned with parliamentarians who seem primarily interested in preserving their positions. Signs of fatigue with the long wait for elections are also emerging among foreign powers. Washington has lately pursued an approach putting security and the economy first, launching its own parallel mediation effort in the second half of 2025 that sidelined thorny political questions. Washington’s envoy, Massad Boulos, convened members of Prime Minister Dabaiba and Khalifa Haftar’s families for closed-door talks, which reportedly led to agreement on joint military training initiatives and a unified development funding mechanism. 

Prolonged political deadlock presents dilemmas for Libya’s foreign partners, particularly European states. Elections no longer appear to be a realistic solution in the short to medium term to address Libya’s impasse, whereas less ambitious alternatives, such as agreements on budgetary issues or joint security training of rival forces, appear more feasible. Nor is it clear who should take part in future mediation between the sides: the rival legislative bodies (the House of Representatives in Benghazi and the Tripoli-based High State Council), current leaders Dabaiba and Haftar or their representatives, or independent experts less entangled in the political system but also less influential.

At the same time, removing the prospect of national reunification as an immediate goal sends a signal to ruling elites that they are free to remain in power and enrich themselves and allied interest groups. Official data from the Central Bank, Audit Bureau and National Oil Corporation point to systematic and large-scale waste of public funds over the past five years, with little tangible benefit for the Libyan people and no attempt to diversify the country’s oil-dependent economy. The informal division of power between two corruption-prone administrations may have contributed to curbing violence in the short term, but it risks sowing the seeds of future instability as Libyans grow increasingly frustrated with the scale of graft as their own hardship deepens.

Libya’s soaring fuel import bill is a central piece of the new political setup. Available data indicate that, since 2022, Libya has nearly doubled its annual spending on imported diesel and gasoline. Most of it comes from Europe, around 50 per cent of it from EU member states and 25 per cent from Russia (though imports from Moscow have reportedly declined significantly in 2026 to date). The Libyan state pays for the fuel in full, before selling it at a heavily subsidised price on the domestic market. These imports far exceed the needs of a country with a small population and minimal industrial activity, especially one that has refineries of its own. According to official Libyan sources, including from the Audit Bureau, between 2022 and 2024 roughly 40 per cent of the imported fuel was eventually smuggled abroad, primarily across the Mediterranean. Subsidies sustain this trade: gasoline costs about $0.02 per litre in Libya, compared to roughly $2 per litre in Europe, creating enormous profit margins for traffickers. Foreign analysts and Libyan sources believe that most of the trafficked fuel departs from Benghazi with coordination by people tied to the Haftars. Most is sold in international waters in ship-to-ship transfers, but cargo is known to have reached Italy, Albania, Türkiye and Greece. 

Estimates of the racket’s total cost to Libya vary enormously. According to the Audit Bureau, in 2024 fuel import costs exceeded $9 billion, equivalent to roughly 30 per cent of the country’s gross hydrocarbon revenues, or about the same proportion of total annual state expenditure. Other sources point to lower figures. As for fuel trafficking, some Libyan and foreign analysts suggest that it generated $6-7 billion annually between 2022 and 2024, while the public prosecutor has offered a more conservative estimate of $1.5 billion per year. 

These multi-billion-dollar sums suggest that fuel smuggling has become a vital component of the arrangement between eastern and western authorities. Libya’s leaders tolerate and, in some cases, encourage these illicit financial schemes because they are a means of cultivating patronage networks and funding off-budget expenses, especially in the east. Foreign capitals are aware of this racket and other parallel funding schemes that cost the state billions of dollars, but they have so far preferred to keep quiet about the matter. Their belief is that this money will ensure that Libya’s peace does not unravel and that crude oil exports from areas under Haftar’s control will continue.

Libya is strategically important to the EU. Its location in the centre of the Mediterranean basin, just across the water from Italy and Greece, make it a potential security liability. A number of countries at odds with various European states, including Russia and Türkiye, have forces stationed in the country, at at least half a dozen bases and airfields, under the umbrella of one Libyan military coalition or the other. Libya also remains the main transit point for migrants seeking to enter Europe via the central Mediterranean route. Lastly, the country is still a major hydrocarbon supplier. Though the EU’s dependence on Libyan oil and gas has diminished in recent years, imports from Libya still help offset the fall in imports from Russia after its all-out invasion of Ukraine.

The EU has certainly not been inactive. In March 2025, it expanded the mandate of its Common Security and Defence Policy naval mission EUNAVFOR MED IRINI (hereafter, Irini) to address illicit trafficking of items other than arms, including monitoring, surveillance and information gathering related to illegal exports of oil and refined fuel products from Libya. Both Irini and the EU’s border assistance mission in Libya, EUBAM, have trained Libyan border control agencies, including the coast guard, and they are considering stepping up joint training of law enforcement personnel from Libya’s east and west, in the hope that an integrated, nationwide security apparatus might foster a greater spirit of political compromise. 

But the EU and its member states have otherwise struggled to translate their priorities into tangible results. Libya’s persistent institutional divides and the Europeans’ limited leverage vis-à-vis other, more assertive players, such as Egypt, Türkiye and the UAE, have reduced the impact of EU policy in Libya. Tackling migration flows has been especially complex, not least because of domestic political considerations in EU member states and because Libyan authorities have exploited migrants as a form of coercive diplomacy, leveraging control of routes to extract bilateral concessions.

As a result, EU member states have had to make difficult policy compromises. They have generally found it easier to focus on bilateral relations with Libyan authorities rather than work together through Brussels. For example, they were forced to seek the cooperation of Khalifa Haftar and his sons after 2024, when it became apparent that a growing number of migrants heading to Italy were coming from the east. Following demands from the Haftar camp, Italy began offering military training in Italy to his security personnel, breaking with previous policy under which they would only train forces affiliated with Tripoli. 

Europe’s struggles to establish an effective policy toward Libya continue. As it reconsiders its priorities, it should consider turning its focus to stopping fuel smuggling and the haemorrhaging of Libyan public funds, which pose long-term risks of political instability and rising public discontent. Compared with the U.S. Treasury, which plays a central role in overseeing dollar-denominated transactions in the oil sector, the EU has limited leverage over financial decision-making in Libya. But the EU and its member states have repeatedly reaffirmed that they are committed to stopping fuel smuggling in Libya: the 2017 Memorandum of Understanding between Italy and Libya on fighting illegal migration puts cooperation against fuel smuggling among its objectives, while the Irini naval mission lists countering fuel smuggling as its secondary mandate. Until now, however, the conditions under which the mission works have militated against efforts to combat fuel smuggling. In particular, its mandate does not allow for interception of vessels on mere suspicion of smuggling fuel. Additional Security Council sanctions measures do permit interdiction if the designated Libyan government contact signals that the cargo is suspect. But no such signal has arrived in recent years, despite the massive smuggling of subsidised fuel, largely because of the complicity of government agencies and their political bosses. 

At the same time, the bloc and its member states should act only when they are prepared for the likely consequences of trying to stymie the racket. One possible type of backlash could be a resurgence of migration flows under the watch of eastern Libyan authorities aggrieved by Europe’s interference in its funding streams. Eastern authorities might also be provoked into reigniting hostilities with Tripoli. For these reasons, any stronger EU push to curb fuel trafficking should be part of a comprehensive and internationally coordinated approach that would ideally bring together UN- and U.S.-led mediation efforts to put Libya’s state finances in order. Simultaneously, the EU could also seek to coax both rival Libyan governments into cooperating by helping improve the country’s paltry maritime security infrastructure, complementing U.S.-backed efforts to promote joint military training of Libyan forces from the east and west of the country. This assistance would also be in line with the EU’s view that the Mediterranean is a strategic maritime domain that requires sustained European attention. 

The EU and its member states should:

• Increase policy coherence. The EU and its member states should work more consistently through EU structures in Brussels and in coordination with the UN to push for progress in the governance, economy, security and reconciliation/human rights tracks of any UN-led initiative, be it the Structured Dialogue or other future talks. Holding nationwide elections should not be the immediate goal of these initiatives. Instead, the priority should be to achieve incremental successes, especially in matters of financial governance and security cooperation, so as to create the conditions for a future political transition. 
• Work with others to encourage economic governance reform. In coordination with regional powers like Egypt, Türkiye and the UAE, and relevant international financial institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, the EU and its member states should ask the UN mission in Libya to work more proactively on improving Libya’s public financial management with the aim of curbing the haemorrhaging of state funds and bolstering economic governance. They should also encourage the U.S., which is already playing a role in overseeing and convening discussions on Libyan finance-related matters, to coordinate more with the above countries and institutions, including the EU. 
• Counter fuel smuggling. As part of these coordinated efforts to improve Libya’s economic governance, the EU and its member states should also advocate for changing the UN Security Council resolution on Libya to permit interception of vessels suspected of smuggling fuel in international waters, even in the absence of notification by Libyan officials. With such licence from the Council, the EU could take a more proactive role in countering fuel smuggling across the Mediterranean by expanding Irini’s mandate and placing greater resources at its disposal.

Five years after seizing power in the 1 February 2021 coup, Myanmar’s military is set to hand authority to a nominally civilian administration in early April. The transfer follows stage-managed elections that delivered a landslide for the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, with none of the main democratic or ethnic parties participating. The former military chief and coup leader, Min Aung Hlaing, looks likely to shed his military garb to become president, but he will have to share a modicum of power with other members of the ruling establishment, creating the potential for tensions or rivalries. China, which pressed the regime to proceed with the polls, has moved quickly to endorse the new arrangement. Meanwhile, the country’s post-coup civil war has continued to rage on several fronts.

Myanmar’s conflict has ramifications for European Union priorities beyond humanitarian and human rights concerns, including organised crime, critical minerals and geopolitical competition. Brussels will therefore need to calibrate its response carefully. The shift in order does not constitute meaningful political change, and any contacts with authorities in the capital Naypyitaw should remain limited and clearly defined around narrow policy objectives – for example, advocating for humanitarian access or raising concerns related to international humanitarian law and transnational organised crime. Such discussions should be approached with care to avoid conferring unwarranted legitimacy upon the regime or diluting existing policies. At the same time, the EU should continue to address the fallout of Myanmar’s civil war by sustaining – and, where possible, expanding – its assistance, delivered outside official channels, and refrain from suspending Myanmar’s access to Everything But Arms (EBA) trade preferences, which support hundreds of thousands of garment-sector jobs, particularly for women, without providing any significant benefit to military or government authorities.

The change in administration will not alleviate the political crisis or the intensified armed conflict triggered by the 2021 coup. Min Aung Hlaing looks set to dominate the new order as president, and though the 2008 constitution constrains the presidency on paper, he will install loyalists in key posts. The new authorities will therefore confront the same fundamental challenges as before: deep public hostility, widespread armed resistance and no obvious way to stabilise the country.

But Min Aung Hlaing will face internal challenges in continuing to wield absolute authority. The military designed the 2008 charter to perpetuate institutional – not autocratic – power, granting the armed forces autonomy from civilian oversight and limiting presidential authority. Though Min Aung Hlaing will put loyalists in top jobs, they will have power bases of their own and may not remain fully aligned. Such rivalries, however, are unlikely to open space for reform. The cabinet, likely to be dominated by establishment figures, could include ministers with experience and technocratic skills, but they may not have much scope for independent policymaking on issues of vital importance to the population, such as health, education and the economy. Whether they will attain more freedom of action over time will merit close attention.

There is also little prospect of the civil war abating. Naypyitaw will continue to preside over a fragmented state, facing persistent armed opposition in several theatres. The conscription drive it launched two years ago has helped it shift battlefield dynamics in its favour by replenishing depleted ranks. Yet the draft has been deeply unpopular and economically damaging, accelerating outward migration by pushing young people of conscription age – including skilled workers – into overseas labour markets or the illicit economy in areas beyond central state control. Though recruitment has so far been limited to men, the law allows for conscripting women as well, prompting many young women to seek exit options of their own.

Combined with increased Chinese support (see below), continued mobilisation may allow the military to consolidate control in some areas, though major advances against powerful opponents such as the Arakan Army and Kachin Independence Army remain unlikely. Tactical, China-facilitated ceasefires may provide temporary respite, but no durable settlement is in sight. The Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement – concluded in 2015 as a step toward a comprehensive peace agreement – will endure as largely symbolic cover for transactional truces, with limited participation or substantive progress toward peace.

Diplomatically, the new administration may find somewhat more breathing space. Since mid-2024, China has expanded its political, military and financial backing for the regime, pressed for the elections to proceed and welcomed the outcome. Beijing looks set to embrace the new administration even more firmly, and it will expect significant concessions in return, including a leadership that is suitably deferential to Chinese interests, for instance by giving accelerated approval to long-planned Chinese infrastructure and investment projects. Naypyitaw is wary of being bound too tightly to Beijing, but it has no viable counterweight.

Other countries will likely follow in China’s diplomatic slipstream. India has intensified engagement with the regime following a period of hedging when it placed greater emphasis on outreach to the armed groups operating on its border. Thailand is pushing to ease Myanmar’s diplomatic isolation within a divided Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as are Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, while the Philippines, which holds the chair at present, is focused on other issues. Untethered from normative constraints on its foreign policy, the U.S. could also pivot toward greater engagement, driven by competition with China and interest in critical minerals, though Myanmar remains a low priority in Washington.

Reduced diplomatic isolation will not translate into improved regional stability, however. Myanmar’s fragmentation and the authorities’ weak territorial control will continue to generate cross-border threats. The illicit economy remains a major concern. Myanmar is the world’s largest producer of heroin, and the dominant source of synthetic drugs – methamphetamine as well as ketamine and ecstasy – in the Asia Pacific. It also hosts large-scale online scam centres, which are associated with human trafficking, involving at least 100,000 workers and generating tens of billions of dollars annually. European nationals are attractive targets for the organised crime groups operating these scam centres, and European financial infrastructure is at risk of being used for illicit financial flows linked to this industry.

While minority rights and opposition to military rule underpin the armed conflict, economic interests within the country also shape the battlefield stakes. These derive in part from the illicit economy, but also from highly lucrative natural resource extraction. Myanmar is the largest global source of heavy rare earth elements, vital for the permanent magnets used in everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines and hi-tech weapon systems. The Kachin Independence Army took over the main mining area on the Chinese border in late 2024, after expelling the military-aligned militia that had long controlled it. There has also been fighting for control of gold deposits in several areas of the country, with the surge in global prices for the metal boosting profitability. In recent years Myanmar has also become the world’s third-largest tin producer, almost entirely from a single mine in an enclave controlled by a non-state armed group, the United Wa State Army. Karen National Union-controlled areas are also a strategically useful source of antimony concentrates for China, at a time when global supplies are highly constrained.

The transition to pseudo-civilian rule will also leave the plight of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority unresolved. Over one million remain as refugees in Bangladesh, where poor camp security and shrinking humanitarian funding heighten risks of dangerous onward migration, criminal exploitation and recruitment by Rohingya armed groups. Within Myanmar, conditions in Rakhine State offer no pathway to safe, voluntary and dignified repatriation for Rohingya in the medium term – even in the event of a tactical ceasefire between the Arakan Army and the military. Attacks by Rohingya armed groups on Arakan Army forces in northern Rakhine State will continue to erode security conditions and aggravate relations between Rakhine and Rohingya people.

The parallel National Unity Government, created by lawmakers ousted in the 2021 coup, is in a difficult position. For some time, it has faced internal and external criticism for excessive bureaucracy, limited transparency in the use of funds, and weak responses to allegations of corruption or abuse in its ranks. More fundamentally, it has struggled to articulate a convincing strategy for effecting political change or to build and sustain the broad coalitions required to do so – particularly with ethnic political leaders and armed groups. The regime’s election exacerbated these challenges. By grounding its legitimacy in the 2020 election results and presenting itself as a parallel government rather than a revolutionary movement, the NUG now faces questions about its mandate given that its original five-year electoral term has expired. But regardless of the NUG’s institutional weakness, the broad popular desire for an alternative to military power remains undiminished and is sure to find political outlets. 

Myanmar is often overshadowed in European policymaking by crises such as Iran, Ukraine and Gaza that are closer to home and present more immediate security and geopolitical challenges. Yet developments in Myanmar carry consequences for the EU that extend well beyond humanitarian and human rights considerations.

Geopolitically, Myanmar has not played a central role in the broader competition for influence in South East Asia, but it cannot be divorced from that contest. China’s position as the decisive external actor in the country underlines the limits of European leverage in a subregion that is central to the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy. How Brussels handles the Myanmar issue in the coming period will therefore test both the credibility of its normative policy instruments and its willingness to sustain principled engagement when leverage is limited. Any move by ASEAN to renormalise relations with Naypyitaw will further test the EU’s commitment to ASEAN centrality – the principle that South East Asian regional diplomacy should be led and coordinated by ASEAN itself – particularly given the bloc’s limited traction with Myanmar at a time when Beijing has markedly expanded its influence.

The country’s booming illicit economy – especially online scam operations and associated human trafficking and money laundering – increasingly affects European citizens and financial systems. Scam networks target EU nationals, use global payment infrastructure – including European networks – and are likely purchasing assets in Europe with criminal revenues. These issues are directly relevant to EU priorities on organised crime, cyber-enabled fraud and financial integrity.

The EU also has an important role to play in continuing to address the immense humanitarian needs in Myanmar. According to the UN’s latest assessment, some 3.6 million people are internally displaced and 16.2 million – almost one third of the population – in need of humanitarian assistance. While humanitarian access remains a major challenge, lack of funding is the binding constraint. With the dismantling of USAID and the U.S. shift away from liberal values and support for the most vulnerable populations in foreign policy and overseas aid, the EU carries a special responsibility as the world’s largest donor committed to these principles. In Myanmar, it should sustain life-saving assistance delivered through non-state channels, while also supporting civil society organisations, including independent media and women-led groups. Though Brussels has made funds available – both humanitarian allocations and the reprogramming of development assistance frozen after the coup – the overall aid envelope for the 2027-2028 period is set to shrink significantly.

In these straitened circumstances, the role of the private sector in Myanmar is vital for providing jobs and sustaining livelihoods, which it can do at a scale far beyond anything that foreign assistance could match. The EU’s EBA trade preferences are essential to sustaining hundreds of thousands of jobs in the garment industry, which employs mostly young women from poor households and whose biggest export market is the EU. In addition to longstanding discussions in Brussels about the optimal balance between the integrity of its trade preferences scheme and its development objectives in Myanmar, the question of continuing EBA access has also been prompted by the International Labour Organisation’s June 2025 call for its members to review their relations with the country in light of its persistent failure to meet obligations on freedom of association and forced labour. But suspending trade preferences would have little impact on the military, while causing deep economic harm to vulnerable households. Other tools, such as principled EU engagement backed by the ILO resolution, offer better ways to push for concessions such as improved compliance with core labour standards. EU pressure demonstrated its efficacy in 2025, when it helped push the regime to release several high-profile trade unionists.

Myanmar’s growing importance in critical mineral supply chains is also of strategic relevance for the EU. As mentioned, the country is the world’s largest source of heavy rare earth elements, as well as a major source of tin and antimony. Production is concentrated in conflict-affected areas and largely exported to China for processing, reinforcing Beijing’s dominance across the value chain. While European companies are not getting these materials from Myanmar, they enter global supply chains that serve European green and defence industries, creating reputational, governance and supply risks. As the EU implements its Critical Raw Materials Act and seeks to diversify supply chains, China’s privileged access to Myanmar resources demonstrates how geopolitical competition affects Europe’s long-term resource security.

The EU and its member states should:

• Elevate Myanmar on the EU’s strategic agenda. Despite being overshadowed by other crises, Myanmar’s conflict has important ramifications for EU priorities on organised crime, critical mineral supply-chain security and geopolitical competition. Brussels should ensure sustained high-level political attention to the country and link its Myanmar policy with the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy, organised crime and critical raw materials frameworks.

• Maintain and refine restrictive measures. The EU should renew its sanctions targeting military leaders, military-owned enterprises and arms transfers at the forthcoming review in April. Where credible evidence supports it, listings should be updated to reflect evolving military-linked business structures and players in the illicit economy. Sanctions should be coordinated with like-minded partners to maximise impact.

• Engage cautiously and in a principled way. Limited engagement with Naypyitaw may at times be warranted, for example to advocate on humanitarian access, human rights and labour standards, and to convey concerns about the illicit economy. Such contacts should be clearly defined, coordinated among member states and pursued in a way that avoids conferring political legitimacy. As regards ASEAN, at a time when it is divided on Myanmar but will almost certainly ease its diplomatic quarantine, EU engagement with and support for like-minded ASEAN members will likely be more consequential than bloc-level interactions on this file.

• Sustain and, where possible, expand humanitarian and civil society support. The EU should protect funding for humanitarian operations and support for civil society and independent media. Such assistance is vital for saving lives, preserving social capital and enhancing accountability. The EU and member states should continue pressing for humanitarian access to address the dire needs of the Rohingya and other displaced persons.

• Maintain Myanmar’s access to EBA preferences. Suspending trade preferences would harm hundreds of thousands of mostly young women workers and their families, while having negligible impact on military authorities. A better way to respond to the ILO’s call to action would be to leverage the ILO process and enhanced monitoring mechanisms to press for incremental improvements in labour rights compliance.

• Consider carefully targeted private-sector support. Beyond the garment industry, Brussels should explore targeted support – including responsible sourcing engagement and compliance assistance – to sustain employment and livelihoods in sectors not structurally dominated by state or military-owned firms, such as agriculture. 

• Strengthen action against transnational organised crime in Myanmar. The EU should deepen cooperation between Europol, DG HOME and member states’ financial intelligence units, on one side, and South East Asian partners, on the other, to address scam networks and associated human trafficking and money laundering. Domains for cooperation include intelligence sharing and asset tracing, as well as political and technical coordination with ASEAN and relevant member states, particularly Thailand.

• Integrate Myanmar-related risks into the EU’s critical materials strategy. As the EU diversifies supplies under the Critical Raw Materials Act, it should ensure enhanced due diligence for rare earths and other resources originating from Myanmar. Brussels should work with industry and international partners to promote transparency and conflict sensitivity in its supply chains.

South Sudan is sliding back into civil war. The violence spreading in Jonglei and elsewhere represents the fallout from President Salva Kiir’s decision to abandon the 2018 peace agreement that brought an end to the last civil war, dismantle the unity government and shift to a military strategy for defeating his political opponents. In March 2025, Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, placed First Vice President Riek Machar, a Nuer, under house arrest and subsequently charged him with treason. Kiir’s move was part of a shakeup of his regime that appears connected to his ailing health and intense jockeying among top regime figures to be in a place to succeed him as president. Yet by arresting Machar and shelving the 2018 accord, Kiir sparked a renewed insurgency. As the country’s turmoil deepens, the risks are growing that the South Sudanese conflict will gradually overlap with the one in Sudan, with the two feeding off each other.

The stakes in South Sudan, whether in terms of humanitarian effects within the country or reverberations in nearby states, are strong reasons for the EU and its member states to keep the spotlight on South Sudan and continue assisting its people. The stability not just of South Sudan but of a large part of East Africa and the Horn of Africa – a region the EU declared as strategically important – is under threat from existing wars and the threat of fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The EU has provided comprehensive support to South Sudan since its independence in 2011, and the bloc as well as some of its member states now stand out as major humanitarian donors to the country. While the main leverage over the conflict parties remains in the hands of regional powers, the EU should exploit its clout as a vital donor to support African mediation efforts and help find a way forward for South Sudan.

South Sudan’s return to warfare in early 2026 marked the failure of over a decade of efforts to extract the country from its previous conflict and ensure that it would not recur. Post-independence power struggles between President Kiir and former Vice President Machar gave rise to a devastating civil war from 2013 to 2018. The fighting shattered the ruling party, displaced nearly half the population and drew in Uganda (backing Kiir) and Sudan (favouring Machar). The 2018 agreement that restored Machar to the vice presidency was a tactical compromise, brought upon Kiir by pressure from Uganda and Sudan rather than any genuine spirit of reconciliation. Not long thereafter, the 2019 ouster of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir caused the regional balance of power to collapse, allowing Kiir and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni to isolate Machar. Confined to the capital Juba from 2020 to 2025, Machar put up no armed resistance, but deep grievances festered among the ranks of his supporters, as the government failed to integrate the opposition forces into the national army or adopt a permanent constitution, both core elements of the 2018 peace deal.

The country’s political order has nevertheless proven brittle. Stability hinges on petrodollars, which help maintain a transactional power sharing compromise among factious elites. In February 2024, the Petrodar pipeline in Sudan ruptured, in effect severing South Sudan’s economic lifeline and slashing state revenue by 70 per cent. This catastrophic loss of revenue persisted for more than a year, gravely weakening the Juba regime, before the pipeline was repaired. Deprived of funds, President Kiir seemed to abandon his “big tent” policy of co-optation in favour of a crackdown on other powerful regime figures. He retreated into a dynastic strategy, relying almost exclusively on immediate family and ethnic kin to keep control.

Kiir moved first against his top security official. In October 2024, he dismissed long-serving intelligence chief General Akol Koor Kuc, breaking up the sprawling intelligence system that had protected him for a decade and leaving him militarily vulnerable. He then deposed his long-time vice president and ruling party deputy chair, James Wani Igga, and elevated business partner and political neophyte Benjamin Bol Mel to those positions, before casting Bol Mel aside in November 2025 and reappointing Wani Igga. As his circle of trust shrank, Kiir concentrated power within his family, appointing his daughter, Adut, as a senior presidential envoy in August 2025. These changes and other purges alienated several veteran party and military loyalists. 

Amid all these reshuffles, Kiir also moved against Machar. In March 2025, Kiir placed Machar under house arrest and charged him with treason. The decision backfired. Though Machar’s political movement has been languishing, his core supporters were galvanised by what they perceived to be a show trial of their leader, while his military forces forged renewed bonds with communal militias as they sought to rekindle their insurgency against Kiir’s government. 

Violence began in the form of local skirmishes in Jonglei on 24 December 2025, but soon took the shape of an organised campaign orchestrated by Machar’s party and the allied White Army, a predominantly Nuer youth militia. Over several weeks, the opposition captured three towns in northern Jonglei. Fearing that the opposition would take the state capital, Bor, the government launched a major counteroffensive in mid-January. They mobilised the national army alongside a coalition of ethnic militias, including the Agwelek under General Johnson Olony. Senior commanders have also resorted to alarmingly inflammatory rhetoric, much of it exploiting ethno-political grievances. In recorded remarks, Olony ordered his advancing forces to “spare no lives”, not even those of the elderly. He also told his troops to ransack houses and slaughter chickens. 

At the same time, both sides are now far weaker than they were at the height of the first civil war (2013-2018), which was characterised at its peaks by large-scale ethnic warfare. Following that period, the country endured years of protracted turmoil (2018-2025), marked by sub-national, inter-communal violence, splinter group insurgencies and severe economic decline. This prolonged crisis has depleted state coffers; irregular pay has in turn led to widespread troop desertions and eroded morale, leaving the national army overstretched. Government forces and proxy militias like the Agwelek are increasingly forced to live off the land. Government offensives thus often appear driven as much by the need for plunder and taxes as by purely military objectives.

On the other side, opposition forces have lost vital supply lines from abroad and are also beset by internal fissures. Machar’s detention set off tussles between his wife, Angelina Teny, and the deputy chairman of his party, Oyet Nathaniel, who is also officially acting as party leader while Machar is in custody. Machar’s new rebel army is also heavily reliant on the rapid mobilisation of local communal militias, which could easily peter out. The youth militias are driven primarily by their own interests, including community defence and the prospect of loot, not by a coherent political strategy.

This mutual degradation could result in a protracted conflict that resembles the low-intensity fighting toward the end of the previous civil war, when the government was unable to quell numerous pockets of insurgency, while the rebels found it impossible to turn the tide against the government. Adding to the government’s vulnerability is the uncertain posture of its traditional guarantor, Uganda. Though President Museveni has already intervened with his country’s military on Kiir’s behalf, it remains unclear how long he will be willing to underwrite Kiir’s survival this time round, especially given South Sudan’s economic collapse and Kampala’s other regional commitments.

The war in neighbouring Sudan adds another layer to tensions in South Sudan. Juba has officially maintained strict neutrality in Sudan’s civil war, which started in 2023. Even so, Juba’s close links to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which now control much of Sudan’s border with South Sudan, are plain to see. Many in Juba suspect that the Sudanese army, the RSF’s main foe, has reactivated its links to South Sudan’s Nuer opposition forces in a bid to press Kiir to rein in RSF activity, as well as to cut RSF supply lines near the border. Machar’s forces strongly deny getting Sudanese backing and say their forces are forced to scrape by with what they can find locally; indeed, there is no clear evidence that South Sudan’s opposition has received major arms shipments. Still, the Upper Nile region in South Sudan risks becoming a proxy theatre of Sudan’s war should relations between Juba and Khartoum deteriorate further. 

The human cost of South Sudan’s longstanding predicament is staggering. The UN-coordinated South Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan has sounded the alarm about a dire situation: humanitarian needs are great, while funding has dropped to its lowest level since 2011. The Plan estimates that 10 million people, or more than two thirds of the population, will require humanitarian assistance in 2026. Even so, aid workers are already unable to help nearly as many people as they once did.

The EU is one of the top humanitarian donors in South Sudan, contributing 106 million euros in 2025, down from 110.2 million euros in 2024. But the EU’s support for the destitute comes with a dilemma: it funds basic services in a country where the state has abdicated its responsibility to care for its citizens. Despite generating substantial oil revenues, the government in Juba allocates a negligible fraction of the national budget to health care, education and food security. Instead, state wealth is routinely diverted to the security apparatus and elite patronage networks. Complete European disengagement, on the other hand, would hurt the weakest hardest. If the EU and other European donors were to abruptly withdraw their funding – especially on the heels of severe aid cuts by the United States over the last two years – South Sudan’s political elites might weather the initial shock, albeit at the risk of great competition among them. The South Sudanese people, however, would suffer immediately. 

Sheer humanitarian need has been and should be enough to prompt an EU response. But as the conflict deepens and spreads, the case for the bloc to step up its engagement is strengthening. With the 2018 peace process now dead and elections planned for 2026 impossible to hold in any credible way, South Sudan’s instability could add to that of the region. A collapse of basic survival systems in the country could generate mass cross-border displacement. At present, more than 2.4 million South Sudanese are refugees, with some 2.6 million more displaced internally. The fighting in Jonglei has displaced an additional 280,000 people. Unlike in previous crises, these people have nowhere to run – Sudan is at war and Ethiopia is far from stable. When South Sudan’s neighbours last reached their maximum absorption capacity, at the height of the 2013-2018 civil war, secondary displacement drove migration flows northward toward North Africa and across the Mediterranean Sea. 

Yet the renascent conflict in South Sudan is coming at the same time as European powers are scaling down their diplomatic and development commitments to the country. By the end of 2026, only a slim EU delegation and two EU member states (France and Germany) will maintain a diplomatic presence in Juba. South Sudan is not a priority file, with an EU official calling it the “most forgotten of forgotten crises”. Given the rapidly evolving crisis in South Sudan, the EU should seek to reverse this trend. As an immediate first step, the EU should shift its posture away from state building – which is routinely exploited by predatory elites – toward a strategy of containing local conflict and preventing wider collapse, leveraging its remaining influence to protect civilians and halt regional spillover.

The EU and its member states should: 

• Strategically leverage their humanitarian footprint. Rather than resorting to sanctions regimes, which are easily evaded, as the main ballast for its political engagement in South Sudan, the EU should use its position as a primary donor to press hard for protected access corridors, particularly in opposition-held areas of Jonglei and Upper Nile. The EU should also ensure that its remaining humanitarian assistance is accompanied by diplomacy to compel warring factions to respect international humanitarian law and protections for civilians. 
• Press for de-escalation and coordinate regional leverage. The EU – alongside key regional powers – should keep pushing for Machar’s release and new ceasefire discussions. The bloc should work directly with South Africa (which chairs the African Union’s High-Level ad hoc Committee for South Sudan, or C5, and is a close ally of Juba) and Kenya (which has launched a mediation effort called Tumaini intended to bring holdout groups into the peace process) to seek a de-escalation of the conflict in South Sudan. Together, they should push Uganda, Kiir’s closest ally, to work with them to stabilise the country, starting with dialogue between Kiir and Machar aimed at reducing violence. Concurrently, the EU member states on the UN Security Council should work to empower the UN Mission in South Sudan.
• Withhold support for the scheduled December elections. Conducting elections in the current climate of violence and political fracture is unsafe and could deepen the country’s unrest. The prerequisites for a credible or responsible vote do not exist, and the EU should not be associated with or confer any legitimacy plans to proceed with balloting. The EU should push for peace, political reconciliation and dialogue as prerequisites for scheduling future polls. 
• Focus on circumscribed, ground-level peacebuilding. With formal, top-down transitional justice practically impossible now that the 2018 peace agreement has broken down, the EU should direct its limited resources toward bottom-up, community-level reconciliation dialogues aimed at breaking cycles of inter-communal revenge. Additionally, the EU should build the capacity of local civil society to securely document human rights abuses to hold perpetrators accountable in the future. Furthermore, while being careful not to duplicate existing efforts, the EU should fund and facilitate Track II diplomacy – unofficial dialogues involving civil society leaders, academics and local elders – in close coordination with humanitarian organisations that have access to field commanders and a strong grasp of local conflict dynamics. Women-led organisations, many of which are already leading these informal processes, should be key partners for both dialogue and human rights monitoring efforts. 
• Coordinate more within Team Europe. Given that the EU and its member states have a small diplomatic footprint in South Sudan, the EU should consider boosting coordination with the UK (which was the most active EU member state on South Sudan prior to leaving the bloc), Norway and Switzerland. This coordination could include diplomacy and intelligence. With the U.S. stepping back from its traditional leadership role in Juba, European countries still active in South Sudan should seek to coordinate more effectively to maximise their collective influence.