Category: geopolitics

For the last ten years we have been told that, while the world economy took a hit during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008/9, it is now recovering well. Mario Draghi did his magic, the Fed saved the day and American securities, in particular, are now going from strength to strength. Climbing well above […]

Oil/Libya: War or US shale collapse? In Libya, General Haftar, mainly supported by the Americans, is not giving up. The reason is simple: he is acting under orders to block the oil wells of a country which is seeing its production collapsing, thus giving some support to the plunging prices of crude oil… and slowing […]

With the neologism futuritis, we wish to denote a disease of the future – a disease whose development process begins with a deficiency, followed by an eruption and ending with high fever. Future deficiency in the 2000s: The Internet was already here, as well as supranational levels of governance to be completed (the EU in […]

A non-exhaustive review of global risk by continents/regions Geopolitical tensions will dominate the year 2020. From the most structural to the most cyclical, the reasons are: The multipolar world is no longer content just doing business and now wishes to defend its trade routes and hunting grounds (Europe, China, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran […]

As we do every year, GEAB by LEAP is presenting a landscape of the key trends for the coming year. Besides the intellectual value of this LEAP contribution, which, of course, reflects many of the analyses of our researchers over the last few months, we aim to provide a better understanding of the main issues […]

As an introduction to our traditional January “key trends”, here are the main guiding lines that we have identified for this “phoney year [1]”. This first year of the new decade promises us a journey through dangerous waters. And the financial crisis announced two years ago by a desperate world of finance could be the […]

As we do every December, we have completed an evaluation of the trend anticipations we published last January. This time, we have ended up with a final score of 27.5 over 39 key trends, or a 70.5% success rate, 2.5 points higher than last year (68%). We organised the “up & down” trends for 2019 […]

This in-depth assessment of our anticipations for the year will be used to update our map of major global transformational trends. We present here a synthesis of a year of anticipations tested against reality and placed in a more classical temporal continuum (past and present). This meticulous work is specially intended to enable everyone to […]

The coming year is not just any year, but 2020! LEAP is one of the offshoots of Franck Biancheri’s Reinventing Europe project inaugurated in Athens in 1998,[1] which gave birth shortly afterwards to the think-tank Europe2020, the immediate predecessor of the European Laboratory for Political Anticipation (LEAP). For 21 years, 2020 has been the time […]

Popular protests are growing and multiplying: from Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Maidan, populist votes, to the yellow vests, Iraq, Algeria, demonstrations against global warming, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia… The streets are on fire, the markets are faltering and the only explanations being given are poverty, increasing disparity, taxes – “the […]

Social unrest is beginning to be perceived by the financial markets and economy as a possible trigger for the famous 2020 crisis: Demonstrations, increased public debt, budgetary crises, the redirection of debt from private to public, austerity, loss of confidence of economic and financial players, bankruptcies etc… In a context of economic slowdown, rising discontent […]

Excerpt from the GEAB 138 / 15 Oct. 2019: “The left-wing president, Evo Morales, is running for a fourth term despite the constitutional limit and a referendum against circumventing the law in 2016. His very good economic record and popularity give him a significant chance of winning the first round. But, used to being elected […]

The fundamentalist religious movements are being strengthened in a world where change frightens poorly educated populations that are suspicious of modernity. They are also strengthened by the political manoeuvring. This manoeuvring brings them closer to the seats of power. Their merging, now well underway, with the bodies of national power is a bad omen, especially […]

We estimate that there is a very high (70%) probability of the imminent launch of a rapid and brutal birthing process of Greater Israel. Figure 1: Comparison between the presentation of the Israeli districts in the Wikipedia in French (left) and the Wikipedia in Hebrew (right) in their version of August 2015. The Wikipedia in […]

The Middle Eastern mega-city project called NEOM[1] that we have told you about in a previous issue is a real reason to hope. As mentioned last time, the Saudis would not proceed with this project if they truly had in mind an open conflict with Iran. This project is first and foremost a symbol of […]

We can not help going back to the Middle East this month, simply because what is happening now looks so much like we had been anticipating for several years and announced at the beginning of 2017 in our list of “up and down trends”: Saudi Arabia’s emergence as a new strong player in the region, […]

The end of the year will be rich in surprises and escalation risks, as we have been saying for the last two months. Currently, all eyes are on the Middle East, the world’s powder keg, and on the tensions emerging around Lebanon, involving nothing less than protagonists like the United States, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia […]

We have repeatedly analyzed that only the regional powers would be able to restore calm in the Middle East and resolve the Daesh issue, the common enemy on which (almost) everyone has agreed. However, we have stated that the US or Russian interventions would only have the effect of exacerbating tensions. Repeatedly missed opportunities Suffice […]