Author: Giorgia Pietropaoli
Navigating the real tension between migration, identity, and Islam: what places, data and voices on the ground are truly telling us In the dead of night between July 27 and 28, 2025, in Torre Pacheco, Spain, a photograph of a 68-year-old pensioner with a severely battered face began circulating online. The man claimed three young North Africans had assaulted him. Within hours, far-right groups organised street patrols, and the town remained on edge for several consecutive nights. Similar episodes have recurred across half of Europe over recent years: from Southport to Ballymena, from Amsterdam to the outer suburbs of Paris.…
Five heatwaves from late May to mid-August, with hundreds of thousands of people evacuated Europe’s Record Heat The summer of 2026 is proving to be one of the most difficult seasons ever recorded in Europe, marked by a growing link between rising temperatures and the proliferation of wildfires. According to data from 3bmeteo, a digital company specialising in weather forecasting, climate analysis, and atmospheric monitoring, Western Europe experienced five distinct heatwaves between late May and mid-August 2026, a remarkable sequence notable not so much for individual records as for its precocity, frequency, and persistence. The first heat surge arrived as…
On the eve of the fifth, grim anniversary of the fall of Kabul, reflecting on this story means reckoning with the balance sheet of a twenty-year war that ultimately resulted in the restoration of the very government that the 2001 international intervention set out to overthrow. Two decades of military, economic, and institutional presence were not enough to build foundations sturdy enough to withstand the return of the Taliban, battered by corruption, the fragility of Afghan institutions, and the contradictions of Western strategy. The result for the civilian population, particularly women, is a return to square one, if not worse:…
When the illusion of sealed borders collides with the global reality of migratory flows On the North African coast, just a few miles from the Spanish mainland, stand two strips of land that encapsulate five centuries of European history: Ceuta and Melilla. Spanish autonomous cities geographically immersed within the territory of Morocco, they represent a unique case in the global geopolitical landscape, the European Union’s only land border with the African continent. For Madrid, they are enclaves, national territory in every sense under the 1668 Treaty of Lisbon for Ceuta and since the 15th century for Melilla; for Rabat, they…
