A new set of Orientalist narratives are deliberately romanticising the Taliban as the natural rulers of Afghanistan. This is a dangerous and flawed strategy emerging in at least five false narratives about the Afghan society and the Taliban.

International politics is the struggle for the dominant normative architecture of world order based on the interlay of power, economic weight and ideas for the good international society. For several decades now wealth and power have been shifting from the west to the east and produced a rebalancing of the world order.

Three developments contribute to the fact that 2023 could indeed become India's global political year: India's chairmanship of the G20 countries, interestingly its role in the war in Ukraine, and the increasingly widespread critical view of China.

How to de-risk a lexical change that represents dangerous trends: fragmentation, decoupling and confrontation.

When following the news over the past three years, one might get the impression that the world is living through a permanent state of crisis. While climate change is arguably the most important challenge of our time, headlines were frequently dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and more recently skyrocketing energy and food prices.

German-Chinese relations are currently being reassessed in Germany. The shock of Germany's dependence on Russian gas, coal and oil supplies has made relations with China particularly sensitive. Germany is not only highly dependent on Russian raw materials and fossil fuels but is also economically more closely interlinked with China: China ranks second in Germany's exports and number one in imports. But is it possible to reduce economic dependency at all and how far should a possible decoupling go?