The stories to watch in 2026

Your Saturday deep dive

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first Saturday newsletter of 2026.

Also, how is it only 10 days into the new year? It really feels like it should have taken more than 10 days to upend the entire world order, but here we are.

Given this is the first edition of what is shaping up to be (another) hell of a 12 months in world events, I thought it would make sense to cast ahead to some of the stories we should be keeping an eye on in 2026.

The stories I’ve chosen, with a couple of exceptions, fit the Proximities criteria of a) non-Western and b) under-reported in the international media.

I hope you find it a useful list.

Until next Saturday,

Barry.

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Sudan

It’s gone from the headlines again. As mentioned in our second Sudan deep dive in November, the country’s civil war briefly regained attention in November when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group captured the city of el-Fasher and unleashed a campaign of ethnically-motivated killing so brutal that the blood could be seen from space. Then the Western media largely turned away again. This is far from over, though, and remains the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, heaping starvation, death, sexual violence and misery on the people of Sudan.

Syria

It’s now more than a year since President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power in Syria after a lightning offensive sent longtime leader Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Moscow. Al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda leader, initially brought a lot of optimism to Syrians exhausted by more than a decade of civil war and quickly became a fixture on the diplomatic circuit, attempting to get sanctions lifted and attract investment. U.S. President Donald Trump seemed particularly taken with him. But, away from the international stage, al-Sharaa has struggled to unite competing factions at home. His forces clashed just this week with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces group, which controls most of the country’s northeast. Al-Sharaa’s journey, and Syria’s, will be challenging in 2026.

The Sahel

We covered the conflict in the Sahel frequently in Proximities last year, particularly the tri-border region, where Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali meet, often described as the world’s epicentre of terrorist activity. The governments of those three nations, all military juntas, are increasingly threatened by ISIS-linked groups who appear to have the wind at their backs. Analysts are now saying there is a very real possibility that at least one of the juntas could fall. An alleged plot to assassinate the hugely popular leader of Burkina Faso, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, earlier this week underlines just how volatile the situation remains.

Vaccines