The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Pages 4 and 5 At the time of writing, bloody repression seems to have quelled the mass protests in Iran that began in late December and spread to nearly 200 towns and cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces. The dynamics of these protests recall those that erupted in 2017 and 2019: both were similarly marked by rising living costs and subsidy cuts, abuses by the religious police in enforcing the veil on women (especially students), and the involvement of ethnic minorities. According to international estimates, the victims of those previous waves of repression amounted to 400 and 550 respectively, while there is still uncertainty about the scale of today’s massacre, with estimates ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 victims. Iranian government sources, quoted by Reuters , mention 2,000-5,000, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, in a speech on January 17 th , speaks of thousands of deaths and enormous damage c...

Internationalism No. 82, December 2025 Page 3 From the series European news In our analysis, we have considered how the most likely path to EU rearmament could be through the creation of a European pillar within NATO. Rather than a common deterrence signifying the supreme affirmation of the sovereignty of a continental State, it would probably involve the sharing of State sovereignty at European level, in the form of nuclear sharing. This assessment is confirmed by a significant French source. Nuclear backing In an October report by the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) , Emmanuelle Maître and Etienne Marcuz elaborate on the concrete prospects for cooperation between States to achieve European-scale deterrence. Together with the British system, they write, French nuclear deterrence forms the foundation of a true European pillar within NATO . The creation of a Franco-British Nuclear Steering Group with the Northwood Declaration ...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 13 From the series War industry and European defence The Economist provides an illustration of how the use of unmanned and remotely piloted systems in warfare is expanding. In Africa, 30 governments are equipped with UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones. In 2024, they were deployed 484 times in local wars in thirteen different countries, twice as frequently as the previous year, causing 1,200 deaths. The most widely used drone on the continent is the TB2, produced by the Turkish company Baykar, which has seen a decade of extensive use in conflicts across Syria, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and Ukraine. LBA Systems and MALE drones At the Paris Air Show in mid-June, an agreement was signed to establish LBA Systems, a joint venture between Baykar and Leonardo. The aim is to produce the Akinci and TB3 drones, the latter of which will be capable of taking off from helicopter carrier decks. The aircraft wil...