Glossary

The UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in 1951, defines a refugee as a person outside their country who has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Its 1967 Protocol removed the limitation to events before 1951 and, for most states, the option of limiting it to events in Europe.

SourceUNHCR

See alsoNon-refoulement, Asylum seeker, UNHCR

The overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in August 1953 in an operation organised by the American and British intelligence services, after his government nationalised the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. It restored the power of the Shah, and the CIA acknowledged its role in documents released in 2013.

See alsoIranian Revolution, National oil company, Resource nationalism

A military approach that uses long-range missiles, submarines, air defences and sensors to keep an adversary's forces away from a region or limit their freedom to operate there. American analysts apply the term mainly to China's ability to threaten US carriers and bases in the western Pacific with missiles such as the DF-21D and DF-26.

See alsoFirst island chain, Second island chain, Taiwan Strait

Two breakaway regions of Georgia that escaped Georgian control in wars in the early 1990s. After its short war with Georgia in August 2008, Russia recognised both as independent states and stationed troops there; only a handful of other states have followed, and most of the world regards them as part of Georgia.

See alsoFrozen conflict, Near abroad, Recognition of states

Agreements brokered by the United States under which Israel normalised relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed at the White House in September 2020; Morocco and Sudan followed within months. They broke with the Arab position that normalisation should wait for a Palestinian state, and a deal with Saudi Arabia has since been the main prize sought.

See alsoArab League, Two-state solution, GCC

A system for grading intelligence, used by NATO and many services, that rates the reliability of a source from A, completely reliable, to F, cannot be judged, and the credibility of the information from 1, confirmed, to 6, cannot be judged. Rating the two separately prevents a trusted source from lending weight to an unverified claim.

See alsoSource criticism, OSINT

A capable, well-resourced attacker, usually linked to a state, that gains access to networks and stays undetected for long periods to steal information or prepare disruption. Security firms number such groups, as in APT28 and APT29, both attributed by Western governments to Russian intelligence services.

See alsoAttribution (cyber)

The free trade area agreed by members of the African Union in Kigali in March 2018, in force since May 2019, with trading under its rules beginning on 1 January 2021. Its secretariat is in Accra; it aims to remove tariffs on most goods traded between African countries, whose trade with one another is a small share of their total trade.

SourceAfrican Union

See alsoFree trade area, Rules of origin

A Russian military formation under the defence ministry that took over much of the Wagner Group's role in Africa after the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023. It has deployed to Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and replaced Wagner entirely in Mali in June 2025, bringing Russian security support in Africa under direct state control.

See alsoWagner Group, Sahel, Alliance of Sahel States

The continental organisation of African states, launched in Durban in 2002 to replace the Organisation of African Unity of 1963, with its headquarters in Addis Ababa. Unlike its predecessor, its Constitutive Act gives it the right to intervene in a member state in grave circumstances: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

SourceConstitutive Act of the African Union, Article 4(h)

See alsoResponsibility to protect

Sand, gravel and crushed rock used in construction, above all in concrete and asphalt, and as fill for land reclamation. Desert sand is generally unsuitable for concrete because wind erosion leaves its grains too smooth and round to bind well.

SourceUNEP

A multilateral development bank proposed by China and based in Beijing, which began operations in January 2016. Britain and other European countries joined as founding members despite objections from Washington, while the United States and Japan stayed out; it often co-finances projects with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

See alsoNew Development Bank, Belt and Road Initiative, World Bank

The Automatic Identification System, a radio transponder that broadcasts a ship's identity, position, course and speed to other ships and shore stations. Under the SOLAS convention it is required on ships of 300 gross tonnage and above on international voyages and on all passenger ships; switching it off is a hallmark of sanctions evasion.

SourceIMO, SOLAS Chapter V

See alsoShadow fleet, Ship-to-ship transfer, SOLAS

The war of independence of 1954 to 1962 fought by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against France, which treated Algeria as part of its national territory and had about a million European settlers there. It brought down the Fourth Republic in 1958, returning de Gaulle to power, and ended with the Évian Accords, prepared in talks facilitated by Swiss diplomats.

See alsoDecolonisation, Suez crisis

A grouping of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, all ruled by military governments after coups between 2020 and 2023, formed as a mutual defence pact in September 2023 and turned into a confederation in July 2024. Its members expelled French forces, left ECOWAS and turned to Russia for security support.

See alsoSahel, ECOWAS, Africa Corps

A structured method, developed by Richards Heuer at the CIA, in which the analyst lists all plausible explanations and tests each piece of evidence against every one, looking for evidence that rules hypotheses out rather than evidence that confirms a favourite. It is designed to counter confirmation bias.

See alsoRed teaming, Words of estimative probability

The formal incorporation by a state of territory that belongs to or is claimed by another. Annexation by force is prohibited under international law and other states are expected not to recognise it; the UN General Assembly affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

See alsoProhibition of the use of force, Recognition of states

A duty imposed on imports sold below their normal value, usually the price in the exporter's home market, when this causes or threatens material injury to an industry in the importing country. It is the most widely used trade remedy; the WTO Anti-Dumping Agreement sets the conditions for investigations and duties, and countervailing duties play the same role against foreign subsidies.

SourceWTO Anti-Dumping Agreement

See alsoSafeguard, Tariff

Laws and controls that oblige banks and other businesses to identify their customers, monitor transactions and report suspicions, so that proceeds of crime cannot be disguised as legitimate. International standards are set by the FATF; the EU set up a new authority, AMLA, in Frankfurt in 2024.

SourceFinancial Action Task Force (FATF)

See alsoFATF, Know your customer, Beneficial ownership

A test of a weapon designed to disable or destroy satellites. Destructive tests that struck satellites with missiles, by China in 2007, the United States in 2008, India in 2019 and Russia in 2021, created debris; the United States declared a moratorium on destructive direct-ascent tests in 2022, which a number of states joined.

See alsoKessler syndrome, Outer Space Treaty

A scale devised by the American Petroleum Institute that measures how heavy or light a petroleum liquid is compared with water; oil above 10 degrees floats on water. Light crudes with a high API gravity yield more petrol and diesel and usually sell at a premium, while heavy crudes such as those of Venezuela need more complex refining.

SourceAmerican Petroleum Institute

See alsoSweet and sour crude, Orinoco Belt

The standing body of seven members, set up in 1995 under the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding, that hears appeals on questions of law in panel reports, with three members sitting on each appeal. Since it lost its quorum in December 2019, a panel report that is appealed cannot be adopted, which is known as appealing into the void.

SourceWTO, Dispute Settlement Understanding, Article 17

A regional organisation of 22 Arab members founded in Cairo in 1945 and headquartered there, which coordinates policy among its members. Decisions taken by majority bind only the states that accept them; it suspended Syria in 2011 over the government's repression of protests and readmitted it in 2023.

See alsoGCC, Abraham Accords

The main intergovernmental forum for the Arctic, set up by the Ottawa Declaration of 1996 and made up of the eight Arctic states, with organisations of Indigenous peoples as permanent participants. Its mandate excludes military security; the seven Western members paused cooperation with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

SourceOttawa Declaration (1996)

See alsoSvalbard, Greenland

Argentina's default on its public debt in December 2001, amid a banking crisis, weeks before the peso's peg to the dollar was abandoned in January 2002. Restructurings in 2005 and 2010 were refused by some holdouts, whose litigation in New York shaped how sovereign bonds have been written since.

See alsoVulture fund, Collective action clause, Currency peg

An agreement between warring parties to stop fighting, which suspends hostilities without formally ending the war or settling political questions. The Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953 is the best known example: no peace treaty followed, so North and South Korea remain technically at war.

See alsoKorean Demilitarized Zone, Frozen conflict

Agreements, formal or informal, that limit the numbers, types, deployment or testing of weapons in order to reduce the risk of war, its cost or its damage. Unlike disarmament, which aims to eliminate weapons, arms control accepts that they exist and seeks to make the balance more stable and predictable, often through verification.

See alsoNew START, INF Treaty, Détente

Non-binding principles for civil exploration of the Moon and beyond, launched by NASA in October 2020 with seven other countries. They cover transparency, interoperability, the extraction of space resources, which signatories hold compatible with the Outer Space Treaty, and safety zones around operations.

SourceNASA

See alsoOuter Space Treaty

The clause of the North Atlantic Treaty under which an armed attack on one or more allies in Europe or North America is considered an attack on them all, and each will take the action it deems necessary, including armed force. It has been invoked once, after the attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001.

SourceNorth Atlantic Treaty, Article 5

See alsoNATO, Article 51, Collective security

The provision of the UN Charter that preserves the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs, until the Security Council has taken the necessary measures. States acting under it must report to the Council at once, and most claims to use force without Council authorisation rest on it.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Article 51

See alsoProhibition of the use of force, Jus ad bellum and jus in bello, Article 5

Mining by individuals, families or small groups with little machinery, often informally or illegally. It supports tens of millions of people worldwide, including many in Congo's cobalt areas, and is associated with unsafe conditions, child labour and the financing of armed groups in conflict zones.

SourceOECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Mineral Supply Chains

See alsoCobalt, Conflict minerals

A regional organisation of Southeast Asian states founded in Bangkok in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand; Timor-Leste became its eleventh member in October 2025. It works by consensus and non-interference, an approach called the ASEAN way, and has negotiated with China for years over a code of conduct for the South China Sea.

See alsoSpratly Islands, South China Sea arbitration

The crisis that began on 2 July 1997 when Thailand let the baht float after failing to defend its peg to the dollar, and spread to Indonesia, South Korea and other economies with large short-term foreign debts. The IMF rescues and their conditions left lasting resentment in the region and encouraged Asian central banks to build up large reserves.

See alsoIMF, Capital controls

A Dutch company, based in Veldhoven, that makes lithography machines, the tools that project circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. It is the sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet scanners needed for the most advanced chips, so Dutch export licensing decisions on its machines have become an instrument of technology policy towards China.

See alsoEUV lithography, Foreign direct product rule

A person who has applied for international protection in another country and whose claim has not yet been decided. Not every asylum seeker is recognised as a refugee, but under international law a refugee is one because of their situation, not because of the decision that recognises it.

SourceUNHCR

See also1951 Refugee Convention

The joint declaration of August 1941 by US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill setting out principles for the postwar world, including no territorial changes against the wishes of the peoples concerned, the right of peoples to choose their government, freer trade and the abandonment of force. The Allied declaration of January 1942 endorsed it, making it a founding text of the United Nations.

See alsoSelf-determination, Fourteen Points, Yalta Conference

The process of identifying who is responsible for a cyber operation, combining technical evidence such as code and infrastructure with intelligence and political judgement. Public attribution by governments, often coordinated among allies, is a political act that can open the way to sanctions or indictments.

See alsoAdvanced persistent threat

A security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, announced in September 2021. Its first pillar is to give Australia nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines; its second covers advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and hypersonics. Australia cancelled a submarine contract with France to join it, which caused a diplomatic row.

See alsoQuad, First island chain

The status of an Orthodox church that governs itself and elects its own head, while staying in communion with the other Orthodox churches. It is usually proclaimed in a decree called a tomos; the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul issued one to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in January 2019.

The network of armed groups and governments allied with Iran against Israel and the United States, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq. Syria under Bashar al-Assad was its main state member until his fall in December 2024, which cut Iran's land route to Hezbollah.

See alsoHezbollah, Houthis, Proxy war

The strait between Yemen and Djibouti and Eritrea that connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, and thus with the Suez Canal route between Europe and Asia. After the Houthi movement began attacking merchant ships in November 2023, many shipping lines diverted around the Cape of Good Hope.

See alsoSuez Canal, Cape of Good Hope route, Chokepoint

The defence pact formed in 1955 by Turkey, Iraq, Britain, Pakistan and Iran to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East, backed by the United States without full membership. Iraq left after its revolution of 1958, the alliance was renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), and it dissolved in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution.

See alsoContainment, Eisenhower Doctrine, Iranian Revolution

The resolution of a failing bank by imposing losses on its shareholders and creditors, by writing down or converting their claims, rather than using taxpayers' money in a bail-out. Cyprus imposed losses on large depositors in 2013, and EU law has required bail-in as the first step since 2016.

SourceBank Recovery and Resolution Directive (EU)

See alsoToo big to fail, Credit Suisse rescue

The record of all economic transactions between a country's residents and the rest of the world over a period, divided into the current account, the capital account and the financial account. Because every transaction is recorded twice, the accounts sum to zero in principle; a balance of payments crisis occurs when a country can no longer finance its external payments.

SourceIMF, Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual

See alsoCurrent account, IMF

A distribution of power among states such that none can dominate the others, and the policy of preserving it by alliances or armament. Britain long pursued it towards continental Europe, and realist theorists treat it as the main mechanism by which states keep their independence in a system without a world government.

See alsoSecurity dilemma, Hedging, Sphere of influence

The letter of 2 November 1917 from the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, stating that the government favoured the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, provided nothing was done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. It was written into the League of Nations mandate for Palestine.

See alsoMandate system, UN Partition Plan for Palestine, Sykes-Picot Agreement

A daily index of the cost of chartering ships that carry dry bulk cargoes such as iron ore, coal and grain, published by the Baltic Exchange in London. It combines time-charter rates for Capesize, Panamax and Supramax vessels and is watched as an early signal of demand for raw materials.

SourceBaltic Exchange

See alsoVLCC

The Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, where 29 mostly newly independent states, among them India, China, Egypt and Indonesia, met without the colonial powers. Its ten principles on sovereignty, non-interference and peaceful coexistence fed into the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961.

See alsoNon-Aligned Movement, Decolonisation, Global South

The central bank of the United Kingdom, founded in 1694 and nationalised in 1946. It gained operational independence to set interest rates in 1997 and, after 2008, took over supervision of banks; its Monetary Policy Committee targets inflation of 2 per cent.

See alsoGilt, Black Wednesday, Lender of last resort

Japan's central bank, founded in 1882. It was the first major central bank to use quantitative easing, in 2001, and held short-term rates below zero and capped long-term bond yields from 2016 until March 2024. Its low rates made the yen a favoured funding currency for carry trades.

See alsoYield curve control, Carry trade, Quantitative easing

A rush by depositors to withdraw their money from a bank they fear may fail, which can bring down even a solvent bank because its assets cannot be sold quickly. Online banking has made runs faster: Silicon Valley Bank lost about 42 billion dollars of deposits in a single day in March 2023.

See alsoLender of last resort, Duration, Too big to fail

The standard unit of volume in the oil industry, equal to 42 US gallons or about 159 litres. Production, trade and consumption are usually stated in barrels per day, and prices in dollars per barrel; because crudes differ in density, a tonne of oil contains roughly seven to eight barrels depending on the grade.

See alsoAPI gravity, Brent

How often an event occurs in a relevant reference class, such as the share of coups that succeed or of wars that end within a year, used as the starting point for a forecast before case-specific evidence. Neglecting it, by focusing on a vivid story, is one of the most common errors in judgement.

See alsoBrier score, Superforecasting

The committee of bank supervisors, founded in 1974 and hosted by the BIS in Basel, that sets global standards for bank capital and liquidity known as the Basel Accords. The latest, Basel III, was agreed after the 2008 crisis; national authorities decide how and when to implement it.

SourceBank for International Settlements (BIS)

See alsoBIS, Financial Stability Board, Global financial crisis

China's programme of infrastructure building and lending abroad announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, made up of an overland Silk Road Economic Belt and a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Financed largely by Chinese state banks, it covers ports, railways and power plants in well over 100 countries and has raised concerns about debt sustainability in some borrowers.

See alsoDebt-trap diplomacy, AIIB

A reference price, rate or index used to settle contracts and value assets, such as Brent for oil or SOFR for dollar interest rates. Whoever compiles a benchmark has influence over a market, which is why their governance is regulated and why rival states promote their own.

See alsoLIBOR, Brent, Shanghai crude oil futures

The natural persons who ultimately own or control a company, trust or other legal entity, even when it is held through nominees or chains of companies. FATF standards require countries to make this information available to authorities, since anonymous ownership is used to hide criminal money and evade sanctions.

SourceFinancial Action Task Force (FATF)

See alsoAnti-money laundering, Know your customer

The Independent Commission of Experts set up by the Swiss government in 1996 under the historian Jean-François Bergier to investigate Switzerland's relations with Nazi Germany, including gold purchases, dormant accounts and refugee policy. Its final report of 2002 found that the authorities had turned refugees away at the border although they knew of the danger they faced.

See alsoWashington Agreement of 1946, Neutrality

The Soviet closure of all road, rail and canal routes into the Western sectors of Berlin from June 1948 to May 1949, after the Western powers introduced a new currency in their zones of Germany. The United States and Britain supplied the city by air for almost a year, and the crisis hastened the founding of NATO and of two German states in 1949.

See alsoBerlin Wall, NATO, Cold War

The conference of 1884 to 1885, convened by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, at which 14 states set rules for European claims on the African coast, requiring effective occupation, and accepted King Leopold II's control of the Congo basin, which became the Congo Free State. It did not itself partition Africa, but it became the symbol of the Scramble for Africa.

See alsoScramble for Africa, Decolonisation

The fortified barrier built by East Germany from August 1961 around West Berlin to stop its citizens fleeing to the West, as millions had done since 1949. Its opening on 9 November 1989 became the symbol of the end of the Cold War in Europe, and Germany was reunified less than a year later.

See alsoBerlin Blockade, Iron Curtain, Two Plus Four Treaty

The bank for central banks, founded in 1930 to handle German reparation payments and based in Basel. It manages part of central banks' reserves and hosts the committees that set international financial standards, notably the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, whose Basel accords define how much capital banks must hold.

See alsoCentral bank swap line, IMF

An arrangement agreed in Istanbul in July 2022 between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations that allowed grain and fertiliser to be shipped from Ukrainian ports through a protected corridor, with ships inspected in Istanbul. Russia withdrew in July 2023, after which Ukraine opened its own corridor along the western Black Sea coast.

SourceUnited Nations

See alsoFood security, Turkish Straits

16 September 1992, when the UK withdrew sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism after failing to hold its value despite raising interest rates and spending reserves. Speculators, notably George Soros's fund, profited; the episode shaped British scepticism of the single currency.

See alsoERM, Hedge fund, Bank of England

A statement agreed at the first AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in England in November 2023, signed by 28 countries, among them the United States and China, and the EU. It recognised risks from the most capable AI models and launched a series of summits continued in Seoul and Paris.

See alsoEU AI Act

The line drawn by the United Nations in 2000 to confirm Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which serves as a de facto border though it is not an agreed international boundary. It is monitored by the UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, whose mandate the Security Council extended in August 2025 for a final time, to 31 December 2026.

See alsoHezbollah, UN peacekeeping

A bound tariff is the maximum rate a WTO member has committed not to exceed on a product, recorded in its schedule of concessions; the applied rate is the one it actually charges. The gap between the two, called binding overhang, lets a government raise tariffs up to the bound rate without breaking WTO rules.

SourceWTO

See alsoTariff, WTO

The main international benchmark for crude oil, based on cargoes of light, sweet crude loading in the North Sea, against which most of the world's internationally traded oil is priced. The underlying basket has been widened over time beyond the original Brent field, and since 2023 it has included WTI Midland crude shipped from the United States.

SourceS&P Global Commodity Insights (Platts); ICE Futures Europe

See alsoWTI, Sweet and sour crude, Contango and backwardation

The monetary order agreed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, under which currencies were pegged to the US dollar and the dollar was convertible into gold for foreign governments at 35 dollars an ounce. The conference also created the IMF and the World Bank; the system ended after President Nixon suspended gold convertibility in August 1971, and by 1973 the main currencies floated.

See alsoIMF, Gold standard, Triffin dilemma

The Soviet position, set out after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, that socialist states had the right and duty to intervene when socialism was threatened in any one of them, which limited the sovereignty of Moscow's allies. Mikhail Gorbachev abandoned it in the late 1980s, allowing the revolutions of 1989 to proceed without Soviet intervention.

See alsoPrague Spring, Sphere of influence, Revolutions of 1989

A grouping of large emerging economies, formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, which held their first summit in 2009, joined by South Africa in 2010 and enlarged from 2024 with members including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. It has no charter or secretariat, and its members differ on how far to challenge the dollar.

See alsoNew Development Bank, De-dollarisation, Renminbi

A measure of the accuracy of probability forecasts: the mean squared difference between the probabilities given and what happened, scored 1 if the event occurred and 0 if not. Lower is better and a perfect forecaster scores 0; it rewards both being right and being well calibrated.

See alsoSuperforecasting, Base rate, Words of estimative probability

The process by which EU rules become global standards because multinational firms find it simpler to apply the strictest market's rules everywhere, a term coined by the legal scholar Anu Bradford. The General Data Protection Regulation is the usual example; whether the AI Act will follow is debated.

See alsoEU AI Act, Digital sovereignty

The Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime of 2001, the first international treaty on crimes committed through computer networks, which harmonises offences and eases cooperation on electronic evidence. It is open to non-members, and parties include the United States and Japan; Russia has refused to join.

SourceCouncil of Europe

See alsoTallinn Manual

The document of December 1994 in which the United States, Britain and Russia gave security assurances to Ukraine, including respect for its independence, sovereignty and existing borders, when it joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and gave up the Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil. The assurances were political rather than a guarantee of military protection.

See alsoNon-Proliferation Treaty, Annexation

A smaller state lying between two rival powers whose independence or neutrality reduces the risk of direct conflict between them. Afghanistan between the Russian and British empires in the 19th century is a classic case; Mongolia between China and Russia is another.

See alsoSphere of influence, Finlandisation

A bond issued by the German federal government, in particular the ten-year Bundesanleihe. Because Germany is regarded as the safest large borrower in the euro area, the Bund serves as the benchmark against which the yields of other euro area governments are measured.

SourceGerman Finance Agency (Finanzagentur)

See alsoSpread, Sovereign bond, Euro area

The Summit on Peace in Ukraine hosted by Switzerland at the Bürgenstock resort in central Switzerland on 15 and 16 June 2024, attended by 92 states and eight international organisations. Russia was not invited; the final communiqué covered nuclear safety, food security and prisoner exchanges, and several major states of the Global South, including India, Brazil and South Africa, did not sign it.

See alsoGood offices, Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant

The coastal facility where an undersea cable comes ashore and connects to terrestrial networks, supplying power to the cable's repeaters and terminating its optical signals. Landing stations are clustered in a few places, such as Marseille or Fortaleza, which makes them points of concentrated risk for whole regions.

See alsoUndersea cable, Cable repair ship

A specialised vessel that locates, lifts and splices damaged undersea cables, usually under regional maintenance agreements shared among cable owners. The world fleet is small and ageing, so repair after an anchor drag or earthquake can take weeks, and states increasingly count these ships as strategic assets.

See alsoUndersea cable, Cable landing station

The two frameworks agreed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with US President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in September 1978. They led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, under which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognise Israel.

See alsoSix-Day War, Yom Kippur War, Oslo Accords

The sea route between Europe and Asia around the southern tip of Africa, the alternative to the Suez Canal. It adds roughly 3,500 nautical miles and about ten days or more to a voyage between Asia and northern Europe, so diversions raise freight rates, fuel use and the number of ships needed.

See alsoSuez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb

Measures that restrict the flow of money into or out of a country, such as taxes on foreign borrowing, limits on buying foreign currency or bans on taking funds abroad. Once treated as distortions, they gained some acceptance after the IMF recognised in 2012 that they can help manage volatile flows; China relies on them heavily.

See alsoImpossible trinity, Renminbi, Asian financial crisis

The rapid movement of money out of a country by residents and foreign investors, usually in response to political or economic danger such as a crisis, war or expected devaluation. It drains reserves and weakens the currency, and governments often respond with capital controls.

See alsoCapital controls

Putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions so that polluters bear part of the cost of the damage, either through a tax per tonne of carbon dioxide or through an emissions trading system that caps total emissions and lets permits be traded. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement allows countries to trade emission reductions with each other.

SourceWorld Bank, State and Trends of Carbon Pricing

See alsoEU ETS, CBAM, Paris Agreement

A strategy of borrowing in a currency with low interest rates and investing in one with higher rates, profiting from the difference as long as exchange rates stay steady. Sudden unwinding causes sharp currency moves, as when the yen jumped in August 2024 after the Bank of Japan raised rates.

See alsoBank of Japan, Safe-haven currency

The statement by US President Jimmy Carter in January 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that an attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region would be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States and repelled by any means necessary, including military force. It has underpinned the American military presence in the Gulf ever since.

See alsoEisenhower Doctrine, Strait of Hormuz, Soviet-Afghan War

The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which makes importers of carbon-intensive goods pay a carbon price equivalent to that faced by EU producers under the Emissions Trading System. It covers iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen; reporting began in October 2023, and goods imported from January 2026 carry a payment obligation, settled with certificates sold from February 2027.

SourceRegulation (EU) 2023/956

See alsoEU ETS, Carbon pricing

Money issued in digital form by a central bank as a direct claim on it, either for the public (retail) or for transfers between banks (wholesale). Most central banks are studying one; the Bahamas launched the first national retail version in 2020, and China's e-CNY is the largest pilot.

SourceBank for International Settlements (BIS)

See alsoe-CNY, Digital euro, mBridge

The legal and practical freedom of a central bank to set monetary policy without instructions from the government. It is meant to protect price stability from short-term political pressure; the Bank of England gained operational independence in 1997, and the EU treaties forbid the ECB from taking instructions.

See alsoInflation targeting, ECB, Federal Reserve

An agreement between two central banks to exchange currencies, letting one lend the other's currency to its own banks in a crisis. The US Federal Reserve's standing dollar swap lines with the central banks of the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Canada, made permanent in 2013, make it the world's dollar lender of last resort; China has signed renminbi swap lines with dozens of countries.

See alsoReserve currency, Renminbi, BIS

The period from the First Opium War of 1839 to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, presented in Chinese official history as one of military defeat, foreign occupation and unequal treaties. The narrative is a central theme of patriotic education in China and frames Beijing's positions on Taiwan, Hong Kong and territorial disputes.

See alsoOpium Wars, Unequal treaties, One China

The name of two currencies, the West African and the Central African CFA franc, used by 14 countries, most of them former French colonies, and pegged to the euro at a fixed rate guaranteed by the French Treasury. Reforms announced in 2019 ended the requirement for the West African central bank to keep half its reserves in Paris.

See alsoImpossible trinity, Decolonisation

An Indian Ocean archipelago that Britain separated from Mauritius in 1965 to form the British Indian Ocean Territory, expelling the inhabitants for a US base on Diego Garcia. After a 2019 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, Britain signed a treaty in May 2025 to cede sovereignty while keeping the base for 99 years; it had not entered into force by October 2026.

See alsoDecolonisation, ICJ

The part of the UN Charter that lets the Security Council act with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression. Once it has made such a determination under Article 39, it may order measures not involving force, such as sanctions, under Article 41, or authorise military action under Article 42.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Articles 39 to 51

See alsoUN Security Council, UN sanctions, Article 51

A US law signed in August 2022 that provides about 52.7 billion dollars for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, research and workforce training, together with a tax credit for investment in chip plants. Companies receiving grants are restricted from expanding advanced chip capacity in China and other countries of concern.

SourceUS Department of Commerce

See alsoEuropean Chips Act, Foreign direct product rule

A narrow channel on a widely used sea route, such as a strait or a canal, through which a large share of seaborne trade passes, so that a disruption there affects markets far away. The US Energy Information Administration counts the Strait of Hormuz among the most important oil chokepoints.

SourceUS Energy Information Administration (EIA)

A system for cross-border payments in renminbi, launched by the People's Bank of China in 2015, which clears and settles payments rather than only carrying messages. Many of its participants still exchange payment instructions through SWIFT, so it extends the reach of the Chinese currency more than it replaces the Belgian network.

SourcePeople's Bank of China

See alsoSWIFT, Renminbi, De-dollarisation

An organisation of former Soviet republics created in December 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved, meant to manage the break-up and keep economic and security links. It has remained loose and largely symbolic; Georgia withdrew after its 2008 war with Russia, and Ukraine ended its participation in 2018.

See alsoNear abroad, CSTO, Eurasian Economic Union

Two ideal types of nationalism: civic nationalism defines the nation by shared citizenship, institutions and political values, ethnic nationalism by common descent, language or religion. The distinction, associated with the historian Hans Kohn, helps explain different rules on citizenship, but most real nationalisms mix both.

See alsoIrredentism

The operator of some of the world's largest derivatives exchanges, based in Chicago and including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Mercantile Exchange. The WTI crude oil futures contract and benchmark contracts for US interest rates, grains and gold trade on its markets.

See alsoWTI, Futures, ICE

A group of states that acts together on a specific mission outside a standing alliance or without a UN mandate. The phrase was widely used for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; in 2025 Britain and France revived it for a group of countries planning security support for Ukraine after any ceasefire.

See alsoMinilateralism, Security guarantee

A metal used mainly in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries and in superalloys, mined largely as a by-product of copper and nickel. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces most of the world's supply and China refines most of it; in February 2025 Congo suspended cobalt exports to support prices, replacing the ban with export quotas from October 2025.

SourceUS Geological Survey (USGS), Mineral Commodity Summaries

See alsoCopperbelt, Artisanal and small-scale mining, Resource nationalism

The use of threats, or limited force, to persuade an adversary to stop or undo an action, as opposed to defeating it outright. The political scientist Alexander George developed the concept; the naval quarantine during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is the standard example of threats paired with an offer that let the other side back down.

See alsoDeterrence, Red line, Economic coercion

The IMF dataset that reports, each quarter, the currencies in which central banks hold their foreign-exchange reserves, based on confidential returns from member countries. It shows the dollar's share falling from about 71 per cent in 1999 to under 60 per cent in the 2020s, with the euro second and the renminbi holding a small share.

SourceInternational Monetary Fund (IMF)

See alsoReserve currency, De-dollarisation

The rivalry between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies, from the late 1940s until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The two never fought each other directly; competition ran through an arms race, alliances, proxy wars, propaganda and the race into space.

See alsoContainment, Proxy war, Détente

A clause in a bond contract that lets a qualified majority of bondholders agree to a restructuring that then binds all holders, including those who voted against. Such clauses limit the ability of holdouts to block a deal; new euro area government bonds with a maturity of more than one year have had to include them since 2013.

See alsoVulture fund, Haircut, Sovereign bond

A system in which all states agree to treat aggression against any of them as a concern of all and to act together against the aggressor, even if it is one of their own number. It differs from collective defence, as in NATO, which is directed against threats from outside the group; the League of Nations and the UN Charter rest on the idea.

See alsoLeague of Nations, Chapter VII, NATO

The economic organisation founded in 1949 by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies as a response to the Marshall Plan, later joined by Mongolia, Cuba and Vietnam. It coordinated planning and trade within the socialist bloc, much of it barter at negotiated prices, and was dissolved in 1991.

See alsoWarsaw Pact, Marshall Plan

A company that buys, ships, stores, blends and sells physical commodities such as oil, metals and grain, earning money from logistics and price differences rather than only from price moves. Switzerland is a leading hub: Glencore, Trafigura, Vitol, Gunvor and Mercuria all run major trading operations from Geneva or the canton of Zug.

See alsoGlencore, LME

The framework through which the member states of the European Union agree common positions and actions on foreign policy and security, including sanctions and civilian and military missions. Created by the Maastricht Treaty in force in 1993, it largely requires unanimity, so a single member state can block a decision; it is led by the High Representative.

SourceTreaty on European Union, Title V

See alsoPESCO, Targeted sanctions

The process agreed by the G20 in November 2020 for restructuring the debts of low-income countries, bringing China and other newer creditors together with the Paris Club. Chad, Zambia, Ethiopia and Ghana applied, but agreements took years to reach, which drew criticism of the process.

SourceG20 and Paris Club

See alsoParis Club, Sovereign default, Debt-trap diplomacy

The OECD standard, adopted in 2014, under which financial institutions collect information on accounts held by foreign tax residents and their governments exchange it automatically each year. More than 100 jurisdictions take part, including Switzerland; the United States uses its own FATCA rules instead.

SourceOrganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

See alsoSwiss banking secrecy, FATCA

Agreements under which the United States provides funding and defence to the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau, in return for exclusive military access to their territory and waters. Their citizens can live and work in the United States; the economic terms were renewed in 2023 and 2024.

See alsoSecond island chain

The principle that a country gains from trade by specialising in goods it produces at a lower opportunity cost than others, even if it is less efficient at making everything. David Ricardo set it out in 1817 with the example of English cloth and Portuguese wine; it remains the basic economic argument for free trade.

See alsoGlobal value chain, Tariff

The practice by which the great powers of Europe, at first Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain and from 1818 also France, settled disputes through conferences after the Congress of Vienna. It helped keep the peace among them for much of the 19th century and is often cited as an early model of great-power management of the international order.

See alsoCongress of Vienna, Balance of power, Collective security

Usually tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, known as 3TG, when their extraction and trade finance armed groups. Section 1502 of the US Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and an EU regulation applied since 2021 require companies to check whether these minerals in their supply chains come from conflict-affected areas such as eastern Congo.

SourceEU Regulation 2017/821; US Dodd-Frank Act, Section 1502

See alsoArtisanal and small-scale mining, Cobalt

A third factor that influences both of two variables and so creates an apparent relationship between them. Wealth, for instance, can drive both democracy and longevity; controlling for confounders is necessary before reading a correlation as evidence of cause.

See alsoCorrelation and split sample

Two wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Zaire: the first, of 1996 to 1997, in which rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko, and the second, of 1998 to 2003, which drew in the armies of several African states. Armed groups have kept fighting in the mineral-rich east since then.

See alsoConflict minerals, Cobalt, Artisanal and small-scale mining

The conference of 1814 to 1815 at which the powers that had defeated Napoleon redrew the map of Europe around a balance among the great states; its Final Act was signed in June 1815. In a declaration signed in Paris on 20 November 1815, the powers recognised the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland and the inviolability of its territory.

See alsoConcert of Europe, Neutrality, Balance of power

The American strategy in the Cold War of resisting the expansion of Soviet power and influence, in the expectation that the Soviet system would eventually mellow or break up. It was set out by the diplomat George Kennan in his Long Telegram of 1946 and his article signed X in 1947, and shaped the Truman Doctrine and NATO.

See alsoCold War, Eisenhower Doctrine, NATO

A market is in contango when prices for future delivery are above the spot price, and in backwardation when they are below it. Steep contango rewards traders who buy oil now and store it, sometimes on tankers at sea; backwardation usually signals tight supply and low inventories.

See alsoBrent, WTI

A mineral-rich region straddling northern Zambia and the Katanga area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that holds some of the world's richest deposits of copper and cobalt. Its exports leave by rail and road to ports on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, a reason for rival Western and Chinese investment in corridors such as the Lobito line to Angola.

See alsoCobalt, Artisanal and small-scale mining

A correlation coefficient measures how closely two series move together along a straight line, on a scale from minus 1 to plus 1; on its own it does not show that one causes the other. A split-sample check estimates the same relationship separately on parts of the data, such as each half of the period, to see whether it holds.

An arrangement in which one bank holds accounts for another, usually abroad, and makes and receives payments on its behalf. Most cross-border payments pass through such chains; because dollar transfers settle through US correspondents, US authorities can reach foreign banks with sanctions.

See alsoSWIFT, Secondary sanctions, Fedwire and CHIPS

An intergovernmental organisation founded in 1949 and based in Strasbourg, separate from the European Union, which promotes human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It oversees the European Convention on Human Rights, enforced by the European Court of Human Rights; Russia was expelled in March 2022 after invading Ukraine.

See alsoEuropean Political Community, OSCE

The risk that political, economic or legal conditions in a country cause losses to foreign investors or lenders, beyond the risks of the business itself. It includes default, currency inconvertibility, expropriation and war, and is scored by rating agencies, export credit agencies and the OECD.

See alsoPolitical risk insurance, Sovereign credit rating, Emerging market

The trade agreement signed in March 2018 by 11 Pacific Rim countries after the United States withdrew from the original Trans-Pacific Partnership in January 2017; it entered into force at the end of 2018. The United Kingdom joined in December 2024 as its first new member, and China and Taiwan both applied in 2021.

See alsoRCEP, Free trade area

A contract in which one party pays a regular premium and the other agrees to compensate it if a named borrower, such as a company or a government, suffers a credit event like a default. Premiums on sovereign swaps are read as a market estimate of default risk; Greek swaps paid out in 2012.

SourceInternational Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA)

See alsoSovereign default, Country risk

The takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS for 3 billion francs, arranged by the Swiss government, the Swiss National Bank and FINMA on 19 March 2023 using emergency law. About 16 billion francs of the bank's AT1 bonds were written off, prompting legal challenges and a debate on how Switzerland regulates its remaining global bank.

See alsoUBS, FINMA, Too big to fail

A peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea, transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republic in 1954 and part of independent Ukraine from 1991. Russia annexed it in March 2014 after a referendum held under military control, which the UN General Assembly declared invalid; Sevastopol is home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet.

See alsoAnnexation, Kerch Strait, Budapest Memorandum

Minerals that a government judges essential to its economy or security and whose supply is at risk, for example because production or processing is concentrated in a few countries. Lists differ by country and are revised; most include lithium, cobalt, graphite, rare earths and gallium.

SourceUS Geological Survey (USGS); European Commission

See alsoCritical Raw Materials Act, Rare earth elements

An EU regulation in force since May 2024 that sets 2030 benchmarks for the Union's own capacity in strategic raw materials: 10 per cent of its needs from domestic extraction, 40 per cent from processing and 25 per cent from recycling. It also aims to keep dependence on any single non-EU country below 65 per cent for each strategic material.

SourceRegulation (EU) 2024/1252

See alsoCritical minerals, Rare earth elements

A military alliance led by Russia, based on a Collective Security Treaty signed in Tashkent in 1992 and turned into an organisation in 2002. Its members are Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, although Armenia froze its participation in 2024. Its first collective deployment was to Kazakhstan in January 2022, during unrest there.

SourceCollective Security Treaty (1992)

See alsoNATO, SCO

The treaty of 1996 that bans all nuclear explosions, for military or civilian purposes. It cannot enter into force until 44 states with nuclear technology, listed in its Annex 2, have ratified it, and several, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, have not; Russia withdrew its ratification in 2023. A monitoring network is nonetheless in operation.

SourcePreparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO)

See alsoNon-Proliferation Treaty, Arms control

The confrontation of October 1962 after American reconnaissance found Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba. After a naval quarantine and 13 days of negotiation, the Soviet Union withdrew the missiles in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret undertaking to remove American missiles from Turkey; a hotline between Washington and Moscow followed in 1963.

See alsoDeterrence, Mutually assured destruction, Arms control

The buying or selling of currencies by a central bank or finance ministry to influence the exchange rate. Selling reserves supports a weak currency; buying foreign currency, as Switzerland did in large amounts after 2008, restrains a strong one. Coordinated action, as in the Plaza Accord of 1985, is rare.

See alsoForeign exchange reserves, Plaza Accord, Currency manipulator

A designation that the US Treasury can give, under laws of 1988 and 2015 and in its semi-annual report to Congress, to a trading partner it judges to be keeping its currency undervalued for unfair advantage. The Treasury labelled China a manipulator in August 2019 and withdrew the label in January 2020.

SourceUS Department of the Treasury

See alsoCurrency intervention, Renminbi

A policy of fixing the exchange rate of a currency to another currency or a basket. A currency board is the strictest form, in which domestic money must be fully backed by the anchor currency; Hong Kong has run one tied to the US dollar since 1983, and most Gulf currencies are pegged to the dollar.

See alsoImpossible trinity, CFA franc, Dollarisation

The part of the balance of payments that records trade in goods and services, income from investment and work abroad, and transfers such as remittances. A deficit must be financed by borrowing from foreigners or selling them assets; China, Germany and the large oil exporters have run persistent surpluses, while the United States has run deficits in most years since the early 1980s.

See alsoBalance of payments, Exorbitant privilege

Rules binding on all states that arise from a general practice of states accepted as law, the second element being known as opinio juris. It is listed with treaties as a source of law in the Statute of the International Court of Justice; much of the law of the sea and of armed conflict was customary before it was written down.

SourceStatute of the International Court of Justice, Article 38

See alsoICJ, UNCLOS

A free trade area whose members also apply a common external tariff and a common trade policy towards the rest of the world, so that goods circulating inside need no rules of origin. The European Union has formed one since 1968; its members cannot sign separate tariff agreements, which made the customs union central to the debate over Brexit.

SourceGATT, Article XXIV

See alsoFree trade area, Rules of origin

The method by which almost all single-crystal silicon for chips is grown: a seed crystal is dipped into molten silicon and slowly pulled upwards while rotating, forming a cylindrical ingot. It is named after the Polish chemist Jan Czochralski, who discovered it in 1916, and depends on crucibles made of high-purity quartz.

See alsoHigh-purity quartz, Silicon wafer

A building housing servers, storage and network equipment that runs cloud services and trains and runs AI models. Large sites need power on the scale of a small town and water or air for cooling, so their location depends as much on grid capacity and energy prices as on proximity to users.

The peace agreement negotiated at Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 and signed in Paris in December, which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It kept Bosnia as a single state of two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and created an international High Representative to oversee its civilian implementation.

See alsoYugoslav Wars

A reduction in the use of the US dollar in trade invoicing, payments, foreign-exchange reserves or borrowing, for example when trade is settled in yuan.

A policy of reducing exposure to a rival economy in sensitive sectors while keeping trade with it otherwise open, as opposed to full decoupling. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, set out the approach towards China in March 2023, and G7 leaders adopted the formula in May 2023.

See alsoReshoring, nearshoring and friend-shoring, Investment screening, Export controls

The claim that a lender, usually China, extends loans that borrowers cannot repay in order to gain strategic assets or influence when they default. Brahma Chellaney coined the term in 2017, and Sri Lanka's 99-year lease of Hambantota port to a Chinese company that year is the usual example; several studies have found little evidence of a deliberate strategy.

See alsoBelt and Road Initiative, Common Framework

The process by which colonies and other dependent territories became independent states, concentrated between 1945 and the mid-1970s, when most of Asia and Africa gained independence. In resolution 1514 of December 1960, the UN General Assembly declared the right of colonial peoples to independence.

SourceUnited Nations

The extraction of minerals from the deep ocean floor, chiefly polymetallic nodules rich in nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, but also seafloor sulphides and cobalt-rich crusts. Commercial mining in international waters awaits rules that the International Seabed Authority has long been negotiating, although in 2025 the United States moved to license it under its own law. Supporters cite demand for battery metals; scientists warn of lasting damage to little-known ecosystems.

See alsoISA, Cobalt

The boost to economic growth possible when falling fertility leaves a large working-age population with relatively few dependants. It is not automatic: it depends on jobs, education and savings, and East Asia's rapid growth from the 1960s is the example most often cited.

SourceUN Population Fund (UNFPA)

See alsoDependency ratio, Demographic transition, Youth bulge

The shift from high birth and death rates to low ones as societies develop: death rates fall first, so the population grows fast, before fertility follows. Most of Europe and East Asia completed it in the 20th century, while much of sub-Saharan Africa is still in the middle stages.

See alsoDemographic dividend, Total fertility rate, Youth bulge

The number of people of an age usually considered dependent, under 15 and 65 or over, per 100 people of working age, 15 to 64. The old-age dependency ratio counts only those 65 or over; its rise in ageing societies puts pressure on pensions, health budgets and military recruitment.

SourceUN Population Division

See alsoSuper-aged society, Demographic dividend, Total fertility rate

The easing of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Its high points were the arms control agreements of 1972, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement (SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975; it ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

See alsoCold War, Arms control

Preventing an adversary from acting by convincing it that the costs will exceed the gains. Deterrence by punishment threatens retaliation after an attack; deterrence by denial aims to make an attack fail. Both depend on capability, on the credibility of the threat, and on the adversary understanding it.

See alsoExtended deterrence, Mutually assured destruction

A population living outside the country it or its ancestors came from while keeping ties to it. States court their diasporas for remittances, investment, votes and lobbying, while some use intelligence services to watch or intimidate critics abroad, a practice called transnational repression.

See alsoRemittances

A proposed digital form of cash that the ECB would issue for payments throughout the euro area, intended in part to reduce reliance on non-European card schemes and payment providers. It requires an EU regulation, which by mid-2026 had entered final negotiations between the European Parliament and member states; the ECB has said first issuance could follow in 2029.

SourceEuropean Central Bank (ECB)

See alsoCentral bank digital currency, ECB, Stablecoin

The ability of a state or bloc to control the digital infrastructure, data and technologies on which its economy and security depend. In the EU the term motivates rules on data, cloud services and platforms; in China and Russia it more often denotes state control over online content.

See alsoSplinternet, Brussels effect

The WTO agreement that sets the procedure for trade disputes: consultations, then a panel of experts, an optional appeal to the Appellate Body, and authorised retaliation if a losing member does not comply. Reports are adopted unless the members decide by consensus to reject them, a rule known as negative consensus, which made the system close to automatic.

SourceWTO

See alsoAppellate Body (WTO), MPIA, WTO

The break-up of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states in 1991, after a failed coup by hardliners in August. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the union dissolved in the Belovezha Accords of 8 December, Gorbachev resigned on 25 December, and Russia took over the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council.

See alsoNear abroad, Budapest Memorandum, Perestroika and glasnost

The official adoption of a foreign currency, usually the US dollar, as legal tender in place of a national one, as in Panama, in Ecuador since 2000 and in El Salvador since 2001. It removes exchange-rate risk and can end high inflation, but the country gives up its own monetary policy and its central bank can no longer act fully as lender of last resort.

See alsoDe-dollarisation, Impossible trinity

The argument, stated by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, that the fall of one country in Southeast Asia to communism would cause its neighbours to fall in turn, like a row of dominoes. It was used to justify American involvement in Indochina, and the term has since been applied to any feared chain of political collapses.

See alsoContainment, Vietnam War

The industrial and coal-mining region of eastern Ukraine, covering the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russian-backed separatists seized parts of it in 2014; Russia recognised their self-proclaimed republics in February 2022, invaded days later and claimed to annex both oblasts, with Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, in September 2022.

See alsoMinsk agreements, Crimea, Annexation

The controversy of the 1990s over assets of Holocaust victims left in Swiss bank accounts and over Swiss dealings in Nazi gold. It ended with a settlement of 1.25 billion dollars by UBS and Credit Suisse in 1998, and the government-appointed Bergier Commission published its final report on Switzerland's wartime role in 2002.

See alsoSwiss banking secrecy, Swiss National Bank

The EU rules that, until June 2026, determined which state must examine an asylum application, as a rule the first member state the applicant entered; Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein also applied them. They placed most of the burden on frontier states such as Italy and Greece, and were replaced on 12 June 2026 by the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation under the Pact on Migration and Asylum.

SourceEuropean Union

See alsoPact on Migration and Asylum, Schengen Area

The boundary of about 2,600 km between Afghanistan and British India agreed in 1893 by the British official Mortimer Durand and Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, which divided the Pashtun lands. Pakistan inherited it as its border in 1947, but no Afghan government, the Taliban included, has formally recognised it.

See alsoGreat Game, Buffer state, Partition of India

A measure of how sensitive a bond's price is to changes in interest rates, expressed in years. The longer the duration, the more the price falls when rates rise; losses on long-dated bonds after rates rose in 2022 contributed to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023.

See alsoYield (bond), Bank run

The harm to manufacturing and other export sectors when a resource boom drives up the exchange rate and draws labour and capital away from them. The Economist coined the term in 1977 to describe the Netherlands after the discovery of the Groningen gas field.

See alsoResource curse, Sovereign wealth fund

The digital renminbi issued by the People's Bank of China, distributed through commercial banks and payment apps and piloted in Chinese cities since 2020. It is the most advanced retail central bank digital currency of a major economy, though its use remains small beside private apps such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.

SourcePeople's Bank of China

See alsoCentral bank digital currency, People's Bank of China, Renminbi

The English trading company chartered in 1600 that built its own army and came to rule much of India after its victory at Plassey in 1757. At its height its forces were larger than the British army; after the Indian rebellion of 1857 the Crown took over its territories, and the company was dissolved in 1874.

See alsoPrivate military and security company, Partition of India, Mercenary

The British military presence in the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, which the government of Harold Wilson announced in January 1968 it would withdraw, a withdrawal largely completed by 1971. It ended Britain's role as the main outside power in the Gulf and is often taken as the end of its position as a global military power.

See alsoSuez crisis, Decolonisation, Carter Doctrine

The diplomatic problem, from the late 18th century to the First World War, of how the European powers would manage the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which Tsar Nicholas I is said to have called the sick man of Europe. Rivalry over the Balkans, the Turkish Straits and the Middle East drew the powers into the Crimean War and fed the crisis of 1914.

See alsoTurkish Straits, Concert of Europe, Treaty of Sèvres

The central bank of the euro area, set up in 1998 and based in Frankfurt. Its primary objective under the EU treaties is price stability, which it defines as inflation of 2 per cent over the medium term; with the national central banks of the euro area it forms the Eurosystem.

SourceTreaty on the Functioning of the European Union

See alsoEuro area, Whatever it takes, Digital euro

The use or threat of trade, investment or financial measures to force another government to change a policy. After China restricted imports from Lithuania in 2021 over a Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius, the EU adopted an Anti-Coercion Instrument, in force since December 2023, which lets it respond with counter-measures such as tariffs or limits on investment.

SourceRegulation (EU) 2023/2675 (Anti-Coercion Instrument)

See alsoEconomic statecraft, Weaponised interdependence

The use of economic tools, such as trade, aid, investment, sanctions and control of finance, to pursue foreign policy goals. David Baldwin's book of that title, published in 1985, established it as a field of study; examples range from the Marshall Plan to export controls on advanced technology.

See alsoEconomic coercion, Weaponised interdependence, Secondary sanctions

A regional organisation of West African states founded by the Treaty of Lagos in 1975 to promote economic integration, later also active in mediation and military intervention, as in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Its sanctions after coups in the Sahel led Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to leave, with their withdrawal taking effect in January 2025.

See alsoAlliance of Sahel States, Sahel, African Union

The see of the Archbishop of Constantinople, based in the Phanar district of Istanbul, whose patriarch is first in honour among Orthodox church leaders. Its claim to grant autocephaly, contested by the Moscow Patriarchate, became a geopolitical issue when it recognised the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019.

See alsoAutocephaly, Russkiy mir

The exclusive economic zone, a belt of sea extending up to 200 nautical miles from a coastal state's baselines, in which that state has sovereign rights to explore and exploit fish, oil, gas and other resources. Other states keep freedom of navigation and overflight there, and overlapping claims underlie disputes in the South China Sea and the eastern Mediterranean.

SourceUNCLOS, Part V

See alsoISA, Deep-sea mining, Flag state

An intergovernmental organisation founded in 1960 by seven states that stayed outside the European Economic Community, as a looser alternative based on free trade alone. Since 1995 its members have been Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland; it negotiates free trade agreements with third countries, such as the trade and economic partnership agreement with India, signed in 2024 and in force since October 2025.

SourceStockholm Convention (1960)

See alsoEuropean Economic Area, Free trade area

The policy announced by President Eisenhower in January 1957, after the Suez crisis, that the United States would give economic and military aid, and if requested use armed force, to help Middle Eastern states against aggression from any country controlled by international communism. It marked America's move to replace Britain and France as the main Western power in the region.

See alsoSuez crisis, Containment, Cold War

The treaty of friendship signed in January 1963 by French President Charles de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, committing the two states to regular consultation on foreign, defence and youth policy. It institutionalised Franco-German reconciliation, the axis of European integration, and was supplemented by the Treaty of Aachen in 2019.

See alsoTreaty of Rome, Maastricht Treaty

An economy, such as Brazil, India or Indonesia, that is integrating into global capital markets but is considered riskier than advanced economies. The term was coined in 1981 by Antoine van Agtmael of the International Finance Corporation; index providers decide which countries count.

See alsoIndex inclusion, Country risk

An enclave is a territory entirely surrounded by another state; an exclave is part of a state separated from its main territory. Büsingen am Hochrhein, a German village surrounded by Swiss territory, is both; Russia's Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, is a strategically important exclave.

The shift of the world energy system from fossil fuels towards low-carbon sources such as wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power, and towards electrification of transport and heating. It changes geopolitics by raising demand for minerals such as copper, lithium and rare earths while reducing, over time, the leverage of oil and gas exporters.

SourceInternational Energy Agency (IEA)

See alsoCritical minerals, Net zero, Peak oil

The European Exchange Rate Mechanism, launched in 1979, under which participating currencies were kept within bands around central rates. It was the forerunner of the euro; its successor, ERM II, is a waiting room that countries must pass through for at least two years before adopting the euro.

See alsoBlack Wednesday, Euro area

The ability of one side in a conflict to raise the intensity of fighting at each stage in ways that leave its opponent worse off, so that the opponent prefers not to escalate. The idea was developed by the American strategist Herman Kahn in his 1965 book On Escalation and remains central to debates on nuclear and conventional deterrence.

See alsoDeterrence, Red line, Extended deterrence

Environmental, social and governance criteria that investors use to judge companies beyond their financial results. ESG rules have become geopolitical: many funds cut holdings in Russian assets in 2022, and defence companies, long excluded by some funds, have been reclassified by others as compatible with sustainability.

See alsoGovernment Pension Fund Global, Stranded assets

A region making up about two-thirds of Guyana's territory, west of the Essequibo river, which Venezuela claims despite an arbitral award of 1899. The dispute intensified after large offshore oil discoveries from 2015; Guyana took the case to the International Court of Justice in 2018, and Venezuela held a referendum on annexing the region in 2023.

See alsoICJ, Irredentism

An investment fund whose shares trade on a stock exchange like those of a company, usually tracking an index of stocks, bonds or commodities. ETFs have made it cheap to buy whole markets, so decisions by index providers on which countries to include can move large sums into or out of a country.

See alsoIndex inclusion, Emerging market

EU regulation on artificial intelligence that entered into force in August 2024 and applies in stages, sorting uses by risk: some practices, such as social scoring, are banned, high-risk systems face strict requirements, and providers of general-purpose models must meet transparency duties. Its reach to any firm selling into the EU makes it a test of global regulatory influence.

SourceEuropean Union

See alsoBrussels effect, Bletchley Declaration

The EU Emissions Trading System, a cap-and-trade market launched in 2005 in which power plants, industry and airlines must surrender an allowance for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. The cap falls each year so that allowances become scarcer; shipping was brought into the system from 2024.

SourceEuropean Commission, Directive 2003/87/EC

See alsoCBAM, Carbon pricing

A customs union and single market of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, established by a treaty that entered into force in January 2015. Russia accounts for most of its economic output, and since 2022 trade with Russia through its partners in the union has drawn Western scrutiny as a possible route around sanctions.

See alsoCustoms union, CIS, Near abroad

The group of EU member states that use the euro, with monetary policy set by the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. The euro was introduced for accounts in 1999 and as notes and coins in 2002; candidates must first meet the Maastricht convergence criteria. In 2012 the ECB president Mario Draghi's pledge to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro calmed the debt crisis.

SourceEuropean Central Bank (ECB)

See alsoImpossible trinity, Reserve currency

The sovereign debt and banking crisis that hit the euro area from 2010, when Greece, Ireland, Portugal and later Cyprus needed rescue loans and borrowing costs soared in Spain and Italy. It led to the European Stability Mechanism, a banking union and the ECB's pledge to do whatever it takes.

See alsoWhatever it takes, Euro area, Spread

A bond issued outside the country in whose currency it is denominated, and so largely outside that country's regulation, such as a dollar bond sold in London. The market grew in London from the 1960s. In European politics the word also refers to proposals for debt issued jointly by euro area states.

See alsoEurodollar, Sovereign bond

The international central securities depository in Brussels that holds and settles securities for financial institutions, including most of the Russian central bank's assets immobilised in the EU since 2022. The G7 agreed in 2024 to lend Ukraine about 50 billion dollars repaid from profits on those assets; in December 2025 the EU froze them indefinitely but set aside a plan to lend the assets themselves, borrowing 90 billion euros instead.

See alsoTargeted sanctions, Reserve currency

A dollar deposit held at a bank outside the United States, and so outside US banking regulation. The market grew in London from the late 1950s, partly because the Soviet Union and others preferred to keep dollars out of US reach; it remains a large part of the offshore dollar system.

See alsoEurobond, Reserve currency, Exorbitant privilege

An EU regulation in force since September 2023 that aims to raise the Union's share of world semiconductor production to 20 per cent by 2030. It eases state aid for first-of-a-kind plants, funds research pilot lines and sets up a mechanism to monitor and respond to chip shortages.

SourceEuropean Commission

See alsoCHIPS and Science Act

The agreement, in force since 1994, that extends the EU single market to Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, which adopt the relevant EU law without voting on it. Swiss voters rejected membership in a referendum in December 1992, after which Switzerland built its relations with the EU on bilateral agreements.

SourceAgreement on the European Economic Area

See alsoEFTA, Customs union

A forum of European leaders, inside and outside the European Union, that meets twice a year to discuss security, energy and migration. Proposed by President Emmanuel Macron, it first met in Prague in October 2022; it has no treaty or budget and includes states such as the United Kingdom, Turkey, Ukraine and Switzerland.

See alsoCommon Foreign and Security Policy, Council of Europe

Extreme ultraviolet lithography prints the finest patterns on chips using light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres, against 193 nanometres for the deep ultraviolet tools used before. ASML of the Netherlands is the only maker of EUV scanners, which makes them one of the tightest bottlenecks in the semiconductor supply chain.

See alsoASML, Process node

The phrase used in the 1960s by the French finance minister, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, for the advantages the United States draws from issuing the main reserve currency. They include borrowing cheaply in its own currency, financing external deficits with ease and earning revenue from the dollars held abroad.

See alsoReserve currency, Triffin dilemma, Bretton Woods system

Restrictions on the export of specified goods, software and technology, traditionally weapons and dual-use items, which are also used to slow a rival's technological progress. Since October 2022 the United States has restricted sales to China of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, and China has required licences for exports of gallium, germanium, graphite and some rare earths.

See alsoForeign direct product rule, Rare earth elements, De-risking

A commitment by a state to deter attacks not only on itself but also on its allies, in the case of nuclear weapons often called a nuclear umbrella. The United States extends it to NATO allies, Japan, South Korea and Australia; its credibility rests on the ally believing that the protector would accept risks to its own territory.

See alsoDeterrence, Nuclear threshold state

A state whose government can no longer control its territory, provide basic services or hold a monopoly on the use of force. Somalia after the collapse of the central government in 1991 is the classic example; the Fund for Peace renamed its Failed States Index the Fragile States Index in 2014, reflecting a shift towards the broader term fragile state.

See alsoWestphalian sovereignty, Horn of Africa

A British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, claimed by Argentina, which calls them the Malvinas. Argentina's invasion in April 1982 led to a ten-week war that Britain won; in a referendum in 2013 almost all voting islanders chose to remain a British territory.

See alsoSelf-determination, Decolonisation

A monthly measure of international prices for a basket of food commodities: cereals, vegetable oils, dairy, meat and sugar, with 2014 to 2016 as the base equal to 100. It reached record highs in March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine.

SourceFood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

See alsoFood security, Black Sea Grain Initiative

A US law of 2010 requiring foreign financial institutions to report accounts held by US taxpayers to the Internal Revenue Service or face a 30 per cent withholding tax on US payments. It ended the anonymity of US clients at Swiss and other foreign banks and inspired the OECD's Common Reporting Standard.

SourceUS Internal Revenue Service

See alsoSwiss banking secrecy, Common Reporting Standard

An intergovernmental body set up by the G7 in 1989 and based in Paris that sets international standards against money laundering and terrorist financing. It publicly lists jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies, a grey list for increased monitoring and a black list for high-risk ones such as North Korea and Iran; being listed raises the cost of banking with the country concerned.

See alsoTargeted sanctions

The central bank of the United States, created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and made up of a Board of Governors in Washington and twelve regional Reserve Banks. Congress gives it a dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices; its Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates.

See alsoCentral bank swap line, US Treasuries, Fedwire and CHIPS

The two main US systems for large dollar payments. Fedwire, run by the Federal Reserve Banks, settles each payment individually and immediately in central bank money; CHIPS, the Clearing House Interbank Payments System, is privately owned by large banks and nets payments against each other. Most international dollar transfers end up in one of them.

SourceFederal Reserve; The Clearing House

See alsoCorrespondent banking, Federal Reserve

A body set up by the G20 in 2009, hosted by the BIS in Basel, that brings together finance ministries, central banks and regulators to coordinate financial regulation. It publishes the list of global systemically important banks each year.

See alsoBIS, Too big to fail, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

The policy by which a small state keeps its independence and its domestic system while accepting the foreign-policy preferences of a powerful neighbour. It refers to Finland's position towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War, under a treaty of friendship of 1948; Finland ended its non-alignment by joining NATO in 2023.

See alsoNeutrality, Sphere of influence, Cold War

Switzerland's independent supervisor of banks, insurers, exchanges and other financial institutions, based in Bern and operating since 2009. Criticised after the fall of Credit Suisse for lacking powers to fine banks, it has been the subject of reform proposals to strengthen its enforcement tools.

SourceFinancial Market Supervision Act

See alsoCredit Suisse rescue, UBS, Swiss National Bank

The arc of islands running from Japan through the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan to the Philippines and Borneo, which encloses China's near seas. American strategists have seen it since the early Cold War as a barrier to contain Chinese naval power; Chinese planners see it as a line their navy must be able to operate beyond. A second chain runs through Guam.

See alsoTaiwan Strait, AUKUS

Material that can sustain the nuclear chain reaction needed for a bomb, in practice highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Uranium enriched to 20 per cent or more of the isotope uranium-235 counts as highly enriched, and weapons usually use about 90 per cent; plutonium is produced in reactors and separated from spent fuel by reprocessing.

SourceInternational Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

See alsoNuclear threshold state, Non-Proliferation Treaty

The intelligence alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, centred on sharing signals intelligence. It grew out of the UKUSA Agreement signed by Britain and the United States in 1946 and is regarded as the closest intelligence partnership in the world.

See alsoOSINT, AUKUS

The registration of a ship in a state other than that of its owners, usually in an open register that offers lower costs or lighter oversight. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea requires a genuine link between a ship and the state whose flag it flies.

SourceUNCLOS, Article 91

The state in which a ship is registered and whose flag it flies, which has jurisdiction over it on the high seas and must enforce safety, labour and environmental rules on board. Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands have the largest registries by tonnage, and much of their tonnage is owned abroad.

SourceUNCLOS, Articles 91 and 94

See alsoFlag of convenience, Port state control, IMO

In the definition of the World Food Summit of 1996, a situation in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and preferences for an active and healthy life. It covers availability, access, use and stability, not only national output.

SourceFood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

See alsoFAO Food Price Index, Black Sea Grain Initiative

A US export rule that extends American controls to goods made abroad if they are the direct product of US technology or software, or are made in plants using equipment that is. Because almost all advanced chip production relies on US tools, its application to Huawei in 2020 cut the company off from foreign chipmakers such as Taiwan's TSMC.

SourceUS Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security

See alsoExport controls, Secondary sanctions

Foreign currency assets held by a central bank or monetary authority, mainly government bonds and deposits, together with gold and claims on the IMF. They are used to pay for imports and service debt in a crisis and to intervene in currency markets; China holds the largest stock.

SourceInternational Monetary Fund (IMF)

See alsoCOFER, Currency intervention, Gold reserves

Communication by a central bank about the likely future path of its policy rate, intended to influence longer-term interest rates today. It may be tied to dates or to economic conditions; it was widely used after 2008, when rates could not be cut much further.

See alsoPolicy rate, Whatever it takes

A chipmaker that manufactures semiconductors designed by other companies rather than its own. The model allowed fabless firms such as Nvidia, Apple and Qualcomm to design chips without owning factories, and concentrated advanced manufacturing in a few foundries, above all TSMC in Taiwan.

See alsoTSMC, Process node

The principles of Vietnam's defence policy, set out in its defence white paper of 2019: no military alliances, no siding with one country against another, no foreign military bases on Vietnamese territory, and no use or threat of force in international relations. They let Hanoi widen defence co-operation with others without provoking China.

SourceVietnam Ministry of National Defence, 2019 Defence White Paper

See alsoHedging

The war aims set out by US President Woodrow Wilson to Congress in January 1918, including open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, the removal of trade barriers, borders drawn along lines of nationality and a general association of nations. They shaped the peace settlement of 1919 and the League of Nations, and popularised the principle later called self-determination.

See alsoSelf-determination, League of Nations, Treaty of Versailles

The surge in the Swiss franc on 15 January 2015, when the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly abandoned its minimum rate of 1.20 francs per euro, held since 2011. The franc briefly gained more than a third against the euro, causing heavy losses to currency brokers and pressure on Swiss exporters.

See alsoSwiss National Bank, Swiss franc, Currency intervention

A group of countries that remove tariffs and other barriers on most trade among themselves while each keeps its own tariffs towards outsiders. Because external tariffs differ, members need rules of origin to stop goods entering through the member with the lowest tariff; GATT Article XXIV permits such areas if they cover substantially all trade between the parties.

SourceGATT, Article XXIV

See alsoCustoms union, Rules of origin, Most-favoured-nation treatment

A conflict in which active fighting has stopped without a political settlement, leaving a de facto boundary, often a breakaway territory and sometimes foreign troops in place. Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are standard examples; the Nagorno-Karabakh case showed in 2020 and 2023 that such conflicts can thaw suddenly.

See alsoTransnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh

A floating storage and regasification unit: a ship moored at a port that receives liquefied natural gas from tankers, stores it and turns it back into gas for the grid. FSRUs can be installed far faster than onshore terminals; Germany chartered several after 2022 to replace Russian pipeline gas, the first opening at Wilhelmshaven in December 2022.

See alsoLNG, Nord Stream

Standardised contracts, traded on an exchange, to buy or sell a set quantity of a commodity or financial asset at an agreed price on a future date. Oil benchmarks such as Brent and WTI are prices of futures contracts, so geopolitical news reaches oil markets first through futures trading.

See alsoBrent, Contango and backwardation, CME Group

A forum of 19 countries, the European Union and, since 2023, the African Union, covering most of the world's output and population. It began as a meeting of finance ministers in 1999 and was raised to leaders' level in 2008, during the global financial crisis, to include emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil.

See alsoG7, African Union, BRICS

An informal forum of seven large advanced democracies, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada, with the European Union also taking part. It has no charter or secretariat and acts through annual summits; Russia, admitted in 1997 to form the G8, was suspended after its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

See alsoG20, Crimea

Minor metals obtained mainly as by-products of aluminium and zinc refining, used in chips, radar, solar cells and fibre optics. China produces most of the world's primary supply; it made exports subject to licences in August 2023 and in December 2024 banned their export to the United States, a ban it suspended in November 2025 for a year.

SourceUS Geological Survey (USGS); Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China

See alsoCritical minerals, Rare earth elements

The trade agreement signed in 1947 by 23 countries and applied provisionally from 1948, which lowered tariffs through eight rounds of negotiations. It was never a full international organisation; when the WTO took over in 1995, its updated text, known as GATT 1994, became the core WTO agreement on trade in goods.

SourceWTO

See alsoWTO, Most-favoured-nation treatment

A densely populated coastal territory between Israel and Egypt, administered by Egypt from 1949 and occupied by Israel from 1967. Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers in 2005 but kept control of most borders, airspace and sea; Hamas has governed it since 2007, and the attack it led on Israel on 7 October 2023 began a devastating war there.

See alsoWest Bank, Two-state solution, Axis of Resistance

A political and economic union of six Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, founded in 1981 and based in Riyadh. Its unity was tested when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, together with Egypt, cut ties with Qatar from 2017 until the Al-Ula declaration of January 2021.

See alsoArab League, Strait of Hormuz, OPEC

The total market value of the final goods and services produced within a country in a given period, the standard measure of the size of an economy. It can be calculated from output, spending or income, and counts production on a territory whoever owns it, unlike gross national income, which adds the net income residents earn abroad.

SourceUN Statistical Commission, System of National Accounts

See alsoPurchasing power parity

The conference of April to July 1954 in Geneva on Korea and Indochina, whose accords ended the French war in Indochina after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu. They confirmed the independence of Laos and Cambodia and divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel pending elections that were never held; the United States did not endorse the final declaration.

See alsoVietnam War, Decolonisation, Domino theory

Four treaties of 1949 protecting the wounded and sick on land, the wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea, prisoners of war and civilians in wartime, supplemented by Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005. Every state is a party, which makes them among the most widely ratified treaties; Switzerland is their depositary.

SourceSwiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (depositary)

See alsoInternational humanitarian law, Mercenary

Switzerland's second financial centre, known for private banks such as Pictet and Lombard Odier and for trade finance. It is also one of the world's main hubs for commodity trading, hosting large traders of oil, grain and metals and the banks that finance them.

See alsoZurich financial centre, Commodity trading house

The treaty adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 that defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and obliges parties to prevent and punish it. In 2007 the International Court of Justice found that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 was genocide.

SourceConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

See alsoICC, Responsibility to protect

An index built by the economists Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello of the Federal Reserve that counts newspaper articles about wars, terrorism and tensions between states. It peaked after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq, and is widely used to study how geopolitical shocks affect markets.

See alsoCountry risk, Scenario analysis

The study of how geography, including location, resources, terrain and population, shapes the power and policies of states. The word was coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén around 1899; discredited by its use in Nazi Germany, it returned to common use in the late 20th century.

See alsoHeartland theory, Rimland, Sea power

A circular orbit about 35,786 km above the equator, in which a satellite circles the Earth once a day and so stays above the same point on the ground. It suits communications, broadcasting and weather satellites, and positions in it are a limited resource coordinated through the ITU.

SourceInternational Telecommunication Union (ITU)

See alsoLow Earth orbit, ITU

A bond issued by the UK government. In September 2022 an unfunded tax-cutting budget set off a rapid fall in gilt prices that forced pension funds using liability-driven investment strategies to sell assets, and the Bank of England intervened with temporary purchases of long-dated gilts.

SourceUK Debt Management Office

See alsoBank of England

The stretches of sea between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom through which ships and submarines must pass between the Arctic and the open North Atlantic. During the Cold War NATO monitored it to detect Soviet submarines of the Northern Fleet, and it has regained that role as Russian naval activity has grown.

See alsoGreenland, Chokepoint, Sea power

One of the world's largest commodity traders and miners, headquartered in Baar in the canton of Zug, which grew out of the trading firm founded by Marc Rich in 1974. It listed in London in 2011 and merged with the miner Xstrata in 2013; it is a leading producer of cobalt and copper in Congo.

See alsoCommodity trading house, Cobalt

The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, which began with losses on US subprime mortgages and spread through banks worldwide, causing the deepest global recession since the 1930s. It led to the creation of the G20 leaders' summits and the Financial Stability Board, and to the Basel III rules.

See alsoLehman Brothers collapse, Financial Stability Board, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

A loose term for the developing and emerging countries of Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, used in place of Third World or developing countries. It describes a shared political outlook and history more than geography, as Australia lies south but is excluded and China and India lie north but are often included.

See alsoDecolonisation

The division of the production of a good or service into stages carried out in different countries, so that parts and components cross several borders before the final product is sold. Such chains spread rapidly from the 1990s; they make bilateral trade figures misleading and let a disruption in one place, such as a factory closure, halt production elsewhere.

See alsoReshoring, nearshoring and friend-shoring, De-risking

Global navigation satellite system: a constellation that gives position and time anywhere on Earth. Four are global, the US GPS, Russia's GLONASS, the EU's Galileo and China's BeiDou; besides navigation, their timing signals synchronise telecommunications networks, power grids and financial markets.

See alsoGNSS jamming and spoofing

Jamming drowns satellite navigation signals in noise so receivers lose their position; spoofing broadcasts false signals so that receivers compute a wrong position or time. Both have spread around conflict zones and in the Baltic and Black Sea regions, affecting civil aircraft and ships far from any front line.

See alsoGNSS

A plateau overlooking northern Israel and southern Syria, captured by Israel from Syria in 1967 and placed under Israeli law in 1981, a step the UN Security Council declared null and void. The United States recognised Israeli sovereignty there in 2019; a UN force has monitored the disengagement line since 1974.

See alsoAnnexation, UN peacekeeping

Gold held by central banks as part of their reserves, valued because it carries no counterparty risk and cannot be frozen if held at home. Central bank buying rose sharply after Western states froze Russia's reserves in 2022; the United States holds the largest stock.

See alsoForeign exchange reserves, Gold standard, De-dollarisation

A monetary system in which a currency is defined as a fixed weight of gold and can be converted into it, which limits how much money a central bank can create. Most major economies adopted it in the late nineteenth century; it broke down in the First World War, was partly restored in the 1920s and abandoned in the 1930s, Britain leaving in 1931.

See alsoBretton Woods system

The agreement of April 1998 between the British and Irish governments and most Northern Ireland parties that ended three decades of conflict known as the Troubles. It set up power-sharing institutions and provided that Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom unless a majority there votes otherwise; keeping the Irish border open was a central issue in the Brexit negotiations.

See alsoSelf-determination

Services offered by a third state or organisation to help parties in dispute communicate or negotiate, ranging from hosting talks to mediation and protecting power mandates. They are a pillar of Swiss foreign policy: Switzerland hosted the Geneva summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and facilitated the Evian talks that ended the Algerian war in 1962.

See alsoProtecting power, International Geneva, Neutrality

Norway's sovereign wealth fund, which invests the state's oil and gas revenues abroad and is managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, part of the central bank. It is the world's largest such fund, owning a small share of most listed companies worldwide, and it excludes companies on ethical grounds.

SourceNorges Bank Investment Management (NBIM)

See alsoSovereign wealth fund, Dutch disease, ESG

A hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia near the border with Sudan, the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, begun in 2011 and inaugurated in September 2025. Egypt, which depends on the Nile for almost all its fresh water, regards the filling and operation of the reservoir without a binding agreement as a threat.

See alsoWater stress, Indus Waters Treaty

The informal name for China's system of internet censorship and surveillance, which blocks foreign sites and services, filters content and slows cross-border connections. It is part of a wider apparatus of state control over online information and has helped domestic platforms such as Baidu, WeChat and Weibo grow without foreign rivals.

See alsoSplinternet, Digital sovereignty

The rivalry between the British and Russian empires for influence in Central Asia during the 19th century, pursued through exploration, espionage, frontier wars and control of buffer states such as Afghanistan. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 settled it by dividing Persia into spheres of influence and recognising Afghanistan as within the British sphere.

See alsoBuffer state, Sphere of influence, Durand Line

The compulsory exchange agreed by Greece and Turkey in a convention signed at Lausanne in January 1923, which moved Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and Muslims from Greece to Turkey, defined by religion rather than language. About 1.2 million and 400,000 people respectively were moved, and it became a reference for later forced transfers.

See alsoPartition of India, Instrumentalised migration

Hydrogen produced by splitting water with electricity from renewable sources, as opposed to grey hydrogen made from natural gas without capturing the carbon dioxide, and blue hydrogen made from gas with carbon capture. It is seen as a way to decarbonise steel, fertilisers and shipping fuels, but remains costly.

SourceInternational Energy Agency (IEA)

See alsoEnergy transition

The march of about 350,000 unarmed Moroccans into Spanish Sahara in November 1975, organised by King Hassan II to press Morocco's claim to the territory. Spain then agreed, in the Madrid Accords, to hand its administration to Morocco and Mauritania, which the Polisario Front and Algeria rejected, beginning the Western Sahara conflict.

See alsoWestern Sahara, Decolonisation, Self-determination

The world's largest island, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark whose Self-Government Act of 2009 recognises its people's right to independence. Its position between North America and Europe, the US Pituffik Space Base and its mineral deposits give it strategic value, which American interest in acquiring it brought to the fore in 2019 and again from 2025.

See alsoArctic Council, GIUK gap, Critical minerals

The space between peace and war in which states compete through coercive actions that fall short of armed attack, so that the victim struggles to respond without escalating. Examples include harassing ships with coastguard and militia vessels, cutting or damaging undersea cables, and sponsoring proxies whose links to the state can be denied.

See alsoHybrid warfare, Salami slicing, Maritime militia

The war of 1990 to 1991 that followed Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. Under UN Security Council resolution 678, a coalition of about 35 states led by the United States expelled Iraqi forces in early 1991, and Iraq was then placed under UN sanctions and weapons inspections for more than a decade.

See alsoUN sanctions, Iran-Iraq War, Iraq War

The pursuit of foreign-policy aims through displays or limited use of naval force, associated above all with the great powers of the 19th century. The American squadron under Commodore Matthew Perry, which pressed Japan into opening ports to American ships in 1854, is a classic example; the term has since been extended to any coercive show of military strength.

See alsoSea power, Open Door policy, Opium Wars

The percentage loss imposed on creditors when a debt is restructured, or the discount applied to the value of collateral when it is pledged for a loan. In the Greek debt exchange of 2012, private bondholders accepted a reduction of more than half in the face value of their claims.

See alsoSovereign default, Collective action clause

An association of merchant communities and towns in northern Europe, led by Lübeck, that dominated trade in the Baltic and North Sea from the 13th to the 15th centuries, with trading posts in London, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod. It declined as territorial states and Atlantic trade grew, and Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck still call themselves Hanseatic cities.

See alsoFree trade area

An informal system of transferring money through a network of brokers who settle balances among themselves, so that funds move without passing through banks. It is widely used for remittances in South Asia, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and the FATF treats it as a money-laundering risk.

SourceFinancial Action Task Force (FATF)

See alsoRemittances, Anti-money laundering

Halford Mackinder's argument, set out in a lecture of 1904, that the interior of Eurasia, out of reach of sea power, was the pivot of world politics. In 1919 he summed it up as a chain: whoever rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland, and through it the World Island and the world.

See alsoRimland, Sea power, Geopolitics

A lightly regulated investment fund open mainly to wealthy and institutional investors, free to use borrowing, short selling and derivatives. Some bet on macroeconomic and political events; George Soros's Quantum Fund made about a billion dollars by betting against sterling in 1992.

See alsoShort selling, Black Wednesday, Private equity

A strategy by which a state avoids choosing sides between rival great powers, mixing co-operation and caution towards each so as to keep its options open and insure against risk from either. Vietnam is a common example: it deepens ties with the United States while maintaining close relations with China, without allying with either.

See alsoFour nos, Non-Aligned Movement

Taking a position that offsets the risk of another, such as an airline buying oil futures to protect itself against a rise in fuel prices or an exporter selling foreign currency forward. Hedging reduces losses from adverse moves at the cost of giving up some gains.

See alsoFutures, Options, Hedging

The document signed in August 1975 by 35 states, all European states except Albania together with the United States and Canada, at the end of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. It affirmed the inviolability of frontiers and respect for human rights; Moscow valued the first, while dissident groups across the Soviet bloc invoked the second.

SourceConference on Security and Co-operation in Europe

See alsoOSCE, Détente, Ostpolitik

A pipeline interchange in Erath, Louisiana, that is the delivery point for natural gas futures traded in New York and the benchmark for gas prices in the United States. Many American export contracts for liquefied natural gas are indexed to Henry Hub, with a fixed fee for liquefaction, which links US gas prices to markets in Europe and Asia.

SourceCME Group (NYMEX)

See alsoTTF, LNG, Shale revolution

A Shia Islamist political party and armed movement in Lebanon, founded with Iranian support in the early 1980s during Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. It is the strongest member of Iran's Axis of Resistance; its exchanges of fire with Israel after October 2023 escalated into an Israeli campaign in 2024 that killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

See alsoAxis of Resistance, Blue Line

Quartz with very low levels of impurities, made into the fused-quartz crucibles in which the silicon crystals for semiconductor wafers and solar cells are grown. The Spruce Pine district in North Carolina is a leading source.

The pipelines that let Gulf producers export some crude without passing the Strait of Hormuz, chiefly Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea, and the line from Habshan in Abu Dhabi to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman. Their spare capacity covers only a fraction of the oil that normally transits the strait.

SourceUS Energy Information Administration (EIA)

See alsoStrait of Hormuz, Chokepoint

The peninsula of north-east Africa comprising Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, which faces the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Its position on the route between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean has drawn foreign bases to Djibouti, including a large American base and China's first overseas military base, opened in 2017.

See alsoBab el-Mandeb, Somaliland, Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

A Zaydi Shia movement from northern Yemen, formally called Ansar Allah, that took the capital Sanaa in 2014 and has since fought a Saudi-led coalition. Backed by Iran, it attacked merchant ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden from late 2023, diverting much container traffic away from the Suez Canal.

See alsoAxis of Resistance, Bab el-Mandeb, Cape of Good Hope route

The pattern of separate bilateral alliances between the United States and Asian partners, rather than a single collective alliance such as NATO. Also called the San Francisco system, it took shape in the early 1950s through treaties with Japan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, and South Korea.

See alsoExtended deterrence, Quad, First island chain

The uprising against Soviet-backed rule in Hungary in October and November 1956, during which Prime Minister Imre Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its neutrality. Soviet forces crushed it while the West was absorbed by the Suez crisis, Nagy was executed in 1958, and about 200,000 Hungarians fled abroad.

See alsoWarsaw Pact, Suez crisis, Prague Spring

The combined use of military and non-military means, such as disinformation, cyber attacks, economic pressure, proxies and unmarked troops, to achieve aims while staying below the threshold that would trigger a conventional response. Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014 by soldiers without insignia, known as little green men, became the standard example.

SourceNATO

See alsoGrey zone, Instrumentalised migration

Extremely rapid inflation, conventionally defined, after the economist Phillip Cagan, as prices rising by more than 50 per cent a month. Well-known cases include Germany in 1923, Hungary in 1946, which holds the record, and Zimbabwe in 2008; they usually stem from governments financing large deficits by printing money.

See alsoDollarisation

The international organisation in Vienna, founded in 1957, that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy and verifies that nuclear material is not diverted to weapons. Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, states without nuclear weapons must accept its safeguards on all their nuclear material.

SourceStatute of the IAEA

See alsoNon-Proliferation Treaty, JCPOA

A permanent court in The Hague that tries individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. It was created by the Rome Statute of 1998, in force since July 2002, and acts only when national courts are unwilling or unable to do so; the United States, Russia and China are not parties.

SourceRome Statute of the International Criminal Court

See alsoICJ, Genocide Convention

A US exchange group based in Atlanta that runs futures exchanges in the United States and Europe and has owned the New York Stock Exchange since 2013. ICE Futures Europe in London hosts the Brent crude futures contract, and ICE Endex in Amsterdam the main contract for Dutch TTF gas.

See alsoBrent, TTF, CME Group

The principal judicial organ of the United Nations, sitting in the Peace Palace in The Hague since 1946. Its 15 judges, elected for nine years, settle legal disputes between states that accept its jurisdiction and give advisory opinions to UN organs; individuals cannot be parties, which distinguishes it from the International Criminal Court.

SourceStatute of the International Court of Justice

See alsoICC, Customary international law

The International Energy Agency, set up in Paris in 1974 within the framework of the OECD in response to the first oil shock. Member countries that import oil must hold emergency stocks equal to at least 90 days of their net imports and can release them jointly, as they did in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

SourceAgreement on an International Energy Program (1974)

See alsoStrategic Petroleum Reserve, Oil shocks of 1973 and 1979

A US law of 1977 that lets the president regulate economic transactions to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad, once a national emergency has been declared. It is the legal basis of most US sanctions programmes; in 2025 it was invoked to impose broad tariffs, which the Supreme Court ruled on 20 February 2026 that the act does not authorise.

SourceUS Congress

See alsoOFAC, Section 232, Section 301

The institution created at Bretton Woods in 1944 and based in Washington that monitors its members' economic policies and lends to countries with balance of payments difficulties, usually on condition of policy reforms. Voting power follows quotas, which gives the United States a veto over decisions needing an 85 per cent majority; by convention its managing director is European.

See alsoStand-By Arrangement, Special Drawing Right, World Bank

The International Maritime Organization, the UN specialised agency in London responsible for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of pollution from ships. Its convention was adopted in 1948 and entered into force in 1958; it drafts treaties such as SOLAS and MARPOL, which flag states then enforce.

SourceConvention on the International Maritime Organization (1948)

See alsoSOLAS, MARPOL, Flag state

The principle that a country cannot at the same time have a fixed exchange rate, free movement of capital and an independent monetary policy, and must give up one of the three. Derived from the Mundell-Fleming model of the 1960s, it explains why euro area members gave up national monetary policy and why China keeps controls on capital.

See alsoCapital controls, Euro area, Dollarisation

The addition of a country's stocks or bonds to a widely tracked index, such as those of MSCI, FTSE Russell or JPMorgan, which brings automatic buying by funds that follow it. Indian government bonds joined JPMorgan's emerging market index in 2024; Russian assets were removed from major indices in 2022.

See alsoETF, Emerging market

A strategic framing that treats the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a single space, bringing India into the balance of power in Asia. Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe promoted a free and open Indo-Pacific from 2016, and the United States renamed its Pacific Command the Indo-Pacific Command in 2018.

See alsoFirst island chain, Sea power

A treaty signed in 1960 by India and Pakistan with the World Bank as a signatory, which assigns the eastern rivers of the Indus basin to India and the western rivers mainly to Pakistan. It survived several wars, but India declared it in abeyance in April 2025 after an attack in Kashmir.

SourceWorld Bank

See alsoWater stress, Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Government action to shape which industries grow, through subsidies, tax credits, public procurement, trade protection or state lending. Long out of favour in Western economies, it returned with the US CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, while China's Made in China 2025 plan, announced in 2015, targeted ten advanced sectors.

See alsoReshoring, nearshoring and friend-shoring, Export controls

The treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987 that eliminated all American and Soviet ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometres. It was the first treaty to remove a whole class of nuclear delivery systems; the United States withdrew in 2019, accusing Russia of violating it.

See alsoArms control, New START, Cold War

A monetary policy framework in which the central bank publicly commits to a numerical target for inflation and sets interest rates to reach it. New Zealand adopted it first, in 1990; the Federal Reserve, the ECB and the Bank of England all aim at inflation of 2 per cent.

See alsoPolicy rate, Central bank independence, Forward guidance

The EU term for a situation in which a third country or a hostile non-state actor encourages or facilitates the movement of people towards the external borders of the Union in order to destabilise the Union or a member state. EU institutions applied it to the movements across the Belarusian border in 2021.

SourceEuropean Commission

A person forced to flee their home who has not crossed an international border, and so is not a refugee in law. The UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement of 1998 set out their rights; the African Union's Kampala Convention of 2009 is the only binding regional treaty on the subject.

SourceUN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement

See also1951 Refugee Convention, UNHCR

The cluster of international organisations, diplomatic missions and non-governmental organisations based in Geneva, including the UN Office at Geneva, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and the International Committee of the Red Cross. It underpins Switzerland's role as a host of negotiations and is a major channel of Swiss influence.

See alsoGood offices, WTO

The body of rules that limits the effects of armed conflict, protecting those who do not or no longer take part in fighting and restricting the means and methods of warfare. Its core principles are distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attacks and precaution; it binds states and armed groups alike.

SourceInternational Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

See alsoGeneva Conventions, Jus ad bellum and jus in bello, Mercenary

Review by a government of foreign investments in domestic companies on grounds of national security or public order, with powers to block deals or impose conditions. In the United States the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) carries it out; an EU regulation of 2019 set a framework for national screening and for cooperation between member states.

SourceRegulation (EU) 2019/452

See alsoDe-risking, Industrial policy

The war of 1980 to 1988 that began when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, in part over control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives, included Iraqi use of chemical weapons and attacks on Gulf shipping known as the Tanker War, and ended with a ceasefire under UN Security Council resolution 598 and no change of borders.

See alsoTanker War, Iranian Revolution, Gulf War

The revolution of 1978 to 1979 that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and established the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The fall in Iranian oil output triggered the second oil shock, and the seizure of the US embassy in November 1979 led to a break in relations with Washington; Switzerland has represented American interests in Tehran since 1980.

See alsoOil shocks of 1973 and 1979, 1953 Iranian coup, Iran-Iraq War

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by a coalition led by the United States and Britain, without explicit authorisation from the UN Security Council, which overthrew Saddam Hussein on the grounds that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction; none were found. Insurgency and sectarian conflict followed, and American combat forces left at the end of 2011.

See alsoGulf War, Prohibition of the use of force, UN Security Council

Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, a multi-orbit constellation approved by the EU in 2023 to provide secure communications for governments and broadband for businesses and citizens. It is meant to reduce European dependence on non-European providers such as Starlink.

SourceEuropean Commission

See alsoMega-constellation, Digital sovereignty

The dividing line between the Soviet-dominated states of Eastern Europe and the West after 1945, a phrase popularised by Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946. It became a physical barrier of fences, minefields and watchtowers, and began to open in 1989 when Hungary dismantled its border fence with Austria.

See alsoCold War, Berlin Wall, Revolutions of 1989

A claim by a state to territory beyond its borders on the ground that it is inhabited by its ethnic kin or historically belonged to it. The term comes from the 19th-century Italian movement for Italia irredenta, unredeemed Italy, the Italian-speaking lands still held by Austria.

See alsoRusskiy mir, Civic and ethnic nationalism

The International Seabed Authority, based in Kingston, Jamaica, through which parties to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea organise and control mineral activities on the seabed beyond national jurisdiction, known as the Area, whose resources are the common heritage of mankind. It grants exploration contracts and has been negotiating rules for commercial exploitation.

SourceUNCLOS, Part XI

See alsoDeep-sea mining, EEZ

International Telecommunication Union, the UN specialised agency for information and communication technologies, founded in 1865 and based in Geneva. It allocates radio spectrum and satellite orbital positions through the Radio Regulations, a binding treaty, and sets global telecommunications standards.

See alsoWorld Radiocommunication Conference, Geostationary orbit

The agreement of July 2015 between Iran and China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, which limited Iran's nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions. The United States withdrew in 2018; in August 2025 Britain, France and Germany triggered its snapback mechanism, and earlier UN sanctions were restored at the end of September 2025.

SourceUN Security Council resolution 2231 (2015)

See alsoIAEA, Nuclear threshold state, UN sanctions

The two branches of the law of war. Jus ad bellum governs when a state may resort to force, since 1945 mainly under the UN Charter; jus in bello, or international humanitarian law, governs how force may be used once fighting begins. The two are independent: an unlawful aggressor's soldiers enjoy the same protections as those of the defender.

See alsoProhibition of the use of force, International humanitarian law, Article 51

A Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania, formerly the German city of Königsberg in East Prussia, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945. It hosts the headquarters of Russia's Baltic Fleet and nuclear-capable Iskander missiles, and is separated from Belarus by the Suwałki Gap, a short stretch of the Polish-Lithuanian border.

See alsoSuwałki Gap, Enclave and exclave

A mountainous region in the north of the Indian subcontinent, disputed since the Partition of 1947 and divided among India, Pakistan and China. India and Pakistan have fought several wars over it; in 2019 India revoked the special constitutional status of its state of Jammu and Kashmir and split it into two union territories.

See alsoLine of Control, Partition of India, Line of Actual Control

The narrow strait connecting the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov, between Crimea and Russia's Taman peninsula. Russia opened a road and rail bridge across it in 2018 and 2019, and in November 2018 seized three Ukrainian naval vessels trying to pass through, the first open clash between the two navies.

See alsoCrimea, Chokepoint

A scenario, set out by the NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, in which the density of objects in an orbit is high enough that collisions create debris that causes further collisions in a cascade. It could make some orbital bands unusable for generations, which is why debris mitigation and the growth of constellations are linked debates.

See alsoAnti-satellite test, Mega-constellation

The duty of banks and other financial firms to verify the identity of their clients, understand the nature of their business and assess the risk they pose. It underpins anti-money-laundering and sanctions controls; in Switzerland banks have followed an agreement on due diligence since 1977.

See alsoAnti-money laundering, Sanctions compliance, Beneficial ownership

The strip of land about four kilometres wide that divides North and South Korea across the peninsula, established by the Armistice Agreement of July 1953. Despite its name it is one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world; the truce village of Panmunjom inside it has hosted talks between the two sides.

See alsoArmistice, Frozen conflict

The war of 1950 to 1953 that began when North Korea invaded the South; a UN-authorised force led by the United States fought for South Korea and Chinese forces intervened for the North. The armistice of July 1953 set the Demilitarized Zone near the 38th parallel, but no peace treaty followed; Swiss officers still serve on the commission of neutral states that monitors it.

See alsoCold War, Neutrality

A territory in the Balkans with an Albanian majority that declared independence from Serbia in 2008, after nearly a decade under UN administration following NATO's air campaign of 1999. The International Court of Justice found in 2010 that the declaration did not violate international law, but Serbia, Russia, China and five EU members do not recognise it.

See alsoRecognition of states, Self-determination, Dayton Agreement

The creation of new land from sea, lakes or wetlands, usually by pumping dredged sand onto the site. Singapore has enlarged its land area by about a quarter since independence this way, largely with imported sand, and China used it to build artificial islands in the Spratlys.

See alsoAggregates

The crisis that began in August 1982 when Mexico said it could not service its foreign debt, followed by most of Latin America. Loans from Western banks of recycled petrodollars became unpayable as US interest rates rose; the 1980s became a lost decade, ended by the Brady Plan of 1989, which swapped loans for bonds.

See alsoPetrodollar, Sovereign default, Washington Consensus

The rules of international law on the rights and duties of neutral states in an international armed conflict, codified mainly in Hague Conventions V and XIII of 1907. A neutral state may not take part in the war or supply belligerents with arms from its own stocks, and must treat them equally in private arms exports it allows; Swiss refusals to let Swiss-made ammunition be re-exported to Ukraine invoked this.

SourceHague Conventions V and XIII (1907)

See alsoNeutrality, Partnership for Peace

The first worldwide organisation for keeping peace, created by the Covenant that formed part of the peace treaties of 1919, with its seat in Geneva. The United States never joined, and the League failed to stop aggression by Japan, Italy and Germany in the 1930s; it was formally dissolved in 1946, after the United Nations had replaced it.

SourceCovenant of the League of Nations

See alsoCollective security, UN Security Council

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, then the fourth-largest US investment bank, on 15 September 2008, after the US authorities declined to rescue it. It turned a crisis in mortgage markets into a global panic and remains the largest bankruptcy filing in US history.

See alsoGlobal financial crisis, Too big to fail, Central bank swap line

The role of a central bank in lending freely to solvent banks facing a run, against good collateral and at a penalty rate, so that panic does not bring down sound institutions. Walter Bagehot set out the principle in Lombard Street in 1873; internationally, the IMF and the Federal Reserve's swap lines play a comparable role.

See alsoCentral bank swap line, IMF

A benchmark interest rate for interbank lending based on daily submissions from banks in London, once used to price trillions of dollars of loans and derivatives. After traders were found in 2012 to have manipulated it, it was replaced by rates based on actual transactions, such as SOFR in dollars and SARON in francs; the main dollar settings ended in June 2023.

See alsoBenchmark

The undemarcated line separating Indian and Chinese controlled territory along their disputed Himalayan border, with the main disputed areas in Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh. A clash in the Galwan valley in June 2020, the first deadly one since 1975, killed 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese, the number Beijing acknowledged in 2021.

See alsoKashmir

The military boundary dividing the parts of Kashmir held by India and Pakistan, which is not a recognised international border. It derives from the ceasefire line of 1949 and was renamed under the Simla Agreement of 1972; the two armies face each other along it, and exchanges of fire across it have been frequent.

See alsoKashmir, Partition of India

The border region of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile whose salt flats hold most of the world's known lithium in brines. Lithium there is produced by evaporating brine in ponds, while Australia, the largest producer, mines it from hard rock; Chile and Bolivia reserve a leading role for their states.

SourceUS Geological Survey (USGS), Mineral Commodity Summaries

See alsoCritical minerals, Resource nationalism

The London Metal Exchange, founded in 1877 and owned since 2012 by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, the main market for industrial metals such as copper, aluminium and nickel. In March 2022 it suspended nickel trading and cancelled trades after prices doubled within hours in a short squeeze.

See alsoNickel (Indonesia), Commodity trading house

Liquefied natural gas: natural gas cooled to about minus 162 degrees Celsius, which shrinks its volume roughly 600 times so that it can be shipped by tanker rather than pipeline. LNG lets gas be traded across oceans; in 2024 the United States, Qatar and Australia were the largest exporters.

SourceInternational Gas Union

See alsoFSRU, TTF, Henry Hub

Orbits at altitudes of up to about 2,000 km above the surface of the Earth, where most satellites operate, including the large broadband constellations.

SourceEuropean Space Agency (ESA)

The treaty signed at Maastricht in February 1992 and in force from November 1993 that created the European Union, EU citizenship and a common foreign and security policy. It also set the convergence criteria for economic and monetary union, including limits of 3 per cent of GDP for budget deficits and 60 per cent for public debt, which led to the euro.

See alsoEuro area, Treaty of Rome, Schengen Area

The arrangement under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations by which former German colonies and Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire were administered by Allied powers on the League's behalf. Britain held the mandates for Iraq and for Palestine, which included Transjordan, and France those for Syria and Lebanon; the UN trusteeship system replaced it in 1945.

SourceCovenant of the League of Nations, Article 22

See alsoLeague of Nations, Sykes-Picot Agreement, Decolonisation

Fishing and other civilian vessels whose crews are organised and trained to support a state's navy and coastguard. China's maritime militia has been used to swarm disputed reefs and block other states' ships while remaining formally civilian, which complicates a military response; Vietnam also maintains one.

See alsoGrey zone, Spratly Islands, Salami slicing

The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, adopted in 1973 and modified by a protocol of 1978. Its annexes cover oil, chemicals, sewage, garbage and air emissions; under Annex VI the sulphur content of ships' fuel has been capped at 0.5 per cent worldwide since 2020.

SourceIMO

See alsoIMO, SOLAS

The European Recovery Program, under which the United States provided about 13 billion dollars, mostly as grants, to Western European states from 1948 to 1952. Recipients coordinated through the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the forerunner of the OECD; the Soviet Union refused to take part and kept the states under its control out.

See alsoTruman Doctrine, COMECON, Containment

A shared platform for cross-border payments in central bank digital currencies, developed by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, later joined by Saudi Arabia. The Bank for International Settlements, which had led it, withdrew in 2024, and it is often discussed as a possible channel outside the dollar system.

See alsoCentral bank digital currency, CIPS, De-dollarisation

The boundary between Tibet and British India in the eastern Himalaya drawn by the British negotiator Henry McMahon at the Simla conference of 1914. China has never accepted it, and it serves as the de facto border of the area India administers as Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims; the two countries fought over this and other border sectors in 1962.

See alsoDurand Line, Great Game

A network of hundreds or thousands of satellites, usually in low Earth orbit, that together provide continuous broadband or other services worldwide. SpaceX's Starlink is the largest; Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Leo, known until 2025 as Project Kuiper, and China's Guowang and Qianfan are other examples, and their spectrum filings and debris risks are a growing source of friction.

See alsoLow Earth orbit, IRIS², Kessler syndrome

The return of power to the Japanese emperor in 1868, which ended the Tokugawa shogunate and began rapid modernisation on Western models, with a conscript army, railways, state-led industry and a written constitution in 1889. Within four decades Japan had defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, becoming the first non-Western great power of the modern era.

See alsoTreaty of Shimonoseki, Unequal treaties, Industrial policy

Under Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, a person recruited to fight in an armed conflict, motivated essentially by private gain and paid substantially more than regular soldiers, who is neither a national of a party nor a member of its forces. All six conditions must be met, so few contractors qualify; a mercenary has no right to prisoner-of-war status.

SourceAdditional Protocol I (1977), Article 47

See alsoPrivate military and security company, Montreux Document, Wagner Group

A customs union founded in 1991 by the Treaty of Asunción between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay; Venezuela was admitted but has been suspended since 2016, and Bolivia became a full member in July 2024. The European Union and Mercosur signed a trade agreement in January 2026, after talks that began in 1999, and its interim trade part has been applied provisionally since 1 May 2026.

SourceTreaty of Asunción (1991)

See alsoCustoms union, Free trade area

A state with less weight than the great powers but enough to shape outcomes in its region or on particular issues, often through coalitions and diplomacy. Canada, Australia, South Korea, Turkey and Indonesia are frequently cited; four of them formed the informal MIKTA grouping with Mexico in 2013.

See alsoHedging, Strategic autonomy

Cooperation among a small group of states, often three or four, on a specific task, as opposed to broad multilateral bodies such as the United Nations. Groupings such as the Quad and AUKUS are often cited; their appeal is speed and focus, at the cost of the legitimacy that wider membership brings.

See alsoQuad, AUKUS, Multipolarity

Two ceasefire and settlement deals for eastern Ukraine, signed in Minsk in September 2014 and February 2015 under the Trilateral Contact Group of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE. Minsk II set out a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons and special status for parts of Donbas, but was never fully implemented and collapsed with Russia's invasion in 2022.

See alsoNormandy format, Donbas, OSCE

The non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of August 1939, whose secret protocol divided Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Bessarabia into German and Soviet spheres. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September; the Soviet Union then occupied eastern Poland and in 1940 annexed the Baltic states, an annexation most Western states never recognised.

See alsoSphere of influence, Munich Agreement, Annexation

The principle stated by President James Monroe in 1823 that the Americas were closed to new European colonisation and that European interference there would be treated as hostile to the United States. The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 extended it into a claimed right of the United States to intervene in Latin American states.

See alsoSphere of influence

An intergovernmental document of 2008, launched by Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross, that restates the obligations of states under existing international law regarding private military and security companies in armed conflict and sets out good practices. It is not legally binding and creates no new obligations.

SourceSwiss FDFA and ICRC

The rule, in Article I of the GATT, that any trade advantage a WTO member grants to one country must be extended immediately and unconditionally to all other members. Free trade areas, customs unions and preferences for developing countries are permitted exceptions, so most-favoured-nation rates are what a country charges partners with which it has no preferential agreement.

SourceGATT, Article I

See alsoNational treatment, Free trade area, WTO

The Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, under which participating WTO members agree to decide appeals among themselves by arbitration under Article 25 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding while the Appellate Body cannot hear them. It was notified to the WTO in April 2020; the United States does not take part.

SourceWTO

An international system in which power is spread among several major states rather than held by one or two. Russia and China have promoted it as a goal since their 1997 joint declaration on a multipolar world, presenting it as an alternative to American primacy after the Cold War.

See alsoUnipolar moment, Balance of power, BRICS

The agreement of September 1938 by which Germany, Italy, Britain and France allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border areas of Czechoslovakia, which was not party to the talks. Germany occupied the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939, and Munich became the standard example of appeasement, conceding to an expansionist power in the hope of avoiding war.

See alsoMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Balance of power

A situation in which two nuclear powers can each inflict unacceptable damage on the other even after absorbing a first strike, so that neither gains by attacking. This depends on a secure second-strike capability, such as submarines at sea; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 limited missile defences partly to preserve it.

See alsoDeterrence, Arms control

A mountainous region inside Azerbaijan with a mainly Armenian population until 2023, held by Armenian forces after a war from 1988 to 1994. Azerbaijan retook much of the surrounding area in a war in 2020 and the rest in a one-day offensive in September 2023, after which almost all its Armenian inhabitants fled to Armenia.

See alsoFrozen conflict, Zangezur corridor, Self-determination

An oil and gas company owned wholly or mainly by a state, such as Saudi Aramco, the National Iranian Oil Company or PDVSA in Venezuela. National oil companies control most of the world's proven reserves, and their spending often serves political as well as commercial aims.

See alsoPDVSA, Seven Sisters, Resource nationalism

The Swiss defence strategy adopted by General Henri Guisan in 1940, under which most of the army withdrew to fortified positions in the Alps, ready to destroy the Gotthard and Simplon transit routes if Germany invaded, while the populated lowlands were lightly held. It became a lasting symbol of Swiss neutrality and self-reliance.

See alsoNeutrality, Deterrence

The principle that imported goods, once they have cleared customs, must be treated no less favourably than like domestic products in taxation and regulation. Set out in Article III of the GATT, it stops governments from using internal taxes or product rules to protect home producers after tariffs have been lowered.

SourceGATT, Article III

See alsoMost-favoured-nation treatment, GATT

The military alliance founded by the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington in April 1949 by twelve states in Europe and North America. Its core is the commitment to collective defence in Article 5; it grew to 32 members when Sweden joined in March 2024, after Finland in April 2023.

SourceNorth Atlantic Treaty (1949)

See alsoArticle 5, Collective security

Russian usage since the early 1990s for the other former Soviet republics, implying a special Russian interest in them. It underlies Moscow's claims to a sphere of influence and its interventions in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

See alsoSphere of influence, Russkiy mir

A policy in which a central bank charges banks for holding reserves with it, pushing market rates below zero. The ECB kept its deposit rate below zero from 2014 to 2022, the Swiss National Bank from 2015 to 2022 and the Bank of Japan from 2016 to 2024.

See alsoPolicy rate, Swiss National Bank, Bank of Japan

A state in which the greenhouse gases a country, company or the world emits are balanced by those removed from the atmosphere, for example by forests or carbon capture. Many governments have adopted net-zero target dates, commonly 2050, with China aiming for carbon neutrality before 2060.

SourceIPCC

See alsoParis Agreement, Energy transition

The legal status of a state that does not take part in a war between other states. Its rights and duties are codified in the Hague Conventions of 1907: belligerents must respect its territory, and it must treat them impartially and not supply them with troops or arms from state stocks. Swiss neutrality was recognised by the European powers in 1815.

SourceHague Conventions V and XIII (1907)

See alsoFinlandisation, Montreux Document

The multilateral development bank founded by the BRICS countries, agreed in 2014 and based in Shanghai, in which each founding member holds an equal share of capital. It lends for infrastructure and sustainable development and aims to lend more in members' own currencies; Dilma Rousseff, a former president of Brazil, has led it since 2023.

See alsoBRICS, AIIB

The treaty between the United States and Russia, signed in Prague in 2010 and in force from February 2011, that limited each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. Russia suspended its participation in 2023, and the treaty expired on 5 February 2026 without a successor, leaving the two largest arsenals without treaty limits for the first time since 1972.

SourceUS Department of State

See alsoArms control, INF Treaty

Indonesia has become by far the largest producer of nickel, a metal used in stainless steel and battery cathodes, after banning exports of unprocessed ore from January 2020 to force investment in domestic smelters, mostly Chinese-financed. The case is the leading example of a downstreaming policy that uses an export ban to capture processing.

SourceUS Geological Survey (USGS), Mineral Commodity Summaries

See alsoResource nationalism, LME

A line on Chinese maps enclosing most of the South China Sea, derived from an eleven-dash line published by the Republic of China in 1947. China has never defined precisely what it claims within it; an arbitral tribunal ruled in 2016 that it could not ground historic rights to resources beyond what the law of the sea allows.

See alsoSouth China Sea arbitration, Spratly Islands, Salami slicing

The announcement by President Richard Nixon on 15 August 1971 that the United States would suspend the convertibility of the dollar into gold, together with a 10 per cent surcharge on imports and a freeze on wages and prices. It ended the core of the Bretton Woods system; by 1973 the main currencies were floating.

See alsoBretton Woods system, Gold standard

A group of states that declined to join either bloc in the Cold War, founded in Belgrade in 1961 under leaders including Tito of Yugoslavia, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt and Sukarno of Indonesia. It drew on the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states in 1955 and has well over 100 member states.

See alsoCold War, Decolonisation, Hedging

Treaty opened for signature in 1968 and in force since 1970. It recognises five nuclear-weapon states, those that had built and exploded a nuclear device before 1 January 1967: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China. The other parties undertake not to acquire nuclear weapons, all parties may use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and the nuclear-weapon states undertake to pursue negotiations on disarmament. Switzerland signed in 1969 and ratified in 1977.

SourceUN Office for Disarmament Affairs

The principle that a state may not return a person to a territory where their life or freedom would be threatened, set out in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and in human rights law prohibiting return to torture. It is the core of refugee protection and the main legal limit on push-backs and deportations.

Source1951 Refugee Convention, Article 33

See also1951 Refugee Convention, Push-back

Two pairs of gas pipelines across the Baltic Sea from Russia to Lubmin in Germany. Nord Stream 1 began operating in 2011 and Nord Stream 2 was completed in 2021 but never entered service; explosions on 26 September 2022 ruptured three of the four lines.

See alsoTTF, FSRU, Power of Siberia

The negotiating group of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia on the war in eastern Ukraine, named after the first meeting of their leaders at the D-Day commemorations in Normandy in June 2014. It brokered the Minsk II agreement in 2015 and held its last summit, in Paris, in December 2019.

See alsoMinsk agreements, Donbas

The shipping lane along Russia's Arctic coast between the Kara Sea and the Bering Strait, which Russia regulates as a national transport route. It can cut the sea distance between northern Europe and Japan by about a third compared with the Suez route, but ice limits it to a summer season for most ships.

See alsoSuez Canal, LNG

The sea routes through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, becoming more navigable as sea ice retreats. Canada regards its waters as internal waters under its sovereignty, while the United States considers them an international strait open to transit passage, a dispute the two allies have agreed to manage rather than settle.

See alsoNorthern Sea Route, Transit passage, UNCLOS

Fertilisers supplying nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the three main plant nutrients. Nitrogen is made from air and natural gas by the Haber-Bosch process, so its price follows gas; phosphorus comes from phosphate rock and potassium from potash, both mined in a small number of countries.

See alsoPhosphate rock, Potash

A state that has the technical base, such as enrichment or reprocessing plants and the necessary expertise, to build nuclear weapons within a fairly short time but has chosen not to, a condition also called nuclear latency. Japan is often cited as an example; the term is also used about Iran.

See alsoFissile material, Non-Proliferation Treaty, JCPOA

The regional organisation of the states of the Americas, founded by a charter signed in Bogotá in 1948 and based in Washington. It observes elections and promotes democracy under its Inter-American Democratic Charter of 2001; Cuba's government was excluded in 1962, and Venezuela began withdrawing in 2017.

See alsoMonroe Doctrine

The state-owned phosphate company of Morocco, founded in 1920 as the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, which mines the large deposits around Khouribga and is one of the largest producers of phosphate fertilisers. It also operates the Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara, a territory whose status is disputed.

See alsoPhosphate rock, NPK fertilisers

The office of the US Treasury that administers and enforces most American economic sanctions. It keeps the Specially Designated Nationals list: the assets of those listed are blocked under US jurisdiction and US persons are generally barred from dealing with them; because foreign banks depend on dollar clearing, its listings reach far beyond the United States.

SourceUS Department of the Treasury

See alsoSecondary sanctions, IEEPA, Targeted sanctions

Aid from governments to developing countries whose main aim is economic development and welfare, given as grants or on concessional terms, as defined by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A UN resolution of 1970 set donors a target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income, which few meet.

SourceOECD Development Assistance Committee

See alsoWorld Bank

A jurisdiction whose financial sector serves mainly non-residents, often with low taxes, light regulation or strong confidentiality, such as the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands. The EU keeps a list of jurisdictions it regards as non-cooperative on tax, and the OECD's Global Forum rates jurisdictions on tax transparency.

See alsoSwiss banking secrecy, Common Reporting Standard

A measure adopted by the G7, the EU and Australia from December 2022 that bars their companies from providing shipping, insurance and finance for Russian crude sold above a set price, initially 60 dollars a barrel. Because Western firms dominate tanker insurance, the cap aims to cut Russian revenue while keeping its oil on the market; the shadow fleet grew to evade it.

SourcePrice Cap Coalition (G7, European Union and Australia)

See alsoShadow fleet, P&I club, Ship-to-ship transfer

Two sharp rises in oil prices that ended the era of cheap energy. In October 1973 Arab oil exporters cut output and embargoed the United States and the Netherlands, among others, over their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and prices roughly quadrupled; in 1979 the Iranian revolution disrupted supply and prices more than doubled again.

See alsoOPEC, IEA, Strategic Petroleum Reserve

The People's Republic's One China principle holds that there is one China, that Taiwan is part of it and that Beijing is its sole legal government. The American One China policy is narrower: since 1979 Washington has recognised Beijing as China's only legal government and acknowledged, without endorsing, its position on Taiwan, while keeping unofficial ties with Taipei.

See alsoStrategic ambiguity, Taiwan Strait, Recognition of states

An intergovernmental organisation of oil-exporting countries founded in Baghdad in September 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, with its secretariat in Vienna. Its members coordinate production policy and agree output targets in an attempt to influence the oil price.

SourceOPEC Statute

See alsoOPEC+, Spare capacity, Oil shocks of 1973 and 1979

The grouping of OPEC members and a number of other oil producers led by Russia that have coordinated output under the Declaration of Cooperation since December 2016. Because it includes Russia, the group accounts for a much larger share of world crude production than OPEC alone, and its decisions on quotas move prices.

SourceOPEC, Declaration of Cooperation

See alsoOPEC, Spare capacity

The American policy, set out in notes by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 and 1900, that all trading nations should have equal access to China and that China's territorial integrity should be preserved. It aimed to stop European powers and Japan from carving China into closed spheres of influence; the phrase has since been applied to any policy of equal commercial access.

See alsoUnequal treaties, Sphere of influence, Most-favoured-nation treatment

Two wars, of 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860, in which Britain, joined in the second by France, defeated Qing China in disputes over trade and diplomatic access, including the opium trade. The Treaty of Nanking of 1842 ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain and opened five ports to foreign trade, the first of China's unequal treaties.

See alsoUnequal treaties, Century of humiliation, Gunboat diplomacy

Contracts giving the holder the right, but not the obligation, to buy (a call) or sell (a put) an asset at a set price before or on a set date, in return for a premium paid to the seller. Prices of oil options are used to gauge how large a price move traders fear.

See alsoFutures, Hedging (finance)

A region north of the Orinoco river in eastern Venezuela holding one of the largest accumulations of extra-heavy crude in the world, the main basis of Venezuela's claim to the largest proven oil reserves. The oil is so dense that it must be diluted or upgraded before it can be piped and exported.

See alsoPDVSA, API gravity, Proven reserves

The largest regional security organisation, grouping states of Europe, Central Asia and North America, with its secretariat in Vienna. It grew out of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe that produced the Helsinki Final Act, took its present name in 1995, decides by consensus and is known for its election observation and field missions.

SourceOSCE

See alsoDétente

Open-source intelligence: information collected and analysed from publicly available sources, such as satellite imagery, ship and aircraft tracking, social media, company records and official publications. Its use by researchers and journalists to document the war in Ukraine showed that it can rival classified sources on some questions.

See alsoAdmiralty Code, Source criticism

The agreements of 1993 and 1995 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, first negotiated in secret in Norway, under which the PLO recognised Israel, Israel recognised the PLO as representing the Palestinians, and the Palestinian Authority was created with limited self-government in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Borders, Jerusalem, settlements and refugees were left to final-status talks that never concluded.

See alsoSix-Day War, Camp David Accords, UN Partition Plan for Palestine

The policy of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt from 1969 of normalising relations with the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia through treaties that accepted the postwar borders in practice. Its approach, summed up as change through rapprochement, contributed to détente and to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

See alsoDétente, Helsinki Final Act

The 1967 treaty that sets the basic rules for activities in space: outer space is not subject to national appropriation by any state, and states bear international responsibility for national activities in space, including those of private companies.

SourceUNOOSA; Articles II and VI of the treaty

A protection and indemnity club, a mutual association in which shipowners insure one another against third-party liabilities such as pollution, injury to crew and wreck removal. The members of the International Group of P&I Clubs insure most of the world's ocean-going tonnage, which is why Western sanctions and the oil price cap work through insurance.

SourceInternational Group of P&I Clubs

See alsoOil price cap, Shadow fleet, War risk insurance

A package of EU laws adopted in May 2024 and applied from 12 June 2026 that reforms the asylum system. It introduces screening and faster border procedures and a mechanism of solidarity under which member states either relocate asylum seekers or pay contributions.

SourceEuropean Union

See alsoDublin Regulation, Temporary Protection Directive

A lock canal across the Isthmus of Panama, opened in 1914 and handed by the United States to Panama on 31 December 1999 under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. Its locks are filled with fresh water from Gatun Lake, so the drought of 2023 forced the authority to limit transits and draughts.

SourcePanama Canal Authority

See alsoChokepoint, Suez Canal

Panda bonds are renminbi bonds issued in mainland China by foreign borrowers; dim sum bonds are renminbi bonds issued offshore, mainly in Hong Kong. Both are tools in Beijing's effort to widen international use of its currency, and some governments, such as Hungary and the Philippines, have issued panda bonds.

See alsoRenminbi, De-dollarisation

A group of islets and reefs in the northern South China Sea, controlled by China since it seized the western part from South Vietnam in 1974 and claimed also by Vietnam and Taiwan. China has built military facilities on Woody Island, which it treats as the seat of an administrative city covering its South China Sea claims.

See alsoSpratly Islands, Nine-dash line, South China Sea arbitration

The climate treaty adopted in 2015 and in force since November 2016, under which parties aim to hold the rise in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. Each party sets its own targets, which are not legally enforceable.

SourceUNFCCC

See alsoUNFCCC, Net zero

An informal group of official creditor countries, mostly rich democracies, that coordinates the rescheduling of debts owed to them by governments in difficulty. It first met in 1956 over Argentina's debts and has since concluded hundreds of agreements, with its secretariat provided by the French Treasury; China, a large bilateral lender, is not a member.

See alsoCommon Framework, Sovereign default

The division of British India in August 1947 into two independent states, India and Pakistan, whose eastern wing became Bangladesh in 1971. The new boundary through Punjab and Bengal, drawn by Cyril Radcliffe and published after independence, set off one of the largest migrations of the 20th century, with communal violence that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

See alsoDecolonisation, Treaty of Lausanne

A NATO programme launched in 1994 for bilateral military cooperation with non-member countries in Europe and the former Soviet Union. Switzerland joined in 1996 and uses it for training, crisis management and interoperability without any obligation of mutual defence, which it regards as compatible with its neutrality.

SourceNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

See alsoNATO, Neutrality, Law of neutrality

Petróleos de Venezuela, the state oil company created when Venezuela nationalised its oil industry on 1 January 1976. Venezuela reports the largest proven oil reserves in the world, mostly extra-heavy crude, but PDVSA's output fell steeply from the 2000s through underinvestment, the dismissal of thousands of staff after a strike in 2002 and 2003, and US sanctions.

See alsoOrinoco Belt, National oil company

The treaties of Osnabrück and Münster of 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic. They confirmed the independence of the Dutch Republic and the exemption of the Swiss Confederation from the Empire, and are often cited, though historians dispute how far, as the origin of the modern system of sovereign states.

See alsoWestphalian sovereignty, Balance of power

The point at which world oil production reaches its maximum and then declines, an idea associated with the geologist M. King Hubbert, who in 1956 predicted that output in the lower 48 United States would peak around 1970. Debate has since shifted towards a peak in demand, driven by efficiency and electrification rather than geology.

See alsoProven reserves, Shale revolution, Energy transition

China's central bank, founded in 1948 and confirmed as the central bank in 1983. Unlike most of its peers, it operates under the State Council rather than independently; it manages the renminbi's exchange rate against a basket of currencies and runs the e-CNY digital currency.

See alsoRenminbi, e-CNY, CIPS

The policies of restructuring and openness launched by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and 1986, which loosened central planning, relaxed censorship and allowed contested elections in 1989. Meant to revive the Soviet system, they weakened the Communist Party's control and contributed to the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and of the Soviet Union itself.

See alsoRevolutions of 1989, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev Doctrine

A framework under the EU treaties in which most member states commit to joint defence projects and to raising defence spending and interoperability. Launched in December 2017, it covers projects from military mobility to training; non-EU states such as the United States, Canada and Norway can join individual projects.

SourceTreaty on European Union, Article 42(6) and Article 46

See alsoCommon Foreign and Security Policy, Strategic autonomy

Dollars earned by oil exporters through sales of oil priced in dollars, and the system in which these earnings are invested back in dollar assets such as US Treasuries. It took shape after 1974, when Saudi Arabia agreed in confidential arrangements with the United States to buy large amounts of US Treasury securities; no treaty required oil to be priced in dollars.

See alsoDe-dollarisation, Reserve currency, OPEC

Rock with a high content of phosphate minerals, the main raw material for phosphorus fertilisers. Phosphorus has no substitute in agriculture.

SourceUSGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries

The policy announced by the Obama administration in 2011, later called the rebalance, of shifting American diplomatic, economic and military attention towards the Asia-Pacific. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set it out in an article titled America's Pacific Century; it included more forces in Australia and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

See alsoIndo-Pacific, Hub-and-spoke system

The agreement of 22 September 1985, reached at the Plaza Hotel in New York by the finance ministers and central bank governors of the United States, Japan, West Germany, France and the United Kingdom, to push down the dollar through coordinated intervention. The dollar fell sharply against the yen and the Deutschmark over the following two years.

See alsoReserve currency, Current account

The short-term interest rate that a central bank sets to steer monetary conditions, such as the federal funds target range in the United States or the deposit facility rate in the euro area. Changes pass through to the rates banks charge and to the exchange rate.

See alsoInflation targeting, Negative interest rates, Forward guidance

Insurance that protects investors and lenders against losses from political events such as expropriation, currency inconvertibility, breach of contract by a government, or war and civil disturbance. It is offered by private insurers, national export credit agencies and the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, founded in 1988.

SourceMultilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)

See alsoCountry risk, War risk insurance

The inspection of foreign ships in a country's ports to check that they meet international rules on safety, pollution and working conditions, with the power to detain those that do not. It compensates for weak flag states; regional agreements such as the Paris Memorandum of Understanding of 1982 coordinate inspections and publish lists of poorly performing flags.

SourceParis Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control

See alsoFlag state, Flag of convenience

Potassium-bearing salts, mainly potassium chloride, mined from ancient evaporite deposits and used as fertiliser. Production is concentrated in Canada, Russia and Belarus, so Western sanctions on Belarus from 2021 and on Russia from 2022 disturbed the market.

SourceUS Geological Survey (USGS), Mineral Commodity Summaries

See alsoNPK fertilisers, Phosphate rock

The conference of July and August 1945 at which Truman, Stalin and Churchill, replaced midway by Clement Attlee, set out principles for occupied Germany, including demilitarisation, denazification and reparations, and placed German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers under Polish administration. During it the Potsdam Declaration called on Japan to surrender unconditionally.

See alsoYalta Conference, Two Plus Four Treaty, Greek-Turkish population exchange

A gas pipeline from fields in eastern Siberia to China, operated by Gazprom, which began deliveries in December 2019 with a design capacity of 38 billion cubic metres a year. A second line through Mongolia, Power of Siberia 2, would let Russia send to China gas from the western fields that once supplied Europe.

See alsoNord Stream, LNG

The period of reform in Czechoslovakia in 1968 under the Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček, who promised socialism with a human face, with relaxed censorship and economic reform. Warsaw Pact forces invaded in August 1968 and ended it, and the Soviet justification became known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

See alsoBrezhnev Doctrine, Warsaw Pact, Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Investment in companies that are not listed on a stock exchange, often by buying them outright with borrowed money and selling them some years later. Large funds, many financed by pension and sovereign wealth funds, own stakes in infrastructure and defence suppliers, which brings them under investment-screening rules.

See alsoSovereign wealth fund, Investment screening, Hedge fund

In the definition of the Montreux Document, a private business that provides military or security services, whatever it calls itself. These services include armed guarding and protection, operating and maintaining weapons systems, detaining prisoners, and advising or training local forces and security personnel.

SourceMontreux Document (2008)

The generation of a chipmaking process, named with a figure in nanometres such as 7 nm or 3 nm, with smaller figures indicating denser and more advanced transistors. The names have become marketing labels that no longer match any physical dimension on the chip, so nodes of different manufacturers are not strictly comparable.

See alsoEUV lithography, Foundry, TSMC

The rule in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter that states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The Charter allows only two exceptions: self-defence against an armed attack and action authorised by the Security Council.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Article 2(4)

See alsoArticle 51, Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

A state that represents the interests of another state, and protects its nationals, in a country with which the latter has broken off diplomatic relations, with the consent of both. Switzerland has represented the United States in Iran since 1980 and, since 2009, after their war of 2008, has represented Russia and Georgia in each other's capitals.

SourceVienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), Article 45

See alsoGood offices, Neutrality

The secret agreement reached at Sèvres, near Paris, in October 1956 by Britain, France and Israel, under which Israel would attack Egypt in Sinai and Britain and France would then intervene, ostensibly to separate the combatants and protect the Suez Canal. It set the course of the Suez war, and British ministers long denied that any such collusion had taken place.

See alsoSuez crisis, Suez Canal

Quantities of oil or gas that geological and engineering data show with reasonable certainty can be recovered from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions. Because the figure depends on prices, technology and how each country reports, national reserve estimates are not always comparable.

SourceSociety of Petroleum Engineers, Petroleum Resources Management System

See alsoPeak oil, Orinoco Belt

A conflict in which outside powers support local forces with money, arms, training or intelligence rather than fighting each other directly. The Cold War saw many, from Angola to Afghanistan in the 1980s, where America backed fighters against Soviet forces; proxies let a state pursue its aims while limiting its own costs and the risk of escalation.

See alsoCold War, Grey zone, Private military and security company

Conversion rates that equalise the cost of a common basket of goods and services across countries, used to compare living standards and the real size of economies. Because prices are lower in poorer countries, their GDP is larger at purchasing power parity than at market exchange rates; on this measure IMF and World Bank estimates have put China's economy ahead of that of the United States since the mid-2010s.

SourceWorld Bank, International Comparison Program

See alsoGDP

The forcible return of migrants across a border without an individual assessment of their claims to protection. Courts and human rights bodies regard such practices as contrary to the prohibition of collective expulsion and to non-refoulement; reports of them multiplied at the Belarusian border after 2021.

See alsoNon-refoulement, Instrumentalised migration

An informal grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the United States, first convened in 2007 and revived in 2017; leaders have met since 2021. It works on maritime security, technology, health and disaster relief in the Indo-Pacific, but has no treaty and no mutual defence commitment.

See alsoAUKUS, First island chain

Large-scale purchases of financial assets, mostly government bonds, by a central bank paid for with newly created reserves, used to lower long-term interest rates once the policy rate is near zero. The Bank of Japan pioneered it in 2001, and the Federal Reserve, Bank of England and ECB adopted it after 2008.

See alsoQuantitative tightening, Policy rate, Bank of Japan

The reduction of a central bank's holdings of assets bought under quantitative easing, either by letting bonds mature without reinvesting the proceeds or by selling them. It withdraws reserves from the banking system and tends to push up long-term interest rates.

See alsoQuantitative easing, Federal Reserve

The 15 lanthanides together with scandium and yttrium, used above all in permanent magnets, catalysts and electronics. Separation and refining turn mined ore into the individual elements, usually by solvent extraction in many stages, and then into oxides and metals; China holds most of the capacity for this step.

SourceUSGS

A free trade agreement among the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, signed in November 2020 and in force since January 2022. It is the largest trade bloc by population; India took part in the negotiations but withdrew in 2019.

See alsoCPTPP, Free trade area

The act by which an existing state accepts an entity as a state. The Montevideo Convention of 1933 lists the usual criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Whether recognition creates statehood or merely acknowledges it is debated; Kosovo, recognised by many states but not by Serbia, is a much-cited test.

SourceMontevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933)

See alsoSelf-determination, Westphalian sovereignty, Annexation

A publicly or privately stated limit which, if crossed by another state, is meant to trigger a response. In August 2012 President Barack Obama called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a red line; after the Ghouta attack of 2013 the crisis ended in a deal to remove Syria's declared chemical arsenal rather than in US strikes.

See alsoDeterrence, Coercive diplomacy, Escalation dominance

Assigning a team to take the role of an adversary or critic, to test a plan, an assessment or a system by trying to defeat it. Used by militaries, intelligence services and security firms, it also covers probing AI models for harmful behaviour before release.

See alsoAnalysis of competing hypotheses, Scenario analysis

The policy launched in China under Deng Xiaoping from December 1978, which introduced market incentives in farming and industry, opened special economic zones such as Shenzhen to foreign investment and tied China into the world economy. It brought decades of rapid growth and led to China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

See alsoWTO, Industrial policy, Global value chain

The replacement of a foreign government by outside pressure, whether through military force, covert action, sanctions or support for an opposition. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which removed Saddam Hussein, is the most cited case; the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 is often discussed in the same terms, since it ended with the fall of Muammar Qaddafi.

See alsoProhibition of the use of force, Responsibility to protect

Money sent home by migrants, mostly to their families. The World Bank estimates that remittances to low and middle-income countries reached about 685 billion dollars in 2024, more than the foreign direct investment they received; in some small economies, such as Tajikistan and Tonga, they exceed a fifth of output.

SourceWorld Bank

See alsoDiaspora

The official currency of China, whose unit is the yuan; it trades onshore under the central bank's management, under the code CNY, and offshore, mainly in Hong Kong, as CNH, a market opened in 2010. Beijing promotes its use in trade settlement and through swap lines, but capital controls limit its role as a reserve currency.

See alsoDe-dollarisation, CIPS, Capital controls

A currency that central banks and governments hold in large amounts as foreign-exchange reserves, to intervene in markets, pay for imports and service foreign debt. The US dollar has been the leading one since the Second World War, followed at a distance by the euro; the depth of the US Treasury market and the dollar's role in trade sustain its position.

See alsoCOFER, Exorbitant privilege, De-dollarisation

Moving production back to the home country, to neighbouring countries or to politically aligned ones respectively; friend-shoring was popularised by the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, in 2022. The aim is to reduce dependence on distant or rival suppliers, usually at the price of higher production costs.

See alsoGlobal value chain, De-risking, Industrial policy

The observation that countries rich in oil, gas or minerals often grow more slowly, suffer more conflict and have weaker or less democratic institutions than countries without such wealth. Explanations include price volatility, an overvalued currency that hurts other exports, and governments that rely on resource rents rather than taxes.

See alsoResource nationalism, National oil company

Policies by which a state asserts greater control over, or a larger share of the income from, its natural resources, through nationalisation, higher royalties, mandatory state stakes, export bans or local processing rules. Examples include Indonesia's ban on nickel ore exports and Congo's suspension of cobalt exports in 2025.

See alsoNickel (Indonesia), Cobalt, National oil company

The principle, endorsed by UN member states at the World Summit of 2005, that every state must protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and that the international community should act through the Security Council when a state manifestly fails to do so. It was cited when the Council authorised force in Libya in 2011.

Source2005 World Summit Outcome, paragraphs 138 and 139

See alsoWestphalian sovereignty, UN Security Council, Genocide Convention

A state that seeks to change the existing distribution of territory, status or rules in the international system, as opposed to a status quo power that wants to preserve it. The US National Security Strategy of 2017 described China and Russia as revisionist powers, marking a turn towards great-power competition in American policy.

See alsoBalance of power, Thucydides trap

The largely peaceful collapse of communist rule across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, beginning with partly free elections in Poland in June and including the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and a violent uprising in Romania. They ended the Soviet bloc, and the Warsaw Pact and COMECON were dissolved in 1991.

See alsoBerlin Wall, Brezhnev Doctrine, Dissolution of the Soviet Union

Nicholas Spykman's term for the coastal belt of Eurasia, from Western Europe through the Middle East and South Asia to East Asia, which he held more important than Mackinder's heartland. His view that the United States must prevent any single power dominating it shaped the logic of Cold War containment.

See alsoHeartland theory, Sea power

The criteria that determine the national source of a product, used to decide which tariff, quota or trade preference applies to it. For goods made in several countries they usually rely on a change in tariff classification, a minimum share of local value added or specific processing steps; strict rules stop third countries from routing goods through a free trade partner.

SourceWTO Agreement on Rules of Origin

See alsoFree trade area, Customs union

The set of institutions, treaties and norms built mainly after 1945, including the UN Charter, the multilateral trading system and the prohibition of conquest, by which Western governments describe the order they seek to defend. Critics, notably in China and parts of the Global South, argue that the phrase is vaguer than international law and applied selectively.

See alsoUN Security Council, Prohibition of the use of force, Global South

In August 1998 Russia devalued the rouble, defaulted on its domestic treasury bills and declared a moratorium on some foreign payments. The shock spread to other emerging markets and caused the near-collapse of the US hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, rescued by banks under Federal Reserve auspices.

See alsoSovereign default, Asian financial crisis, Hedge fund

Russian for Russian world: the idea of a community of Russian speakers and Orthodox believers that extends beyond Russia's borders, especially to Ukraine and Belarus. Promoted by the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate, and by a foundation of that name created in 2007, it has served to justify claims to influence over neighbours.

See alsoNear abroad, Ecumenical Patriarchate, Irredentism

A currency that investors buy in times of global stress, so that it tends to rise when markets fall; the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen and the US dollar are the usual examples. To curb the franc's appreciation, the Swiss National Bank enforced a minimum rate of 1.20 francs per euro from September 2011 to 15 January 2015.

See alsoReserve currency, Capital controls

A temporary restriction on imports of a product, usually a tariff or quota, allowed under GATT Article XIX when a surge in imports causes or threatens serious injury to a domestic industry, even without unfair trade practices. Unlike anti-dumping duties, safeguards normally apply to imports from all sources; the United States imposed them on washing machines and solar panels in 2018.

SourceGATT, Article XIX; WTO Agreement on Safeguards

See alsoAnti-dumping duty, Section 232

The semi-arid belt south of the Sahara, stretching from Senegal and Mauritania to Sudan and Eritrea. Its central part, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, has faced jihadist insurgencies since 2012 and military coups between 2020 and 2023, after which French forces left and Russian forces arrived.

See alsoAlliance of Sahel States, Africa Corps

A strategy of advancing through a series of small steps, none of which is large enough to justify a forceful response, but which together change the status quo. It is often used to describe China's actions in the South China Sea, such as building on reefs and gradually establishing a coastguard presence in disputed waters.

See alsoGrey zone, Spratly Islands, Nine-dash line

The controls by which banks and companies make sure they do not deal with sanctioned persons, countries or goods, such as screening customers and payments against lists. Failures carry heavy penalties: BNP Paribas agreed in 2014 to pay about 9 billion dollars to US authorities for processing transactions for sanctioned countries.

See alsoOFAC, Know your customer, Secondary sanctions

A triangular chain of reefs and rocks in the South China Sea, about 220 kilometres west of the Philippine island of Luzon, claimed by both the Philippines and China. China has kept effective control since a standoff in 2012; the arbitral tribunal of 2016 found that it is a traditional fishing ground for fishers of several nations, including Filipinos.

See alsoSouth China Sea arbitration, Maritime militia, Grey zone

A planning method that builds several plausible and internally consistent pictures of the future around the main uncertainties, then tests how a strategy or a company would fare in each. Scenarios are not forecasts.

The zone in which internal border controls have been abolished among most EU member states and Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, named after the Luxembourg village where the first agreement was signed in 1985. Switzerland applied the rules from December 2008; states may reintroduce temporary internal checks in case of serious threats.

SourceEuropean Union

See alsoDublin Regulation

A regional organisation founded in Shanghai in 2001 by China, Russia and four Central Asian states, which grew out of a border-confidence group known as the Shanghai Five. India and Pakistan joined in 2017, Iran in 2023 and Belarus in 2024; it deals with security, counter-terrorism and economic co-operation but is not a military alliance with a defence commitment.

SourceSCO Charter (2002)

See alsoCSTO

The partition of almost all of Africa among European powers between about 1880 and 1914, after which only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. Many of Africa's present borders were drawn in this period by negotiation in Europe, and in 1964 the Organisation of African Unity resolved that its members would respect the borders existing at independence.

See alsoBerlin Conference, Decolonisation, African Union

The ability of a state to use the sea for trade and war through navies, merchant fleets, ports and bases. Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, published in 1890, argued that it was the basis of British greatness and influenced naval building in the United States, Germany and Japan.

See alsoRimland, Heartland theory, Chokepoint

The line of islands running south from Japan through the Bonin Islands, the Marianas including Guam, and on towards Palau, beyond the first island chain. In Chinese and American strategic thinking it marks a second belt of US bases and a more distant goal for the reach of China's navy.

See alsoFirst island chain, A2/AD

Sanctions that penalise third parties, including foreign companies and banks, for dealing with a sanctioned target, as opposed to primary sanctions, which bind only the sanctioning country's own citizens and firms. The United States uses them, notably against Iran, by threatening to cut foreign banks off from the dollar system; the EU regards them as unlawful extraterritoriality and adopted a Blocking Statute in 1996.

See alsoOFAC, Targeted sanctions, Shadow fleet

The provision of the US Trade Expansion Act of 1962 that lets the president restrict imports which the Commerce Department finds threaten to impair national security. In 2018 it was used to impose tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, and later to cover cars, copper and other products.

SourceUS Trade Expansion Act of 1962

See alsoSection 301, Security exception (GATT Article XXI), IEEPA

The provision of the US Trade Act of 1974 that authorises the US Trade Representative to retaliate against foreign practices judged unreasonable or discriminatory that burden American commerce. It was the basis of the tariffs imposed from 2018 on several hundred billion dollars' worth of imports from China, after an investigation into technology transfer and intellectual property.

SourceUS Trade Act of 1974

See alsoSection 232, IEEPA

The problem that measures a state takes to make itself safer, such as arming or forming alliances, tend to make other states feel less safe, so that they respond in kind and all end up less secure. The concept was set out by the political scientist John Herz in 1950 and is used to explain arms races that no side wants.

See alsoBalance of power, Thucydides trap, Deterrence

The clause that allows a WTO member to take measures it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests, including in time of war or other emergency in international relations. In the case Russia, Traffic in Transit in 2019, a panel ruled for the first time that such invocations are open to review, a view the United States has rejected.

SourceGATT, Article XXI

See alsoWTO, Dispute Settlement Understanding, Section 232

A binding commitment by one or more states to defend another if it is attacked, as distinct from a weaker security assurance, which promises only to respect or support it. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is a guarantee; the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 gave Ukraine assurances, a difference that has shaped debates on Ukraine's security since 2014.

See alsoArticle 5, Budapest Memorandum, Extended deterrence

The right of peoples to determine their political status freely and pursue their economic, social and cultural development. It appears in the UN Charter and in Article 1 of both human-rights covenants of 1966; it underpinned decolonisation, but outside the colonial context it rarely supports secession against an existing state's wishes.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Article 1(2)

See alsoDecolonisation, Western Sahara

A group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea administered by Japan and claimed by China, which calls them the Diaoyu Islands, and by Taiwan. Tensions rose after the Japanese government bought three of them from a private owner in 2012; the United States has stated that its defence treaty with Japan applies to them.

See alsoFirst island chain, Grey zone, Hub-and-spoke system

The seven Western companies that dominated the oil industry outside the Soviet bloc from the 1940s to the 1970s: Anglo-Iranian, Royal Dutch Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Socal and the Standard Oil companies of New Jersey and New York. The name is credited to Enrico Mattei of Italy's ENI; their control waned as producing states nationalised their oil.

See alsoNational oil company, OPEC, Oil shocks of 1973 and 1979

Tankers that carry oil subject to sanctions or price caps while obscuring their ownership, flag, insurance or position, for example by switching off their AIS transponders or transferring cargo between ships at sea. The International Maritime Organization uses the terms dark fleet and shadow fleet for these operations.

SourceIMO

The rapid growth of American oil and gas output from about 2008, made possible by combining horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in shale and other tight rock formations. It made the United States the world's largest crude producer and turned it into a major exporter of oil and liquefied natural gas.

See alsoWTI, LNG, Henry Hub

The joint statement issued during US President Richard Nixon's visit to China in February 1972, in which the United States acknowledged that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China, and did not challenge that position. It opened the way to diplomatic relations, established in 1979.

See alsoOne China, Strategic ambiguity, Sino-Soviet split

Crude oil futures priced in renminbi, launched in March 2018 on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange and open to foreign traders. They give China a domestic oil price benchmark and are often described as a step towards a petroyuan, though Brent and WTI remain dominant.

SourceShanghai International Energy Exchange (INE)

See alsoFutures, Petrodollar, Renminbi

An annual security conference held in Singapore since 2002 and organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, where defence ministers from across the Indo-Pacific meet. It is often the main occasion for American and Chinese defence officials to set out their positions in public.

SourceInternational Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)

See alsoIndo-Pacific

The transfer of cargo, usually oil, from one vessel to another at sea or in sheltered anchorages. The practice is legal and common, but it is also used to blend and disguise the origin of sanctioned oil, often combined with switched-off transponders, and poses a spill risk when done by poorly insured ageing tankers.

SourceIMO, MARPOL Annex I

See alsoShadow fleet, AIS, Oil price cap

Selling a borrowed security in the hope of buying it back later at a lower price, profiting from a fall. Regulators often restrict it in crises: many countries banned short sales of financial stocks in 2008, and Russia banned them in 2022.

See alsoHedge fund, Options

Mediation in which a third party travels back and forth between parties who will not meet directly, carrying proposals between them. The term was coined for Henry Kissinger's journeys between Israel, Egypt and Syria after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which produced the disengagement agreements of 1974.

See alsoGood offices, Track II diplomacy, Camp David Accords

The argument that Taiwan's central place in chip manufacturing deters attack, because the United States, China and the rest of the world economy all depend on its output. Critics reply that the shield weakens as the United States, Japan and Europe build plants of their own, and that deterrence does not rest on economics alone.

See alsoTSMC, Foundry

A thin disc cut from a single crystal of very pure silicon, on which chips are built in hundreds of process steps. Leading-edge chips are made on wafers 300 mm in diameter; a handful of suppliers in Japan, Taiwan, Germany and South Korea dominate their production.

See alsoCzochralski process, High-purity quartz

The treaty of 1984 under which Britain returned Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997, and China undertook that Hong Kong would keep its capitalist system, way of life and a high degree of autonomy for 50 years, under the formula of one country, two systems. Britain has said that the national security law China imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 breaches it.

See alsoOpium Wars, One China, Century of humiliation

The breakdown of the alliance between China and the Soviet Union from the late 1950s, driven by ideological disputes, rivalry for leadership of the communist world and the Soviet withdrawal of technical advisers in 1960. It led to armed border clashes on the Ussuri River in 1969 and made possible the rapprochement between China and the United States in the 1970s.

See alsoShanghai Communiqué, Cold War

The brief war of February and March 1979 in which China invaded northern Vietnam, saying it meant to punish Hanoi for invading Cambodia and ousting the Khmer Rouge, a Chinese ally, and for its alignment with the Soviet Union. Chinese forces withdrew after about a month, both sides claimed victory, and border clashes continued through the 1980s.

See alsoVietnam War, Sino-Soviet split, Spratly Islands

The war of June 1967 in which Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan and took the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967 set out the formula of land for peace that underlies later negotiations, including Camp David and Oslo.

See alsoCamp David Accords, Oslo Accords, Yom Kippur War

The US Tariff Act of 1930, which raised duties on thousands of imported goods and provoked retaliation by trading partners as the Great Depression deepened. Economists debate how much it contributed to the collapse of world trade, but it became the standard warning against protectionism and was followed by the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which allowed tariffs to be cut by negotiation.

See alsoTariff, GATT

The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, the main treaty on the safety of merchant ships, first adopted in 1914 after the sinking of the Titanic; the version in force dates from 1974. It sets minimum standards for construction, equipment, fire protection, navigation and life-saving appliances.

SourceIMO

See alsoIMO, MARPOL, AIS

A self-declared state in north-west Somalia, the former British protectorate, which proclaimed independence in 1991 and has its own government, currency and elections. Israel became the first UN member state to recognise it, in December 2025, a move rejected by Somalia, the African Union and many Arab and African states.

See alsoHorn of Africa, Recognition of states

The brief Swiss civil war of November 1847 in which the federal army under General Guillaume Henri Dufour defeated the Sonderbund, a defensive league of seven Catholic and conservative cantons. It lasted less than a month and cost about a hundred lives, and the victory of the liberal cantons opened the way to the federal constitution of 1848.

See alsoSwiss federal state of 1848

The evaluation of a source before using it: who produced it, when, for what purpose and with what access to the facts, and whether independent sources confirm it. A primary source is first-hand evidence from the time, such as an official record; a secondary source interprets primary ones.

See alsoAdmiralty Code, OSINT

The case brought by the Philippines against China under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, with the Permanent Court of Arbitration as registry. The tribunal ruled in July 2016 that China had no legal basis to claim historic rights to resources within the nine-dash line; China refused to take part and rejects the award.

SourcePermanent Court of Arbitration, case 2013-19

See alsoNine-dash line, Spratly Islands

A debt security issued by a national government, promising to pay interest and repay the principal on set dates. Bonds issued under the government's own law and in its own currency carry different risks from those issued under foreign law, usually that of New York or England, in dollars or euros.

See alsoSovereign default, Eurobond, Collective action clause

An assessment by a rating agency of a government's ability and willingness to repay its debt; the three largest agencies are S&P Global, Moody's and Fitch. Debt rated BBB minus or above by S&P and Fitch, or Baa3 or above by Moody's, counts as investment grade; many funds may hold only such bonds, so a downgrade below that line can raise borrowing costs sharply.

See alsoSovereign default

The failure of a government to pay interest or principal on its debt when due, or a restructuring that imposes losses on creditors. States cannot be liquidated, so defaults end in negotiation; cases include Argentina in 2001 and 2020, Greece in 2012 and Russia in 2022, when sanctions blocked payments on its foreign-currency bonds.

See alsoParis Club, Common Framework

A state-owned investment fund that invests public money, often from commodity revenues or foreign-exchange surpluses, in assets at home and abroad. Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, built from oil and gas income, is the largest; the Santiago Principles of 2008 set voluntary standards meant to reassure recipient countries that such funds invest on commercial rather than political grounds.

SourceInternational Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds

See alsoInvestment screening

The war of 1979 to 1989 in which Soviet forces backed a communist government in Afghanistan against mujahideen insurgents, who received weapons and money from the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others. The Soviet withdrawal, completed in February 1989, was followed by civil war and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s.

See alsoProxy war, Carter Doctrine, Great Game

In the definition of the US Energy Information Administration, oil production that can be brought on stream within 30 days and sustained for at least 90 days. Most of it is held by Saudi Arabia and a few other Gulf members of OPEC, which gives them a cushion against supply disruptions elsewhere.

SourceUS Energy Information Administration (EIA)

See alsoOPEC, OPEC+, Strategic Petroleum Reserve

An international reserve asset created by the IMF in 1969 and allocated to members in proportion to their quotas, which they can exchange for currencies. Its value is based on a basket of the dollar, euro, renminbi, yen and pound, the renminbi having joined in 2016; the largest allocation, worth about 650 billion dollars, was made in 2021 during the pandemic.

SourceInternational Monetary Fund (IMF)

See alsoIMF, Reserve currency

Russia's financial messaging system, a domestic alternative to SWIFT set up by the Bank of Russia in 2014 after the first sanctions over Crimea. It carries much of Russia's domestic interbank traffic and has linked some foreign banks; since June 2024 the EU has barred its banks outside Russia from connecting to it.

SourceBank of Russia

See alsoSWIFT, CIPS, Secondary sanctions

A region in which a great power claims a privileged say over the foreign and sometimes domestic policies of other states, without formally ruling them. The idea runs against the sovereign equality of states in the UN Charter, but has shaped policy from the Monroe Doctrine to Russia's claims over former Soviet republics.

See alsoMonroe Doctrine, Finlandisation, Balance of power

The fragmentation of the global internet into national or bloc networks with different rules, technical standards and filtering. Drivers include censorship systems such as China's, Russian laws on a sovereign internet, data localisation requirements and divergent regulation of platforms.

See alsoGreat Firewall, Digital sovereignty

A group of small islands, reefs and shoals in the southern South China Sea, claimed in whole by China, Taiwan and Vietnam and in part by the Philippines and Malaysia, with Brunei claiming waters there. From 2013 China turned several reefs into artificial islands with runways and ports; Vietnam has since enlarged its own features considerably.

See alsoNine-dash line, South China Sea arbitration, Maritime militia

The difference between the yields of two bonds, usually expressed in basis points, where one basis point is a hundredth of a percentage point. The gap between Italian and German ten-year government bonds is watched as a gauge of stress in the euro area.

See alsoYield (bond), Bund, Euro crisis

A crypto-asset designed to keep a stable value against a reference asset, usually the US dollar, typically by holding reserves such as Treasury bills. Most are dollar-linked, which spreads dollar use abroad; the EU regulates them under its MiCA regulation and the United States under the GENIUS Act of 2025.

See alsoCentral bank digital currency, De-dollarisation, US Treasuries

The IMF's standard lending instrument for countries with short-term balance of payments needs, under which money is released in instalments as the borrower meets agreed policy conditions. During the Suez crisis of 1956, the United States held up Britain's access to IMF money until London agreed to withdraw its troops from Egypt.

SourceInternational Monetary Fund (IMF)

See alsoIMF, Sterling area

A result is called statistically significant when its p-value, the probability of observing data at least as extreme if there were no real effect, falls below a threshold, often 5 per cent. Significance says nothing about the size or importance of an effect, and testing many hypotheses makes chance findings likely.

See alsoCorrelation and split sample

The group of countries, mostly in the British Empire and Commonwealth, that pegged their currencies to sterling and held their reserves in London, formalised at the outbreak of war in 1939. It kept sterling the second reserve currency after the war, but repeated runs, including during the Suez crisis of 1956, eroded it until it was largely dismantled in 1972.

See alsoReserve currency, Stand-By Arrangement, Decolonisation

The strait between Iran and the Musandam peninsula of Oman that links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean. According to the US Energy Information Administration, oil flows through it averaged about 20 million barrels a day in 2024, around a fifth of world consumption, and Qatar's LNG exports also pass through it.

SourceUS Energy Information Administration (EIA)

See alsoChokepoint, Hormuz bypass pipelines

The strait between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the shortest sea route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and a main path for oil shipped from the Gulf to East Asia. China's dependence on it was described in 2003 as the Malacca dilemma, a phrase attributed to President Hu Jintao.

See alsoChokepoint, Strait of Hormuz

Investments such as oil fields, coal mines or power plants that lose their value before the end of their expected life, for example because climate policy, cheaper technology or falling demand leaves them unprofitable. Central banks and investors study the risk because it could hit the balance sheets of energy companies and their lenders.

See alsoEnergy transition, Proven reserves, Net zero

The long-standing American policy of not stating whether the United States would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked. Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 the United States supplies Taiwan with defensive arms, and the ambiguity is meant to deter both an attack by Beijing and a declaration of formal independence by Taipei.

SourceTaiwan Relations Act (1979)

See alsoOne China, Taiwan Strait, Deterrence

The capacity of the European Union to act on its own in security and defence, and by extension in trade, technology and energy, without depending on other powers, chiefly the United States. The term entered EU documents in the 2010s, notably the Global Strategy of 2016, and its meaning remains disputed between member states.

SourceEuropean Union

See alsoNATO

The distance between a country's front line or borders and its core areas of population, industry and government, which gives it room to absorb an attack and regroup. Pakistani military planners applied the idea to Afghanistan, and Ahmet Davutoğlu, later Turkey's foreign minister and prime minister, used it as the title of a 2001 book arguing for a wider Turkish role in its former Ottoman neighbourhood.

See alsoBuffer state, Geopolitics

The emergency stock of crude oil held by the US government in salt caverns on the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, created by Congress in 1975 after the Arab oil embargo. Presidents have drawn on it during wars, hurricanes and price spikes.

SourceUS Department of Energy

See alsoIEA, Oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, Spare capacity

Malware discovered in 2010 that sabotaged centrifuges at Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz by altering their speed while reporting normal operation. Widely attributed to the United States and Israel, neither of which has confirmed it, it is regarded as the first known cyber weapon to cause physical destruction.

See alsoAttribution (cyber)

A sea-level canal across Egypt between Port Said on the Mediterranean and Suez on the Red Sea, opened in 1869, which spares ships between Europe and Asia the voyage around Africa. Egypt's nationalisation of the canal company in July 1956 led to the Suez crisis; the grounding of the Ever Given blocked it for six days in March 2021.

SourceSuez Canal Authority

See alsoBab el-Mandeb, Chokepoint

The war of 1956 in which Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt after President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company in July. Under financial pressure from the United States, including a run on sterling, and threats from the Soviet Union, London and Paris accepted a ceasefire in November, an outcome widely seen as marking the end of their imperial power.

See alsoUNEF, Eisenhower Doctrine, Decolonisation

In a common classification, a society in which at least 20 per cent of the population is 65 or older, after the thresholds of 7 per cent for an ageing and 14 per cent for an aged society. Japan crossed it first among large countries; South Korea did so in December 2024, among the fastest transitions on record.

See alsoDependency ratio, Total fertility rate

The practice of making unusually accurate probability forecasts on political and economic questions, studied by the psychologist Philip Tetlock. His Good Judgment Project won a forecasting tournament run by the US intelligence research agency IARPA from 2011 to 2015, in which a small group of volunteers, the superforecasters, consistently beat others by reasoning from base rates and updating often in small steps.

See alsoBrier score, Base rate

The short stretch of the border between Poland and Lithuania that separates Belarus from Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. Military planners see it as a weak point of NATO: if it were cut, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would lose their only land link with the rest of the alliance.

See alsoNATO, Instrumentalised migration

A Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean governed by the Svalbard Treaty of 1920, which gives Norway sovereignty but grants citizens and companies of all parties equal rights to economic activity there. The treaty forbids naval bases and fortifications; Russia maintains a coal-mining settlement at Barentsburg, a source of recurring friction with Norway.

SourceSvalbard Treaty (1920)

See alsoArctic Council, Greenland

Crude oil is called sweet when its sulphur content is low, commonly below 0.5 per cent by weight, and sour when it is higher. Sour crude needs more processing to meet fuel standards, so it generally trades at a discount; much Middle Eastern oil is sour, while Brent and WTI are sweet.

See alsoAPI gravity, Brent

A cooperative owned by its member banks, founded in 1973 and based in La Hulpe, Belgium, that runs the main network for secure payment messages between banks; it does not hold or move funds itself. As a Belgian company it is bound by EU law, which is how Iranian banks were disconnected in 2012 and several Russian banks in 2022.

See alsoCIPS, Weaponised interdependence, De-dollarisation

The legal duty of Swiss bankers to keep client information confidential, made a criminal offence by the Banking Act of 1934. Under US and OECD pressure it no longer shields foreign clients from their tax authorities: UBS paid 780 million dollars in 2009, and Switzerland began automatic exchange of account information in 2018.

SourceBanking Act, Article 47

See alsoCommon Reporting Standard, FATCA, Offshore financial centre

The federal state created by the Swiss Federal Constitution of September 1848, which replaced the loose confederation of sovereign cantons after the Sonderbund War. It established a two-chamber Federal Assembly, a seven-member Federal Council and a single customs area, with Bern as the federal city; much of this structure survives in the constitution of 1999.

See alsoSonderbund War, Neutrality, Congress of Vienna

The currency of Switzerland and Liechtenstein, introduced in 1850 and issued by the Swiss National Bank. It is a classic safe haven, rising in times of global stress, which hurts Swiss exporters and has repeatedly led the central bank to intervene in currency markets.

SourceSwiss National Bank

See alsoSafe-haven currency, Swiss National Bank, Franc shock

Switzerland's central bank, founded in 1907, with seats in Bern and Zurich; unusually, it is a company whose shares trade on the stock exchange, with most held by the cantons and cantonal banks. From 2011 to January 2015 it held a minimum exchange rate of 1.20 francs per euro.

SourceNational Bank Act

See alsoSwiss franc, Franc shock, Negative interest rates

The secret agreement of May 1916 between Britain and France, with Russian assent, that divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into zones of British and French control or influence, with much of Palestine under international administration. The postwar borders differed from it in many places, but it remains a byword in the region for borders drawn by outside powers.

See alsoMandate system, Balfour Declaration, Treaty of Sèvres

A United States law of 1979, passed after Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, that governs unofficial relations with Taiwan. It commits the United States to provide Taiwan with defensive arms and treats coercion against Taiwan as a matter of grave concern, without obliging it to defend the island.

See alsoOne China, Strategic ambiguity, Taiwan Strait

The channel between mainland China and Taiwan, about 130 kilometres wide at its narrowest, and one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. For decades the Chinese military largely respected an informal median line along it, drawn by an American general in 1954; since August 2022 Chinese military aircraft have crossed it regularly.

See alsoOne China, Strategic ambiguity, First island chain

A study by international experts, convened by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, on how existing international law applies to cyber operations; the first edition appeared in 2013 and Tallinn Manual 2.0 in 2017. It is an academic work, not official NATO doctrine, but is widely cited by governments.

SourceNATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence

See alsoBudapest Convention, Attribution (cyber)

The phase of the Iran-Iraq War, mainly from 1984 to 1988, in which both sides attacked oil tankers and terminals in the Persian Gulf to cut each other's export revenue. From 1987 the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and escorted them, the largest naval convoy operation since the Second World War.

See alsoStrait of Hormuz, War risk insurance

Sanctions aimed at named individuals, companies or sectors rather than at a whole economy, such as asset freezes, travel bans and bans on particular goods or financing. They spread from the late 1990s after the comprehensive UN sanctions on Iraq were criticised for their humanitarian cost; Switzerland generally adopts EU sanctions under its Embargo Act.

See alsoSecondary sanctions, OFAC

A tax on imported goods, collected at the border. It may be ad valorem, a percentage of the customs value, or specific, a fixed sum per unit such as per tonne; besides raising revenue, tariffs protect domestic producers and serve as leverage in trade negotiations.

See alsoBound and applied tariffs, Most-favoured-nation treatment

An EU directive of 2001 that allows immediate collective protection for people fleeing a mass influx, without individual asylum procedures. It was first activated in March 2022 for people fleeing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Switzerland activated its comparable protection status S the same month.

SourceEuropean Union

See alsoPact on Migration and Asylum, 1951 Refugee Convention

The twenty-foot equivalent unit, the standard measure of container capacity, based on a container 20 feet long; the common 40-foot box counts as two TEU. Container ships, ports and shipping lines are ranked by TEU, and since 2017 the largest ships have carried more than 20,000.

See alsoVLCC

The danger of war when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, a phrase coined by the political scientist Graham Allison after the Greek historian's account of Athens and Sparta. In his study of 16 such cases over five centuries, 12 ended in war; the phrase is widely used about relations between China and the United States.

See alsoSecurity dilemma, Balance of power

The protests led by students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other Chinese cities from April to June 1989, calling for political reform and an end to corruption. The army cleared the square on the night of 3 to 4 June, killing an unknown number of people, estimated in the hundreds or more, and Western states imposed sanctions, including an arms embargo declared by the European Community in June 1989.

See alsoReform and opening up, Revolutions of 1989

The problem that some banks are so large and interconnected that governments cannot let them collapse, which encourages risk-taking and gives them cheaper funding. The Financial Stability Board designates global systemically important banks, which must hold extra capital and prepare plans for orderly resolution.

SourceFinancial Stability Board (FSB)

See alsoBail-in, UBS, Financial Stability Board

The average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates of a given year throughout her reproductive years. In countries with low mortality, a rate of about 2.1 replaces each generation without migration.

SourceUN Population Division

Unofficial dialogue between people close to governments, such as former officials, academics and retired officers, used to explore ideas that official negotiators cannot yet raise. The Pugwash Conferences, which brought together scientists from both sides of the Cold War and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, are an early example.

See alsoGood offices, Shuttle diplomacy

The right of all ships and aircraft under the law of the sea to pass continuously and expeditiously through straits used for international navigation, even where they lie within the territorial sea of coastal states. Unlike innocent passage, it cannot be suspended by those states; Iran, which has not ratified the convention, disputes that the right applies in the Strait of Hormuz.

SourceUN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Articles 37 to 44

See alsoUNCLOS, Chokepoint

A breakaway strip of Moldova east of the Dniester river, which has run itself without international recognition since a short war in 1992. Russian troops remain there, guarding a large Soviet-era ammunition depot at Cobasna; the end of Russian gas transit through Ukraine in January 2025 caused a severe energy crisis in the territory.

See alsoFrozen conflict, Near abroad

The peace treaty of March 1918 by which Soviet Russia left the First World War, giving up Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland and Ukraine to German control or independence. Germany's defeat that November voided it, but Finland, Poland and the three Baltic states emerged from the territories it detached as independent states.

See alsoTreaty of Versailles, Buffer state

The peace treaty signed in Lausanne in July 1923 between Turkey and the Allied powers, which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres and fixed most of the borders of modern Turkey. A separate convention signed in Lausanne that January provided for the compulsory exchange of Orthodox Christians living in Turkey and Muslims living in Greece, exempting the Greeks of Istanbul and the Muslims of Western Thrace.

See alsoPartition of India, Instrumentalised migration

The treaty signed in March 1957 by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg that founded the European Economic Community, with a customs union and a common market; a second treaty signed the same day founded Euratom. As amended, it became the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union in 2009.

See alsoMaastricht Treaty, Customs union

The peace treaty between Japan and 48 Allied states signed in September 1951 and in force from April 1952, which ended the occupation of Japan. Japan renounced Korea, Taiwan, the Kuril Islands and southern Sakhalin without naming who would receive them, leaving disputes over Taiwan's status and the Kurils open; neither China nor the Soviet Union signed it.

See alsoOne China, Korean War

The peace treaty of August 1920 between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, which would have left the Ottomans a rump state in Anatolia, placed the Turkish Straits under international control and provided for an Armenian state and Kurdish autonomy. Rejected by the Turkish nationalist movement and never ratified, it was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

See alsoTreaty of Lausanne, Sykes-Picot Agreement, Eastern Question

The treaty of 1895 that ended the First Sino-Japanese War, under which Qing China recognised the independence of Korea and ceded Taiwan, the Penghu Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan. Russia, France and Germany forced Japan to return Liaodong within weeks; Taiwan remained under Japanese rule until 1945.

See alsoUnequal treaties, Taiwan Strait, Meiji Restoration

The agreement of 1494 between Spain and Portugal that divided the lands outside Europe they had found or might find along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, Spain taking the west and Portugal the east. The line explains why Brazil became Portuguese while most of the rest of South America was colonised by Spain.

See alsoSphere of influence

A series of peace treaties of 1713 to 1715 that ended the War of the Spanish Succession. A Bourbon kept the Spanish throne on condition that the crowns of France and Spain were never united, and Spain ceded Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain; Article X on Gibraltar remains the legal basis Britain cites for its sovereignty over the territory.

See alsoBalance of power

The peace treaty between Germany and the Allied powers signed in June 1919, which returned Alsace-Lorraine to France, gave territory to Poland, limited the German army to 100,000 men and, in Article 231, held Germany responsible for the losses caused by the war, the basis for reparations. Its first part was the Covenant of the League of Nations.

See alsoLeague of Nations, Fourteen Points, Mandate system

Treaty adopted at the United Nations in 2017 and in force since January 2021. It prohibits its parties from developing, testing, producing, possessing, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. None of the states that have nuclear weapons has joined it, and Switzerland is not a party.

SourceUN Office for Disarmament Affairs

The conflict identified by the economist Robert Triffin in 1960: a country whose currency serves as the world's reserve must run deficits to supply it to others, yet persistent deficits erode confidence in that currency. It anticipated the breakdown of the link between the dollar and gold under the Bretton Woods system.

See alsoBretton Woods system, Exorbitant privilege, Reserve currency

The policy announced by President Harry Truman to Congress in March 1947 that the United States would support free peoples resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure, beginning with aid to Greece and Turkey. It committed the United States to containment and marked the start of open Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.

See alsoContainment, Marshall Plan, Cold War

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, founded in 1987 by Morris Chang in the Hsinchu Science Park, the first company built purely as a contract chip manufacturer. It makes most of the world's most advanced logic chips, which is why its plants figure in every assessment of the economic cost of a conflict over Taiwan.

See alsoFoundry, Silicon shield

The Title Transfer Facility, a virtual trading point for natural gas in the Dutch grid whose futures on ICE Endex serve as Europe's main gas price benchmark. Its price rose above 300 euros per megawatt hour in August 2022 as Russia cut pipeline deliveries, many times its usual level.

SourceGasunie Transport Services; ICE Endex

See alsoHenry Hub, LNG, Nord Stream

The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, joined by the Sea of Marmara, the only sea passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Under the Montreux Convention of 1936, merchant ships enjoy freedom of passage in peacetime, which makes the straits the export route for Russian, Kazakh and Ukrainian oil and grain.

SourceMontreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits (1936)

See alsoChokepoint, Black Sea Grain Initiative

The treaty signed in September 1990 by the two German states and the four wartime Allies, which restored full sovereignty to a united Germany. It confirmed the border with Poland, capped German armed forces at 370,000 and provided that foreign troops and nuclear weapons would not be stationed or deployed in the former East Germany.

See alsoBerlin Wall, Potsdam Conference, NATO

The proposed settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, generally based on the lines before the 1967 war with agreed land swaps. It underlay the Oslo process; in September 2025 the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and France were among the states that recognised the State of Palestine, citing the need to keep it alive.

See alsoOslo Accords, West Bank, Gaza Strip

Switzerland's largest bank and, since absorbing Credit Suisse in 2023, its only global bank, with a balance sheet larger than the Swiss economy and the world's biggest wealth management business. Its size has prompted a debate in Bern since 2023 over how much capital it must hold, particularly for its foreign subsidiaries.

See alsoCredit Suisse rescue, Too big to fail, Zurich financial centre

A coalition of about 50 states that coordinates military aid to Ukraine, also called the Ramstein group after the US air base in Germany where it first met in April 2022. The United States chaired it until early 2025, when the United Kingdom and Germany took over the chair.

See alsoNATO, Coalition of the willing

The main deliberative organ of the United Nations, in which every member state has one vote. Its resolutions are generally recommendations rather than binding law, except on internal matters such as the budget, but they carry political weight and can help to form customary international law.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Chapter IV

See alsoUN Security Council, Uniting for Peace, Customary international law

Resolution 181 of the UN General Assembly, adopted in November 1947, which recommended ending the British mandate and dividing Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration. Jewish leaders accepted it and Arab leaders rejected it; Israel declared independence in May 1948, and war with neighbouring Arab states followed.

SourceUN General Assembly

See alsoMandate system, Balfour Declaration, UN General Assembly

Operations in which the United Nations deploys military, police and civilian personnel, known as blue helmets, to monitor ceasefires or help implement peace agreements, usually with the consent of the parties. The first observer mission was set up in the Middle East in 1948 and the first armed force during the Suez crisis of 1956; peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

SourceUnited Nations Department of Peace Operations

See alsoUNEF, UN Security Council, Blue Line

Measures not involving armed force that the Security Council imposes under Article 41 of the Charter, binding on all member states, such as arms embargoes, asset freezes and travel bans. The first mandatory sanctions targeted Southern Rhodesia in 1966; since the 1990s most regimes have been targeted at named people and entities and are monitored by committees and panels of experts.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Article 41

See alsoChapter VII, Secondary sanctions, JCPOA

The organ of the United Nations with primary responsibility for international peace and security, and the only one whose decisions bind all member states. It has 15 members: five permanent ones (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States), each holding a veto over substantive decisions, and ten elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms.

SourceCharter of the United Nations, Chapter V

See alsoChapter VII, UN General Assembly, Uniting for Peace

The treaty of 1982, in force since 1994, that sets out the rules for the use of the oceans, often called the constitution of the seas. It defines the territorial sea of up to 12 nautical miles, the exclusive economic zone of up to 200 nautical miles and the rights of passage through straits; the United States follows much of it as custom but has not ratified it.

SourceUnited Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

See alsoTransit passage, South China Sea arbitration

A UN body set up in 1964 and based in Geneva to help developing countries benefit from trade and investment. It publishes reference data on trade, investment and maritime transport, including the World Investment Report; its first secretary-general, Raúl Prebisch, is known for the thesis that the terms of trade of commodity exporters tend to decline.

See alsoWTO, Official development assistance

A fibre-optic cable laid on the seabed between landing stations on the coast; such cables carry almost all intercontinental data traffic. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea requires states to make the wilful or culpably negligent breaking of a cable beneath the high seas a punishable offence.

SourceUNCLOS, Article 113

The United Nations Emergency Force, created by the General Assembly in November 1956 to secure and supervise the end of fighting in the Suez crisis. It was the first armed UN peacekeeping force; Lester Pearson of Canada, who proposed it, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. It withdrew in 1967 at Egypt's request, shortly before the Six-Day War.

SourceUnited Nations

See alsoSuez crisis, Uniting for Peace

The treaties imposed on China, Japan, Korea and other Asian states in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Western powers and later by Japan, which granted foreigners treaty ports, fixed low tariffs and exemption from local courts. Japan had revised its own by 1911; Britain and the United States gave up their extraterritorial rights in China in 1943.

See alsoOpium Wars, Century of humiliation, Open Door policy

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992 and in force since 1994, which commits its parties to stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that prevents dangerous interference with the climate. Its parties meet each year at the Conference of the Parties, known as the COP, where the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement were adopted.

SourceUnited Nations

See alsoParis Agreement

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, created by the General Assembly in 1950 and based in Geneva. It protects and assists refugees, stateless and displaced people, supervises the application of the 1951 Convention, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954 and 1981.

See also1951 Refugee Convention

The period after the end of the Cold War in which the United States was the only superpower, without a rival of comparable military, economic or political weight. The phrase comes from an essay by the columnist Charles Krauthammer in Foreign Affairs, in its issue for 1990 and 1991; debate since has turned on how long that moment lasted.

See alsoMultipolarity, Cold War

A resolution of the UN General Assembly of November 1950 under which the Assembly may meet in emergency special session and recommend collective measures when the Security Council fails to act because its permanent members disagree. The first such session was held on the Suez crisis in 1956; another was called after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

SourceUN General Assembly resolution 377 (V)

See alsoUN General Assembly, UN Security Council, UNEF

The growth in the share of a population living in towns and cities. On national definitions of urban areas, UN estimates put more than half of the world's population in towns and cities from about 2007, with most future growth expected in Asian and African cities.

SourceUN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects

The eighth and last round of GATT negotiations, launched in Punta del Este in 1986 and concluded in Marrakesh in 1994. It created the WTO and brought agriculture, textiles, services and intellectual property under multilateral rules; its successor, the Doha Round launched in 2001, stalled over agriculture and was never concluded.

See alsoGATT, WTO

Debt securities issued by the US Treasury: bills of up to one year, notes of two to ten years and bonds of twenty or thirty years. Their market is the deepest in the world, and their yields serve as the reference for pricing dollar assets; foreign central banks hold much of their reserves in them.

SourceUS Department of the Treasury

See alsoReserve currency, Exorbitant privilege, Foreign exchange reserves

The trade agreement among the United States, Mexico and Canada that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on 1 July 2020. It tightened rules of origin for cars, requiring 75 per cent regional content and a share made by workers earning at least 16 dollars an hour; at its first joint review, on 1 July 2026, the United States declined to extend it, which triggers annual reviews.

See alsoRules of origin, Free trade area

The war between communist North Vietnam, allied with the Viet Cong insurgency in the South, and the government of South Vietnam, backed by the United States, which had more than 500,000 troops there at its peak in 1968 and 1969. It ended with the fall of Saigon in April 1975 and the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule in 1976.

See alsoDomino theory, Geneva Conference of 1954, Sino-Vietnamese War

A very large crude carrier, a tanker of roughly 200,000 to 320,000 deadweight tonnes that can carry about two million barrels of oil. Smaller classes include Suezmax, the largest tankers that can pass the Suez Canal laden, and the medium-sized Aframax, named after a freight rate assessment scale.

See alsoShadow fleet

The Dutch trading company chartered in 1602 with a monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and the right to wage war, conclude treaties and build forts. Often described as the first company to issue publicly traded shares, it ruled territories across the Indonesian archipelago from its base at Batavia and was dissolved in 1799.

See alsoEast India Company, Private military and security company, Strait of Malacca

A pejorative name for an investment fund that buys the debt of a distressed borrower cheaply and then refuses a restructuring, suing for full payment. After Argentina's default of 2001, funds led by NML Capital won judgments in New York and were paid in 2016.

See alsoCollective action clause, Argentine default of 2001

A Russian private military company, active from 2014 in Ukraine, Syria and African states including Mali, the Central African Republic and Libya, often paid partly in mining concessions. After its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin led a mutiny in June 2023 and died in a plane crash two months later, Russia's defence ministry built up an Africa Corps to take over its role, and it replaced Wagner in Mali in June 2025.

See alsoPrivate military and security company, Mercenary

Cover for ships and cargoes against losses from war, piracy, terrorism and similar perils, which ordinary marine policies exclude. When the Joint War Committee of the London insurance market lists a sea area as one of heightened risk, ships entering it pay an additional premium, so attacks in places such as the Red Sea or the Gulf raise shipping costs quickly.

SourceJoint War Committee (Lloyd's Market Association and International Underwriting Association)

See alsoP&I club, Bab el-Mandeb, Tanker War

The military alliance formed in May 1955 by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European states, days after West Germany joined NATO. Its forces crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 without Romania taking part, and Albania formally left the same year; the pact was dissolved in July 1991.

See alsoNATO, COMECON, Prague Spring

The agreement of May 1946 between Switzerland and the United States, Britain and France, under which Switzerland paid 250 million Swiss francs in gold to settle Allied claims over gold it had bought from the German Reichsbank during the Second World War, in return for the release of Swiss assets frozen in the United States. The question returned in the 1990s debate over wartime gold and dormant accounts.

See alsoBergier Commission, Neutrality

The ten policy prescriptions listed by the economist John Williamson in 1989 as those that institutions in Washington agreed Latin American countries needed, including fiscal discipline, trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation. The phrase came to stand for the market reforms the IMF and the World Bank attached to their lending in the 1990s, and for criticism of them.

See alsoIMF, World Bank

The ratio of fresh water withdrawn for farming, industry and households to the renewable supply available, used as a UN Sustainable Development Goal indicator. When withdrawals exceed a quarter of renewable resources a country is considered water stressed; many countries of North Africa and the Middle East withdraw more than their renewable supply.

SourceFood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); UN Sustainable Development Goal indicator 6.4.2

See alsoGrand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Indus Waters Treaty

The idea that states controlling central nodes of global networks, such as dollar payment systems or internet infrastructure, can use them to monitor or exclude others. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman set it out in 2019; the disconnection of Iranian and Russian banks from SWIFT is a frequently cited example.

See alsoSWIFT, Secondary sanctions, Economic statecraft

The territory west of the Jordan river, held by Jordan from 1949 and occupied by Israel since the war of 1967, including East Jerusalem. Under the Oslo Accords it is divided into Areas A, B and C, with Israel in full control of Area C; in 2024 the International Court of Justice advised that Israel's continued presence there is unlawful.

See alsoOslo Accords, Two-state solution, Gaza Strip

A former Spanish colony on the Atlantic coast of north-west Africa, most of which Morocco has controlled since Spain withdrew in 1975 and 1976. The Polisario Front, which proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in 1976, disputes this; the United Nations lists the territory as non-self-governing. A UN mission, MINURSO, was deployed in 1991 to monitor a ceasefire, which the Polisario Front declared over in November 2020.

SourceUnited Nations

See alsoSelf-determination, Decolonisation, Phosphate rock

The principle that each state has exclusive authority over its territory and that other states should not interfere in its internal affairs. It is named after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War and also confirmed the independence of the Swiss Confederation from the Holy Roman Empire.

See alsoRecognition of states, Self-determination, Responsibility to protect

The pledge by Mario Draghi, president of the ECB, in London in July 2012 that the bank would do whatever it took to preserve the euro. It was followed by the Outright Monetary Transactions programme for buying the bonds of states under a rescue programme, which was never used but calmed bond markets.

See alsoEuro crisis, ECB, Forward guidance

Verbal expressions of likelihood, such as likely or almost certain, tied to numerical ranges so that readers interpret them consistently. Sherman Kent of the CIA proposed such a scale in 1964; the UK Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment publishes a probability yardstick used across British government.

See alsoBrier score, Analysis of competing hypotheses

The development lender created at Bretton Woods in 1944 and based in Washington, made up of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which lends to middle-income governments, and the International Development Association, which gives grants and very cheap loans to the poorest countries. By convention its president has been an American.

See alsoIMF, Washington Consensus, Official development assistance

An ITU conference held every three to four years that revises the Radio Regulations, the treaty governing the use of radio spectrum and satellite orbits. Its decisions on frequency bands for mobile networks, satellites and radar settle commercial and military interests for years, and the 2023 conference was held in Dubai.

SourceInternational Telecommunication Union (ITU)

See alsoITU, Mega-constellation

West Texas Intermediate, a light, sweet crude that serves as the benchmark for oil in the United States, with futures contracts traded in New York and delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma. In April 2020, as storage at Cushing ran short, the expiring futures contract settled below zero for the first time.

SourceCME Group (NYMEX)

See alsoBrent, Contango and backwardation

The international organisation that administers the multilateral trade agreements, provides a forum for trade negotiations and settles disputes among its members. It was created on 1 January 1995 by the Marrakesh Agreement, which concluded the Uruguay Round, and is based in Geneva; it decides by consensus, which gives each member an effective veto.

SourceMarrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization

See alsoGATT, Dispute Settlement Understanding, Appellate Body (WTO)

The meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in Crimea in February 1945 that agreed on the division of Germany into occupation zones, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, voting rules in the UN Security Council and a westward shift of Poland's eastern border. It is often cited, especially in Central Europe, as the moment the continent was divided into spheres of influence.

See alsoPotsdam Conference, Sphere of influence, UN Security Council

The annual return an investor earns on a bond, taking into account its coupon and the price paid for it. Because the coupon is fixed, the yield rises when the price falls, so a sell-off in a government's bonds shows up as higher borrowing costs for that state.

See alsoSovereign bond, Yield curve, Duration

A line plotting the yields of bonds of the same issuer against their time to maturity. It normally slopes upwards, because lenders demand more to lend for longer; an inverted curve, with short-term yields above long-term ones, has preceded most US recessions since the 1970s.

See alsoYield (bond), US Treasuries, Yield curve control

A policy in which a central bank targets the yield of a bond of a given maturity and buys as many bonds as needed to hold it. The Bank of Japan capped the ten-year government bond yield from 2016 until March 2024; the Federal Reserve pegged Treasury yields from 1942 to 1951.

See alsoBank of Japan, Yield curve, Quantitative easing

The war of October 1973 in which Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, making early gains before Israeli counter-offensives. Arab oil producers responded with an embargo and production cuts aimed at states supporting Israel, causing the first oil shock, and the war's aftermath opened the way to peace between Egypt and Israel.

See alsoOil shocks of 1973 and 1979, Six-Day War, Camp David Accords

An unusually large share of young adults, often those aged 15 to 24, in a population, typically during the early stages of the demographic transition. Researchers link it to a higher risk of political unrest where young people lack jobs, though the evidence shows it as one factor among many.

See alsoDemographic dividend, Demographic transition

The wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001, in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and North Macedonia. They included the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide at Srebrenica in 1995, drew NATO into its first combat operations and led the UN to set up the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

See alsoDayton Agreement, Responsibility to protect, NATO

A proposed transit route across Armenia's southern province of Syunik linking mainland Azerbaijan with its exclave of Nakhchivan, and by extension Turkey. At a White House meeting in August 2025 Armenia and Azerbaijan initialled a peace agreement and agreed on a US-backed route there, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, under Armenian law; the treaty had not been signed by October 2026.

See alsoNagorno-Karabakh, Enclave and exclave

The largest nuclear power station in Europe, with six reactors, located on the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine and occupied by Russian forces since March 2022. The International Atomic Energy Agency has kept experts at the site since September 2022, because shelling and repeated losses of external power have raised the risk of an accident.

See alsoIAEA, Donbas

German for turning point of an era, the word Chancellor Olaf Scholz used in a speech to the Bundestag on 27 February 2022, three days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He announced a special fund of 100 billion euros for the armed forces and a commitment to raise defence spending, breaking with decades of German restraint.

See alsoStrategic autonomy, NATO

Switzerland's main financial centre, home to the headquarters of UBS, the stock exchange operator SIX, the reinsurer Swiss Re, the insurer Zurich and a seat of the Swiss National Bank. It ranks among the leading centres for cross-border wealth management and insurance.

See alsoGeneva financial centre, UBS, Swiss National Bank