--- title: "Conflicts to Watch in 2026: The World's Flashpoints Go Hot" description: "Say what you will about the post-Cold-War order, but love it or hate it, that global order completely collapsed in 2025. At the one-quarter mark of the twenty-first century, the world has entered an era of global realignment, where ambitious new players are on the rise and old titans have started to fall. A unipolar world has become multipolar, the old rules no longer apply, and every nation on Earth must make a choice. They can adapt and thrive, or they can stagnate and consign themselves to history.\n\nIf 2025 was the year the global rule book was rewritten, then 2026 will be the year the new rules are put to the test. Those new rules will shape conflict from the battlefields of Eastern Europe to the multidimensional chaos of the African Horn, from the coasts of Venezuela to the coasts of Taiwan, and from the jungles of South Asia to the jungles of South America. They will decide not only who gets ahead, but what they can get away with, guiding nations not toward peace but toward profit.\n\n2026 may or may not be a year of major world conflicts, but it is practically guaranteed to be a year of chaos. What follows is a region-by-region survey of the places that most demand watching, and an honest accounting of why each one could tip from simmering tension into open war. The thesis is simple: in a multipolar world without an enforcer, the conflicts most likely to define 2026 are the ones already burning at low heat, waiting for an incentive to flare.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n- Several frozen conflicts turned hot in 2025 — Iran and Israel, India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Thailand and Cambodia — and each remains a simmering flashpoint where all sides weigh known incentives to return to war.\n- Washington's escalating pressure campaign against Nicholas Maduro is widely read as regime-change leverage rather than counter-narcotics; a full US invasion of Venezuela is unlikely in 2026, with targeted airstrikes the more probable path.\n- Ecuador has collapsed from one of Latin America's safest countries into one of the world's ten most violent, with a projected 2025 murder rate near 50 per 100,000 and roughly 40 armed gangs now competing for cocaine and illegal-mining spoils.\n- Syria's greatest escalation risk lies between Damascus and the Kurdish-led region of Rojava, with Turkey pressing for reintegration by an end-of-2025 deadline and signaling its willingness to go to war.\n- The Horn of Africa is hardening into two hostile blocs — Ethiopia backed by the UAE, and Eritrea backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia — with multiple triggers that could ignite a wider East African war.\n- Sudan's civil war, already the deadliest conflict on Earth with estimates as high as 400,000 killed, is forecast to worsen in 2026, with Kordofan emerging as the new focal point of the bloodshed.\n- In Ukraine, Russia controlled 19% of the country's territory by December 2025 — only one point more than at the end of 2022 — at a cost cited by CSIS of nearly one million Russian casualties, the hallmark of a grinding attritional war with no clear off-ramp.\n\n## The World's Frozen Conflicts Turn Hot\n\nBefore looking forward, it is worth paying respects to 2025, a year in which a handful of frozen conflicts recently turned hot. The long cold war between Iran and Israel produced their first major direct military engagement ever during the twelve-day war last June. India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed enemies, engaged in a large-scale showdown across April and May. Disputes and skirmishes near the historic Durand Line escalated into a proper border conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Thailand and Cambodia saw all-out fighting break out across four days in July, go quiet for a few months, then roar back to life in early December.\n\nHeading into 2026, these are best understood as simmering flashpoints — places where tensions are known to be high, where all sides are balancing known incentives that could send them back into conflict, but where nobody can predict exactly when things will go hot again. None of these combatants is necessarily seeking war. What they share is a structure of incentives that makes a return to violence acceptable, even attractive, if it serves a broader goal.\n\nStart with Israel and Iran. Neither nation is currently trying to force a return to war, but both have ample incentives to accept renewed conflict if it suits them. In Israel, the Netanyahu government and its military allies understand that Jerusalem stands on the precipice of total victory — not merely defeating the militant proxy forces of Hamas and Hezbollah, but stamping them out entirely, and collapsing the Iranian regime in the process. With Hamas and Hezbollah largely dealt with, Israel's attention has turned to Iran and its other regional adversaries.\n\nIt is possible Iran's regime will never recover from the setbacks of the twelve-day war, but Israel is not about to leave that to chance. If Iran appears to be reconstituting its forces, meaningfully rebuilding its proxies, or — worse — making renewed progress on its nuclear program, Israel is likely to take unilateral action. Iran's own calculus is more counterintuitive. Its ruling regime grows weaker by the day, yet it understands that its mandate to lead is strongest when the country is under threat from Israel. As paradoxical as it sounds, the regime may try to maintain its grip on power precisely by continuing to engage Israel in limited conflict.\n\nThe conflicts among India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan bleed into a single regional mess, and can be discussed together. India and Pakistan routinely accuse one another of sponsoring organized terror campaigns on each other's soil, and both remain quite vulnerable to such attacks. India wants to put Pakistan in its place so it can focus on competing with China, and it wants to reassert its strategic non-alignment and autonomy after perceiving a loss of face when the United States stepped in to broker their recent ceasefire. Pakistan, by contrast, feels emboldened by how that last conflict played out, and it is under the control of a military strongman gaining in both power and international support.\n\nAfghanistan is the one nation here that definitely does not want a war, and has little ability to fight a conventional war at all — but it may not have a choice. Its territory is home to the Pakistani Taliban, who are accused of receiving direct support from the Afghan Taliban. Even if no such support exists, Pakistan has proven entirely willing to blame Afghan leadership for the Pakistani Taliban's actions. This is a part of the world where non-state actors operate in all directions, serving many conflicting strategic objectives, and sometimes acting in ways their alleged foreign sponsors cannot control. So even if none of the three governments actively wants war in 2026, the region is liable to be pulled into one by non-state actors — and if any of them does secretly want to return to conflict, those same actors offer a perfect excuse.\n\nFinally, the latest round of fighting between Thailand and Cambodia remains volatile, and both sides have given ample indications that the most recent exchange probably will not be their last. Cambodia is clearly the weaker of the two combatants, yet during the long lull between its first 2025 clash with Thailand and its second, the Cambodian military appears to have placed fresh land mines all along the border regions and engaged in other provocative acts that make little sense unless Cambodia was looking to return to conflict. Thailand, meanwhile, is ruled by a new government that has taken a hard line against Cambodia. After its first ceasefire attempt failed, Thailand now seems determined to ensure Cambodia will not be a threat in the coming years.\n\nIt is entirely feasible that the current violence is resolved through another ceasefire. But if the two enter yet another cycle of escalation afterward, then the next time open conflict breaks out, Thailand will be even less willing to accept a ceasefire than it is today. Major nationalist movements are fanning the flames on both sides of the border zone, and as long as confrontation makes for good politics, neither side's recent behavior suggests it would back down.\n\n## Venezuela Versus Washington\n\n\"He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,\" White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in a wide-ranging interview, referring to President Trump. \"And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.\" The remark seemed to confirm what Latin America observers have argued since the Trump administration began striking boats in the Caribbean: that the strikes are less about fighting drug trafficking than about pressuring Venezuelan strongman Nicholas Maduro into resigning.\n\nGiven that on the 11th of December — five days before the Vanity Fair interview was published — the administration seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, it seems more than likely the feud will continue to escalate. So what does 2026 hold for the standoff between Caracas and Washington?\n\nFirst, despite President Trump insisting he has not ruled out putting boots on the ground in Venezuela, most experts do not think an actual American invasion is on the cards — at least not in 2026. Beyond cutting against Trump's promise to start no new wars, invading Venezuela would be an unpopular decision that could cost the administration the upcoming midterms. A poll conducted by CBS found that only 30% of Americans would support taking military action against Venezuela.\n\nWith a full-scale invasion seemingly off the table, the most likely remaining course is targeted airstrikes against strategic targets inside the country. Two outcomes follow from that path. In the first, the airstrikes and any accompanying actions prove so devastating that the Venezuelan people conclude their only option for survival is to oust Maduro. That would mean massive public protests, followed by the military removing Maduro and handing him over to Washington. Alternatively, Maduro could see the writing on the wall and flee before it came to that, spending a deservedly miserable retirement in Moscow.\n\nIn the second scenario, Washington still carries out airstrikes, but the damage is not sufficient to turn the public and the military against Maduro. In that case, Maduro runs down the clock until 2028, when Trump leaves office, hoping a successor administration more willing to negotiate takes power. Whichever option Washington chooses, Venezuela will remain a place to watch closely throughout the coming year.\n\n## Ecuador Falls Into the Abyss\n\nWhen the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data organization — better known as ACLED — released its 2026 watchlist, few of the featured countries caused much surprise. Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Pakistan: these are nations now synonymous with insurgency and war. But buried amid the overviews of conflict in places like the Sahel and the Middle East was one name that stuck out like a sore thumb.\n\nJust five years ago, Ecuador was one of the safest nations in Latin America — a Nevada-sized strip of the Andes nestled between the far more violent nations of Colombia and Peru. Before the pandemic, its murder rate was roughly equal to that of the United States, and far below that of countries like Honduras, Mexico, or Brazil. What a difference half a decade can make. In 2021, Ecuador's murder rate began to climb dramatically. By 2023 it had reached an eye-watering 46 per 100,000 — higher than Venezuela, higher than Colombia, higher even than Haiti.\n\nThe violence grew so severe that, following a gangster uprising in January 2024, the government of President Daniel Noboa declared the nation in a state of \"internal armed conflict\" and launched a military crackdown. That crackdown saw modest initial success, only to be followed by a new wave of even worse violence. The statistics for 2025 are eye-popping. While official homicide data will not be available for some months, projections indicate the murder rate will have reached 50 per 100,000. By comparison, Mexico's murder rate in 2024 was around 19.3. As ACLED's report notes, \"Ecuador ranks among the top 10 countries with the most intense violence in the world.\"\n\nThe roots of the collapse lie in the fragmentation of Ecuador's criminal landscape. At the height of the 2023 violence, the country was dominated by two armed groups at war with one another — Los Lobos and Los Choneros. But after two years of arrests and police operations, multiple Ecuadorian gangs have shattered, with their remnants turning on each other. After the arrest of their boss Negro Willy, for example, Los Tiguerones splintered, and former comrades began slaughtering one another for control of lucrative trafficking routes. Los Chone Killers likewise broke apart. And with the head of Los Choneros, Fito, recently extradited to the United States, there are fears that group could fragment the same way.\n\nIn total, there are now thought to be roughly 40 different armed gangs competing for the spoils of Ecuador's cocaine and illegal-mining trades — and all of them are willing to engage in grotesque, almost theatrical violence to come out on top. Hence the overkill of certain gang actions, like shooting up a rival's funeral or hanging headless corpses from bridges. Hence, too, the pervasiveness of the violence. While Ecuador's tourist districts remain relatively safe, the densely populated coastal strip sounds like Miami in the early 1980s. By ACLED's calculation, 71% of the Ecuadorian population has been exposed to at least one violent event — be that witnessing a kidnapping, being near a car bomb, or simply hearing gunshots as someone is cut down one street over.\n\nAs for the coming year, 2026 is likely to be even worse. The more Ecuador's gangs fracture, the more competition there is, and the greater the incentive for these smaller groups to use extreme violence to get their way. Add in rising instability in neighboring Peru, and it becomes easy to see how Ecuador's internal armed conflict could enter a phase resembling Mexico's Drug War — a phase characterized by growing lawlessness, rising murders, and a creeping sense that nothing can be done.\n\n## Syria Reignites\n\nThen there is the risk of a new escalation in Syria. This time last year, the story was the sudden collapse of the Assad dynasty after more than a half-century of continuous rule. Today, Syria is undoubtedly in a better place than it was during its civil war, but calling the nation either stable or unified would be a stretch. Large parts of Syria sit outside the control of the government in Damascus; that government stands accused of complicity in several massacres and mass atrocities targeting Syrian minorities; and the country is shaping up as ground zero for a rising cold conflict between its northern neighbor Turkey and its southern neighbor Israel. Making matters worse, the Islamic State remains active across the country — worming its way into state institutions, gathering strength for a future return to full-scale insurgency, and preparing to break thousands of fighters and loyalists out of vulnerable prison camps.\n\nRight now, the greatest potential for escalation lies in the simmering tensions between Damascus and the Kurdish-led autonomous region in Syria's northeast. Protected by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and a range of other paramilitary groups, the autonomous region of Rojava has tried to maintain a degree of separation from the Syrian state, despite Damascus's clear intent to compel full reintegration. That reintegration process — along with a critical effort to fuse the SDF with the Syrian military — has stalled in recent months, even though both sides already committed to a compromise plan. And although Damascus and Rojava both appear willing to let negotiations play out, Turkey now seems poised to force the issue.\n\nTo understand Turkey's role, domestic politics matter. Turkey's own Kurdish paramilitaries are disarming under an amnesty deal, but Ankara regards Syria's Kurdish fighting forces — including the SDF — as armed extensions of those paramilitaries, ones that have not agreed to Turkey's deal. Turkey has intervened directly against Rojava in the past, still holds a large buffer zone on Syrian territory, and has worked tirelessly to prop up pro-Turkish militias contesting Rojava's influence in places like Aleppo and Manbij. In recent weeks, Turkey has ramped up the pressure substantially, insisting that Rojava agree to reintegrate with Syria by the end of 2025. If that does not happen, Turkey has made clear it is willing to go to war.\n\nThe military picture is ominous. Turkish military convoys are massing in areas under Damascus's control, on Syrian territory. Syrian forces are gathering in the north and in the oil-rich heartland near Deir ez-Zor, suggesting they could readily mount a two-pronged offensive on a \"go\" order. The SDF has the capacity to resist, but not if Turkey also attacks from across the northern buffer zone — and any such fight would risk losing control of the Islamic State prison camps, where the danger of a breakout would rise exponentially. The United States, long an ally of Syria's Kurds, now appears unlikely to intervene on their behalf. If Turkey holds to its end-of-2025 deadline, this could very well become the first new conflict of 2026, with the potential to destabilize the rest of Syria in the process.\n\n## Gen Z Overthrows More Governments\n\nOne of the biggest stories of the year has been the Gen Z protests that swept the world from Africa to Asia before landing squarely in Europe, where they recently toppled the Bulgarian government. It is nearly guaranteed that 2026 will bring another tsunami of youth protests. The conditions that made Gen Z angry in 2025 — a lack of opportunities, a spiraling affordability crisis, systems that seem to work for everyone except the young, and elites out of touch with their complaints — will still exist in 2026.\n\nSo where will the protests hit next? The last attempt to predict this focused on the global south: Madagascar, Kenya, Nigeria, India. This time the lens shifts to the global north, because as Bulgaria proved, no country is safe from the Gen Z wave.\n\nFirst is France. In September, at least 170,000 protesters from the Block Everything movement took to the streets to protest two things: a budget that would significantly reduce public spending, and France's perennial political instability. The government managed to quell the protests, deploying more than 80,000 police officers to do so, but the underlying issues remain unaddressed. The Prime Minister whose government proposed the budget, François Bayrou, was ousted. He was replaced by Sébastien Lecornu, who took office on the 9th of September before resigning a day after appointing his cabinet on the 5th of October — meaning he served less than a month. President Macron then reappointed Lecornu as Prime Minister on the 10th of October, and his government survived a vote of no confidence five days later. Political instability, check.\n\nOn Friday, the 12th of December, the French government passed a budget supported by Lecornu that suspended an unpopular pension reform. So while the immediate spark for a new wave of protests does not exist, it would take only one unpopular budgetary decision to send French youth back into the streets. Next is Germany, normally the picture of stability, included here for two reasons. First, according to Peter Leibinger, president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), the German economy is in freefall and the government is not responding decisively enough. The causes are straightforward: high energy costs make it more expensive for manufacturers to produce anything, international demand for German exports is weak in key markets, and American tariffs and the rise of China as an industrial rival are causing endless headaches.\n\nSecond, the German parliament recently voted to reintroduce voluntary military service for 18-year-olds. Under the new law, all 18-year-olds will receive a questionnaire from January 2026 asking whether they are interested in and willing to join the armed forces. The form is mandatory for men and voluntary for women. Many young Germans oppose the law out of fear it could lead to the reintroduction of conscription, and protests have already erupted in several cities. In Hamburg alone, more than 1,500 people were expected to join. This could become a bigger flashpoint in 2026, especially once the questionnaires go out in January — though it is worth stressing that recruitment at this stage is intended to be voluntary, which may take the edge off.\n\nBeyond where the next Gen Z protest will erupt lies the question of what happens in the countries where the youth succeeded in 2025 — specifically Nepal, which heads for an election in March. As Nepal expert Meena Bhatta put it in a piece for The Diplomat, the elections will test whether the political energy unleashed by the youth during the protests can free the country from its past of transactional politics. If Nepal's youth can successfully navigate the elections and win against parties that have spent years building the machinery, loyalty, and patronage networks that win elections, they will prove to young people around the world that it is possible to do more than just protest against unpopular regimes. It is possible to beat them, too.\n\n## The Horn of Africa Could Implode\n\nAmong people with a passing interest in geopolitics, there are a handful of widely known flashpoints for a future war: Kashmir, where India and Pakistan hold competing claims; the island of Taiwan; the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. But even among those who follow this material closely, one flashpoint is frequently overlooked — the Horn of Africa. Packed with fragile states and bordering others weakened by conflict and insurgency, it is already a source of ongoing instability. Next year it could become something else entirely: the spark for a war that would reverberate not just across Africa, but through the Red Sea, the Middle East, and likely as far afield as Europe.\n\nThe reasons are too complex to cover fully in one segment, but the basic version is that a series of overlapping and impending conflicts is pushing the region toward crisis. The most worrying involves Ethiopia and Eritrea. Although the two fought alongside one another in the Tigray War, Addis Ababa excluded Asmara from the peace talks that ended the conflict. Since then, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been vocal about restoring his nation's access to the ocean — something most analysts read as a threat to annex parts of Eritrea, given that it was Eritrean independence that robbed Ethiopia of its coastline in the first place. Longtime Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki has tried to counter this threat by getting increasingly involved in Ethiopia's internal conflicts. A massive offensive this autumn by the insurgent Fano militias in eastern Amhara is thought to have been possible only with Eritrean backing.\n\nBut while the Amhara crisis may be Ethiopia's biggest current internal conflict, there are fears a far deadlier one could reignite. The Tigray War, fought between 2020 and 2022 in northern Ethiopia, remains one of the deadliest conflicts of this century. The specifics are extremely complicated, but the relevant point is that the peace agreement kicked the can down the road on a host of key questions — including the fate of Fano-occupied Western Tigray. The failure to resolve those issues led this year to a split in the Tigrayan leadership, with one faction moving closer to Addis Ababa and the other closer to Asmara. Even without a full-blown Ethiopia-Eritrea war, a civil war between Tigrayan factions could become a proxy battle between the two neighbors.\n\nComplicating all of this is the ongoing catastrophe in neighboring Sudan, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are fighting the official Sudanese Armed Forces. Because the RSF are backed by the UAE — which also backs Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa — Isaias Afwerki has tried to make common cause with the SAF, even visiting the de facto capital of Port Sudan in November. The SAF, who have backers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also maintain links to Tigray's regional forces, and might try to intervene if the region falls into civil war. And just in case the picture was not already complex enough, there is Somalia. Last year it briefly looked as though Ethiopia would strike a deal with the unrecognized breakaway state of Somaliland, exchanging recognition for one of its ports. This caused panic in Mogadishu, with Somalia's official government scrambling to forge an alliance with both Eritrea and Egypt to deter the move. While mediation from Turkey eventually killed the proposal, it exposed growing fault lines in the African Horn, with coastal states becoming ever more nervous about Ethiopia's desire to expand.\n\nThat nervousness is forcing the region into two increasingly hostile blocs: one led by Ethiopia and backed by the UAE, and one led by Eritrea and backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. None of this makes a wider regional war inevitable. But the risk is clearly growing, with multiple potential triggers — from a meltdown in Tigray, to a direct confrontation between Addis Ababa and Asmara, to the rising prospect of direct military intervention in Sudan's civil war. 2026 could prove just another year of saber rattling in the region, or it could be the year a widespread East African war finally erupts.\n\n## Myanmar's Civil War Continues\n\nFive years after the Myanmar military seized power in 2021, the war between the junta and various rebel groups shows no end in sight. For much of 2025, the story was the military — with China's help — reversing the gains the rebels had made. Beyond leaning on Beijing, the military changed its tactics, introducing conscription and expanding its drone fleet, playing to its strengths and trying to nullify whatever advantages the armed groups had enjoyed.\n\nThe military's victories arrived at a particularly crucial moment, as Myanmar gears up for elections beginning on the 28th of December that will dominate coverage of the country for the foreseeable future — an election most regional observers believe is nothing more than a sham. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a non-governmental organization of leading judges and lawyers from around the world, believes that should the elections happen, they most likely will not be free, fair, or inclusive. The ICJ points to the amended Political Parties Registration Law, which imposes strenuous membership and financial requirements that effectively block long-established political parties from registering.\n\nThe junta has also passed several other regulations denying political rights to individuals accused — often without due process — of involvement in \"unlawful activities,\" a catch-all term used to target critics, activists, and members of opposition movements. According to an article in The Conversation by Nicholas Coppel, Australia's former ambassador to Myanmar, citizens who criticize the elections on social media have been sentenced to up to seven years in prison with hard labor. For some offenses, the death penalty applies.\n\nSo if everyone agrees the elections will be a sham, why is the military pushing ahead? In Coppel's view, the elections are an attempt by the junta to gain legitimacy at home and abroad — a legitimacy it has sought since first seizing power, but which has so far eluded it. When the rebel groups won major victories in 2024, they exposed just how hollow the junta's control actually was. The elections, paired with the recent string of battlefield wins, are meant to reverse that narrative and show that the junta, despite its perceived weakness, remains the country's most dominant ruling faction.\n\nThat will be a tall order. As Su Mon, ACLED's senior Asia Pacific analyst, noted for the organization, while the military's successes in 2025 were significant, the junta remains in a weakened position compared with where it stood before the rebel advances of 2023 and 2024, and is unable to assert effective control over the areas it has recently retaken. There is also the simple fact that most rebel groups will keep fighting, elections be damned. In Myanmar, then, 2026 is shaping up to be a battle of narratives. For the junta, it is a battle to show the world it can rule the entire country, not just the pockets where its forces are concentrated. For the rebels, it is a battle to show that the victories of 2024 were not a fluke but the beginning of a permanent shift in power that no rigged election can reverse.\n\n## Sudan's War Will Get Even Worse\n\nBy most measures, Sudan's civil war is already the worst conflict happening anywhere on Earth — deadlier for civilians than Russia's invasion of Ukraine, more chaotic than Myanmar's civil war, and characterized by more starvation and atrocity than Haiti's meltdown. While no one knows how many have been killed, reasonable estimates run as high as 400,000 — a figure calculated before the fall of El-Fasher, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces may have slaughtered close to 70,000. This is an apocalyptic conflict, one that makes most wars look like a Sunday picnic. And yet all signs point to 2026 being even more catastrophic.\n\nThere are many reasons for that pessimism, but the basic one is that the war at this stage is likely unwinnable. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) had a spectacular start to the year — recapturing the breadbasket state of Gezira and driving the RSF from the capital, Khartoum — but that success was possible only because the paramilitaries had overstretched themselves. After falling back to their home base of Darfur in the west, the RSF consolidated and captured the last remaining major holdout city of El-Fasher. Now it is the military that finds itself overstretched by its drive into Kordofan, falling back as the RSF once again marches onward.\n\nIn recent weeks alone, the paramilitaries have captured the strategic oil fields of Heglig — though control was later transferred to neutral forces from South Sudan — taken the SAF base at Babanusa after a long siege, and begun pushing toward the North Kordofan capital of el-Obeid. Cities like Kadugli and Dilling have been placed under siege. But while the RSF is now on the front foot, there is no indication the group has the firepower or stamina to drive back into the central regions and retake Khartoum. That is a problem, because, as analyst Dallia Abdelmoniem told Al Jazeera, RSF leader Hemedti \"was never going to be satisfied with just controlling the Darfur region — he wants the whole country.\"\n\nOn the other side, the SAF consider the parallel government Hemedti has established in the west to be an affront — one they cannot allow to persist, despite their inability to retake Darfur. So it seems likely the two sides will keep fighting, with Kordofan becoming the main focal point of the bloodshed. Speaking exclusively to WarFronts, senior Africa analyst at ACLED Ladd Serwat noted that violence is unlikely to diminish in 2026 and may even spread to the Northern Region, which has so far been spared the worst of the fighting. With the UN warning that Kordofan may become \"another El-Fasher,\" it appears Sudan's tragedy is set to continue for at least another year.\n\n## South Sudan Could Yet Implode\n\nIn many ways, South Sudan in 2025 was the dog that didn't bark. As of this analysis, the world's newest country technically remains at peace — the sort of fragile peace in which everyone is tense and paranoid that something awful could happen at any moment, but peace nonetheless. To call this surprising is an understatement. Across the past twelve months, Juba repeatedly seemed on the brink of total collapse. The economy had been battered by a loss of oil exports stemming from the civil war in Sudan. President Kiir was increasingly ailing, purging rivals and allies alike. Ethnic militias like the White Army were seizing whole towns. And, to top it all off, Vice President Riek Machar was put on trial for treason.\n\nGiven that Machar represents the Nuer ethnicity that fought President Kiir's Dinka group in the civil war between 2013 and 2018 — a conflict defined by ethnic cleansing and massacres — this should have been explosive. As Crisis Group put it, \"The trial of South Sudan's First Vice President Riek Machar represents one of the greatest threats to the country's stability since the end of its civil war.\" And yet, somehow, things just about held together. Even as the country risked being dragged into the civil war in Sudan, the expected fighting never erupted. When WarFronts published its latest update on the situation back in September, it would have been astonishing to learn the country would end the year at peace.\n\nAnd yet it may not be worth celebrating just yet. For all that 2025 proved better than expected for the world's newest country, the conditions for state collapse remain firmly in place. Kiir is elderly and infirm. Soldiers still do not receive regular wages. Pressures from the war in Sudan are still causing cracks; the economy remains a basket case; and more and more elites are being purged. Ethnic tensions are rising, and there is a sense that something, at some point, has to give. Rather than a cause for celebration, it may turn out that 2025 merely postponed the country's crack-up.\n\n## Russia Expands Its War With Ukraine\n\nIn Eastern Europe, Russia's primary military objective in 2026 should be obvious — barring, of course, a surprise peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv. Assuming no such deal materializes, Russia's focus will remain concentrated mostly on Ukraine until it reaches some kind of resolution there, whether through victory, defeat, or — more likely — a ceasefire arrangement that leaves both nations on edge. But that does not mean Russia's objectives will be limited to its Ukraine invasion, any more than they were in 2025.\n\nFor one thing, Russia is likely to continue pursuing its hybrid-warfare strategy in Europe, relying on a combination of disinformation, drone surveillance overflights, material sabotage, and at times targeted assassination. Russia's objectives appear straightforward: to probe and analyze NATO defenses and response times, to challenge NATO's resolve and willingness to protect itself, and to sow discord among the alliance's members. Russia tends to probe its adversaries in all directions at once, and while it generally backs down once it meets resistance, it redoubles its efforts wherever it finds an apparent vulnerability. What Russia does across Europe in 2026 will most likely depend on the weaknesses Europe reveals.\n\nThen there is the possibility of limited military action by Russia in non-NATO countries — possibly Georgia, possibly Moldova, possibly both. Georgia would be the most likely candidate, already neutered and brought into alignment with Moscow by its pro-Russian government, and now poised to serve as a showpiece for whatever message Russia wants to send. If Russia wants to use Georgia to demonstrate the benevolence and mutual enrichment that supposedly come from an alliance with Moscow, then perhaps Georgia and its elites are about to get a lot richer. If, on the other hand, Russia has been fattening Georgia up for the slaughter — to demonstrate just how powerful it can be when it really wants to capture an entire country — then Georgia's elites may find themselves double-crossed, made an example of for the rest of the world.\n\nMoldova would be harder for Russia to attack outright, but could come under threat from disinformation, hybrid-warfare campaigns, or even long-range strikes, especially after Moldova's warnings of Russian interference in its 2025 elections seemed to amount to nothing. Other nations could be on the chopping block too, including Kazakhstan, whose leaders have made clear they view Russia as a long-term threat — though a Russian offensive in Central Asia is far less likely this year.\n\nAnd if Russia and Ukraine do reach a ceasefire, there is a non-zero chance the invasion could conclude, restart, and conclude again, all within the next twelve months. Russia has shown across this recent round of negotiations that it really wants control of the entire Donbas — which would also hand it the rest of Ukraine's fortress belt, the best defensive line left between the front lines and Kyiv. That indicator, along with others from the Kremlin and Western intelligence, suggests that if Russia can get Ukraine to agree to a peace, it probably does not intend for that peace to endure. Instead, the objective would be to rest its troops, refresh its arsenal, and re-invade — betting on the kind of days-long offensive it originally planned for in 2022. But suppose no ceasefire, not even a cynical one, is reached. What happens instead?\n\n## Ukraine's 2026 Looks Bleak\n\nAccording to Orysia Lutsevych, Deputy Director of Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, a peaceful settlement in Ukraine remains far from reach. In her view, as long as President Putin continues to insist on controlling Ukraine's eastern edge, the American-led negotiations are unlikely to be enough to stop him. Lutsevych is not wrong to be skeptical. Despite the optimistic press conferences and declarations about a peace deal being closer than ever, the fundamentals have not changed. Russia still believes it is winning. Ukraine still cannot accept losing a fifth of its territory. And the Trump administration, for all its deal-making bluster, has not figured out how to square that circle.\n\nThat means Ukraine will most likely see a continuation of what has unfolded throughout 2025: a grinding, attritional war in which each side exchanges thousands of men for meters of territory. And that is not an exaggeration. According to DW, by December 2025 Russia controlled 19% of Ukraine's territory — only one percentage point more than it controlled at the end of 2022. Yet according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), nearly one million Russian soldiers were killed or injured to gain that ground. It is precisely the ratio of mass casualties to minor gains typically associated with the Western Front in World War One.\n\nFor Ukraine, the situation may be even worse. The country has lost approximately 10 million people — roughly a quarter of its prewar population — mostly through emigration, but also through casualties and plummeting birth rates. Its military, which began the war with volunteers flooding recruitment centers, now sees only 12% of new recruits volunteer. The rest are conscripts, many of them older men. The average Ukrainian infantryman, according to the military outlet War on the Rocks, is 43 years old.\n\nSo in 2026, if a peace deal cannot be reached — and it looks likely it will not be — Ukraine will continue fighting a war in which survival depends on Western nations maintaining their willingness to fund an indefinite stalemate. Russia, meanwhile, will keep trying to grind forward at massive cost, betting that its larger population and war economy can outlast Ukrainian manpower reserves and Western political commitment. The result will likely be neither dramatic offensives nor decisive battles, but another year of artillery exchanges and drone strikes in which thousands die for villages destined to become forgotten footnotes in history books, while each side hopes the other collapses first. Barring an unexpected change at the top in the Kremlin, things may remain this way for a very long time.\n\n## The Threat of World War Three\n\nFinally, no survey of 2026 would be complete without addressing World War Three. As things stand, a true global war appears unlikely for 2026 — though that assessment comes with fingers firmly crossed. As improbable as it is, two major offensives must be acknowledged as remote possibilities: Russia against NATO, and China against Taiwan. In both cases, Western experts have pinned down a likely date for military action around 2027 or 2028, before either the nations of Europe or those of the Indo-Pacific rearm to the point where they could fully deter Russia or China respectively.\n\nBut rearmament on both sides of the globe is now happening quickly. If Russia, China, or both evaluate that their window of opportunity is closing, that presents a problem. Should Russia and China come to suspect that their window could shut by, say, 2028, will they abandon their wider ambitions? Or will they chase those ambitions in 2026? There is no way to say for certain. What can be said is that the coming year is likely to prove as chaotic and destructive as most of this decade has been so far — and the hope, when it finally comes time to assess 2027, is for a less pessimistic outlook than this one.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Which frozen conflicts turned hot in 2025, and why do they remain flashpoints?\n\nFour stand out. Iran and Israel fought their first major direct military engagement during the twelve-day war last June. India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, clashed in a large-scale showdown across April and May. Pakistan and Afghanistan saw skirmishes near the Durand Line escalate into a proper border conflict. And Thailand and Cambodia fought for four days in July, paused, then resumed fighting in early December. All four remain dangerous because each side has a structure of incentives that makes a return to violence acceptable if it serves a broader goal — not because any party is actively seeking war.\n\n### What makes Syria the most likely candidate for the first new conflict of 2026?\n\nThe flashpoint is the standoff between Damascus and the Kurdish-led region of Rojava, protected by the SDF. Reintegration talks have stalled, and Turkey — which views the SDF as an extension of its own Kurdish paramilitaries — has demanded reintegration by the end of 2025 and signaled willingness to go to war. Turkish military convoys are massing on Syrian territory, Syrian forces are gathering in the north near oil-rich Deir ez-Zor, and the US now appears unlikely to intervene on behalf of the Kurds, raising the risk of a Turkish offensive that could also trigger Islamic State prison-camp breakouts.\n\n### Why is the Horn of Africa hardening into two hostile blocs?\n\nThe region is splitting between Ethiopia backed by the UAE, and Eritrea backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Abiy Ahmed has been vocal about restoring Ethiopian sea access — widely read as a threat to annex parts of Eritrea — while Eritrea has backed the Fano insurgency to destabilize Ethiopia internally. Somalia panicked over a possible Ethiopia-Somaliland port deal and forged an alliance with Eritrea and Egypt. Sudan's civil war adds further volatility, with the RSF backed by the UAE on one side and the SAF tied to Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the other, potentially pulling the whole region into a wider East African war.\n\n### How much territory has Russia gained in Ukraine, and at what cost?\n\nAccording to DW, Russia controlled 19% of Ukraine's territory by December 2025 — just one percentage point more than at the end of 2022. CSIS estimates nearly one million Russian soldiers were killed or wounded to achieve those marginal gains, a casualty-to-territory ratio reminiscent of the Western Front in World War One. Ukraine, for its part, has lost roughly a quarter of its prewar population through emigration, casualties, and falling birth rates, and only 12% of new recruits now volunteer, with the average infantryman 43 years old.\n\n### How likely is World War Three in 2026?\n\nIt appears unlikely but not impossible. Western experts generally date the most probable window for a Russian move against NATO or a Chinese move against Taiwan to 2027 or 2028 — before Europe and the Indo-Pacific can rearm enough to deter them. The risk is that rapid rearmament convinces Moscow or Beijing their window is closing sooner, prompting action before they abandon their ambitions. Should Russia and China evaluate that their window is shutting in 2026, the calculus could shift faster than most analysts expect.\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/conflicts-to-watch-in-2026.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/conflicts-to-watch-in-2026 datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/Z16OCa_ddWY/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 34b1de1b23864e80804feebd9207935186b7a606570c565c9a8e09d6fde4bd8e tokens: 11085 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/conflicts-to-watch-in-2026.md.summary.md --- Say what you will about the post-Cold-War order, but love it or hate it, that global order completely collapsed in 2025. At the one-quarter mark of the twenty-first century, the world has entered an era of global realignment, where ambitious new players are on the rise and old titans have started to fall. A unipolar world has become multipolar, the old rules no longer apply, and every nation on Earth must make a choice. They can adapt and thrive, or they can stagnate and consign themselves to history. If 2025 was the year the global rule book was rewritten, then 2026 will be the year the new rules are put to the test. Those new rules will shape conflict from the battlefields of Eastern Europe to the multidimensional chaos of the African Horn, from the coasts of Venezuela to the coasts of Taiwan, and from the jungles of South Asia to the jungles of South America. They will decide not only who gets ahead, but what they can get away with, guiding nations not toward peace but toward profit. 2026 may or may not be a year of major world conflicts, but it is practically guaranteed to be a year of chaos. What follows is a region-by-region survey of the places that most demand watching, and an honest accounting of why each one could tip from simmering tension into open war. The thesis is simple: in a multipolar world without an enforcer, the conflicts most likely to define 2026 are the ones already burning at low heat, waiting for an incentive to flare. ## Key Takeaways - Several frozen conflicts turned hot in 2025 — Iran and Israel, India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Thailand and Cambodia — and each remains a simmering flashpoint where all sides weigh known incentives to return to war. - Washington's escalating pressure campaign against Nicholas Maduro is widely read as regime-change leverage rather than counter-narcotics; a full US invasion of Venezuela is unlikely in 2026, with targeted airstrikes the more probable path. - Ecuador has collapsed from one of Latin America's safest countries into one of the world's ten most violent, with a projected 2025 murder rate near 50 per 100,000 and roughly 40 armed gangs now competing for cocaine and illegal-mining spoils. - Syria's greatest escalation risk lies between Damascus and the Kurdish-led region of Rojava, with Turkey pressing for reintegration by an end-of-2025 deadline and signaling its willingness to go to war. - The Horn of Africa is hardening into two hostile blocs — Ethiopia backed by the UAE, and Eritrea backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia — with multiple triggers that could ignite a wider East African war. - Sudan's civil war, already the deadliest conflict on Earth with estimates as high as 400,000 killed, is forecast to worsen in 2026, with Kordofan emerging as the new focal point of the bloodshed. - In Ukraine, Russia controlled 19% of the country's territory by December 2025 — only one point more than at the end of 2022 — at a cost cited by CSIS of nearly one million Russian casualties, the hallmark of a grinding attritional war with no clear off-ramp. ## The World's Frozen Conflicts Turn Hot Before looking forward, it is worth paying respects to 2025, a year in which a handful of frozen conflicts recently turned hot. The long cold war between Iran and Israel produced their first major direct military engagement ever during the twelve-day war last June. India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed enemies, engaged in a large-scale showdown across April and May. Disputes and skirmishes near the historic Durand Line escalated into a proper border conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Thailand and Cambodia saw all-out fighting break out across four days in July, go quiet for a few months, then roar back to life in early December. Heading into 2026, these are best understood as simmering flashpoints — places where tensions are known to be high, where all sides are balancing known incentives that could send them back into conflict, but where nobody can predict exactly when things will go hot again. None of these combatants is necessarily seeking war. What they share is a structure of incentives that makes a return to violence acceptable, even attractive, if it serves a broader goal. Start with Israel and Iran. Neither nation is currently trying to force a return to war, but both have ample incentives to accept renewed conflict if it suits them. In Israel, the Netanyahu government and its military allies understand that Jerusalem stands on the precipice of total victory — not merely defeating the militant proxy forces of Hamas and Hezbollah, but stamping them out entirely, and collapsing the Iranian regime in the process. With Hamas and Hezbollah largely dealt with, Israel's attention has turned to Iran and its other regional adversaries. It is possible Iran's regime will never recover from the setbacks of the twelve-day war, but Israel is not about to leave that to chance. If Iran appears to be reconstituting its forces, meaningfully rebuilding its proxies, or — worse — making renewed progress on its nuclear program, Israel is likely to take unilateral action. Iran's own calculus is more counterintuitive. Its ruling regime grows weaker by the day, yet it understands that its mandate to lead is strongest when the country is under threat from Israel. As paradoxical as it sounds, the regime may try to maintain its grip on power precisely by continuing to engage Israel in limited conflict. The conflicts among India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan bleed into a single regional mess, and can be discussed together. India and Pakistan routinely accuse one another of sponsoring organized terror campaigns on each other's soil, and both remain quite vulnerable to such attacks. India wants to put Pakistan in its place so it can focus on competing with China, and it wants to reassert its strategic non-alignment and autonomy after perceiving a loss of face when the United States stepped in to broker their recent ceasefire. Pakistan, by contrast, feels emboldened by how that last conflict played out, and it is under the control of a military strongman gaining in both power and international support. Afghanistan is the one nation here that definitely does not want a war, and has little ability to fight a conventional war at all — but it may not have a choice. Its territory is home to the Pakistani Taliban, who are accused of receiving direct support from the Afghan Taliban. Even if no such support exists, Pakistan has proven entirely willing to blame Afghan leadership for the Pakistani Taliban's actions. This is a part of the world where non-state actors operate in all directions, serving many conflicting strategic objectives, and sometimes acting in ways their alleged foreign sponsors cannot control. So even if none of the three governments actively wants war in 2026, the region is liable to be pulled into one by non-state actors — and if any of them does secretly want to return to conflict, those same actors offer a perfect excuse. Finally, the latest round of fighting between Thailand and Cambodia remains volatile, and both sides have given ample indications that the most recent exchange probably will not be their last. Cambodia is clearly the weaker of the two combatants, yet during the long lull between its first 2025 clash with Thailand and its second, the Cambodian military appears to have placed fresh land mines all along the border regions and engaged in other provocative acts that make little sense unless Cambodia was looking to return to conflict. Thailand, meanwhile, is ruled by a new government that has taken a hard line against Cambodia. After its first ceasefire attempt failed, Thailand now seems determined to ensure Cambodia will not be a threat in the coming years. It is entirely feasible that the current violence is resolved through another ceasefire. But if the two enter yet another cycle of escalation afterward, then the next time open conflict breaks out, Thailand will be even less willing to accept a ceasefire than it is today. Major nationalist movements are fanning the flames on both sides of the border zone, and as long as confrontation makes for good politics, neither side's recent behavior suggests it would back down. ## Venezuela Versus Washington "He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle," White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in a wide-ranging interview, referring to President Trump. "And people way smarter than me on that say that he will." The remark seemed to confirm what Latin America observers have argued since the Trump administration began striking boats in the Caribbean: that the strikes are less about fighting drug trafficking than about pressuring Venezuelan strongman Nicholas Maduro into resigning. Given that on the 11th of December — five days before the Vanity Fair interview was published — the administration seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, it seems more than likely the feud will continue to escalate. So what does 2026 hold for the standoff between Caracas and Washington? First, despite President Trump insisting he has not ruled out putting boots on the ground in Venezuela, most experts do not think an actual American invasion is on the cards — at least not in 2026. Beyond cutting against Trump's promise to start no new wars, invading Venezuela would be an unpopular decision that could cost the administration the upcoming midterms. A poll conducted by CBS found that only 30% of Americans would support taking military action against Venezuela. With a full-scale invasion seemingly off the table, the most likely remaining course is targeted airstrikes against strategic targets inside the country. Two outcomes follow from that path. In the first, the airstrikes and any accompanying actions prove so devastating that the Venezuelan people conclude their only option for survival is to oust Maduro. That would mean massive public protests, followed by the military removing Maduro and handing him over to Washington. Alternatively, Maduro could see the writing on the wall and flee before it came to that, spending a deservedly miserable retirement in Moscow. In the second scenario, Washington still carries out airstrikes, but the damage is not sufficient to turn the public and the military against Maduro. In that case, Maduro runs down the clock until 2028, when Trump leaves office, hoping a successor administration more willing to negotiate takes power. Whichever option Washington chooses, Venezuela will remain a place to watch closely throughout the coming year. ## Ecuador Falls Into the Abyss When the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data organization — better known as ACLED — released its 2026 watchlist, few of the featured countries caused much surprise. Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Pakistan: these are nations now synonymous with insurgency and war. But buried amid the overviews of conflict in places like the Sahel and the Middle East was one name that stuck out like a sore thumb. Just five years ago, Ecuador was one of the safest nations in Latin America — a Nevada-sized strip of the Andes nestled between the far more violent nations of Colombia and Peru. Before the pandemic, its murder rate was roughly equal to that of the United States, and far below that of countries like Honduras, Mexico, or Brazil. What a difference half a decade can make. In 2021, Ecuador's murder rate began to climb dramatically. By 2023 it had reached an eye-watering 46 per 100,000 — higher than Venezuela, higher than Colombia, higher even than Haiti. The violence grew so severe that, following a gangster uprising in January 2024, the government of President Daniel Noboa declared the nation in a state of "internal armed conflict" and launched a military crackdown. That crackdown saw modest initial success, only to be followed by a new wave of even worse violence. The statistics for 2025 are eye-popping. While official homicide data will not be available for some months, projections indicate the murder rate will have reached 50 per 100,000. By comparison, Mexico's murder rate in 2024 was around 19.3. As ACLED's report notes, "Ecuador ranks among the top 10 countries with the most intense violence in the world." The roots of the collapse lie in the fragmentation of Ecuador's criminal landscape. At the height of the 2023 violence, the country was dominated by two armed groups at war with one another — Los Lobos and Los Choneros. But after two years of arrests and police operations, multiple Ecuadorian gangs have shattered, with their remnants turning on each other. After the arrest of their boss Negro Willy, for example, Los Tiguerones splintered, and former comrades began slaughtering one another for control of lucrative trafficking routes. Los Chone Killers likewise broke apart. And with the head of Los Choneros, Fito, recently extradited to the United States, there are fears that group could fragment the same way. In total, there are now thought to be roughly 40 different armed gangs competing for the spoils of Ecuador's cocaine and illegal-mining trades — and all of them are willing to engage in grotesque, almost theatrical violence to come out on top. Hence the overkill of certain gang actions, like shooting up a rival's funeral or hanging headless corpses from bridges. Hence, too, the pervasiveness of the violence. While Ecuador's tourist districts remain relatively safe, the densely populated coastal strip sounds like Miami in the early 1980s. By ACLED's calculation, 71% of the Ecuadorian population has been exposed to at least one violent event — be that witnessing a kidnapping, being near a car bomb, or simply hearing gunshots as someone is cut down one street over. As for the coming year, 2026 is likely to be even worse. The more Ecuador's gangs fracture, the more competition there is, and the greater the incentive for these smaller groups to use extreme violence to get their way. Add in rising instability in neighboring Peru, and it becomes easy to see how Ecuador's internal armed conflict could enter a phase resembling Mexico's Drug War — a phase characterized by growing lawlessness, rising murders, and a creeping sense that nothing can be done. ## Syria Reignites Then there is the risk of a new escalation in Syria. This time last year, the story was the sudden collapse of the Assad dynasty after more than a half-century of continuous rule. Today, Syria is undoubtedly in a better place than it was during its civil war, but calling the nation either stable or unified would be a stretch. Large parts of Syria sit outside the control of the government in Damascus; that government stands accused of complicity in several massacres and mass atrocities targeting Syrian minorities; and the country is shaping up as ground zero for a rising cold conflict between its northern neighbor Turkey and its southern neighbor Israel. Making matters worse, the Islamic State remains active across the country — worming its way into state institutions, gathering strength for a future return to full-scale insurgency, and preparing to break thousands of fighters and loyalists out of vulnerable prison camps. Right now, the greatest potential for escalation lies in the simmering tensions between Damascus and the Kurdish-led autonomous region in Syria's northeast. Protected by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and a range of other paramilitary groups, the autonomous region of Rojava has tried to maintain a degree of separation from the Syrian state, despite Damascus's clear intent to compel full reintegration. That reintegration process — along with a critical effort to fuse the SDF with the Syrian military — has stalled in recent months, even though both sides already committed to a compromise plan. And although Damascus and Rojava both appear willing to let negotiations play out, Turkey now seems poised to force the issue. To understand Turkey's role, domestic politics matter. Turkey's own Kurdish paramilitaries are disarming under an amnesty deal, but Ankara regards Syria's Kurdish fighting forces — including the SDF — as armed extensions of those paramilitaries, ones that have not agreed to Turkey's deal. Turkey has intervened directly against Rojava in the past, still holds a large buffer zone on Syrian territory, and has worked tirelessly to prop up pro-Turkish militias contesting Rojava's influence in places like Aleppo and Manbij. In recent weeks, Turkey has ramped up the pressure substantially, insisting that Rojava agree to reintegrate with Syria by the end of 2025. If that does not happen, Turkey has made clear it is willing to go to war. The military picture is ominous. Turkish military convoys are massing in areas under Damascus's control, on Syrian territory. Syrian forces are gathering in the north and in the oil-rich heartland near Deir ez-Zor, suggesting they could readily mount a two-pronged offensive on a "go" order. The SDF has the capacity to resist, but not if Turkey also attacks from across the northern buffer zone — and any such fight would risk losing control of the Islamic State prison camps, where the danger of a breakout would rise exponentially. The United States, long an ally of Syria's Kurds, now appears unlikely to intervene on their behalf. If Turkey holds to its end-of-2025 deadline, this could very well become the first new conflict of 2026, with the potential to destabilize the rest of Syria in the process. ## Gen Z Overthrows More Governments One of the biggest stories of the year has been the Gen Z protests that swept the world from Africa to Asia before landing squarely in Europe, where they recently toppled the Bulgarian government. It is nearly guaranteed that 2026 will bring another tsunami of youth protests. The conditions that made Gen Z angry in 2025 — a lack of opportunities, a spiraling affordability crisis, systems that seem to work for everyone except the young, and elites out of touch with their complaints — will still exist in 2026. So where will the protests hit next? The last attempt to predict this focused on the global south: Madagascar, Kenya, Nigeria, India. This time the lens shifts to the global north, because as Bulgaria proved, no country is safe from the Gen Z wave. First is France. In September, at least 170,000 protesters from the Block Everything movement took to the streets to protest two things: a budget that would significantly reduce public spending, and France's perennial political instability. The government managed to quell the protests, deploying more than 80,000 police officers to do so, but the underlying issues remain unaddressed. The Prime Minister whose government proposed the budget, François Bayrou, was ousted. He was replaced by Sébastien Lecornu, who took office on the 9th of September before resigning a day after appointing his cabinet on the 5th of October — meaning he served less than a month. President Macron then reappointed Lecornu as Prime Minister on the 10th of October, and his government survived a vote of no confidence five days later. Political instability, check. On Friday, the 12th of December, the French government passed a budget supported by Lecornu that suspended an unpopular pension reform. So while the immediate spark for a new wave of protests does not exist, it would take only one unpopular budgetary decision to send French youth back into the streets. Next is Germany, normally the picture of stability, included here for two reasons. First, according to Peter Leibinger, president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), the German economy is in freefall and the government is not responding decisively enough. The causes are straightforward: high energy costs make it more expensive for manufacturers to produce anything, international demand for German exports is weak in key markets, and American tariffs and the rise of China as an industrial rival are causing endless headaches. Second, the German parliament recently voted to reintroduce voluntary military service for 18-year-olds. Under the new law, all 18-year-olds will receive a questionnaire from January 2026 asking whether they are interested in and willing to join the armed forces. The form is mandatory for men and voluntary for women. Many young Germans oppose the law out of fear it could lead to the reintroduction of conscription, and protests have already erupted in several cities. In Hamburg alone, more than 1,500 people were expected to join. This could become a bigger flashpoint in 2026, especially once the questionnaires go out in January — though it is worth stressing that recruitment at this stage is intended to be voluntary, which may take the edge off. Beyond where the next Gen Z protest will erupt lies the question of what happens in the countries where the youth succeeded in 2025 — specifically Nepal, which heads for an election in March. As Nepal expert Meena Bhatta put it in a piece for The Diplomat, the elections will test whether the political energy unleashed by the youth during the protests can free the country from its past of transactional politics. If Nepal's youth can successfully navigate the elections and win against parties that have spent years building the machinery, loyalty, and patronage networks that win elections, they will prove to young people around the world that it is possible to do more than just protest against unpopular regimes. It is possible to beat them, too. ## The Horn of Africa Could Implode Among people with a passing interest in geopolitics, there are a handful of widely known flashpoints for a future war: Kashmir, where India and Pakistan hold competing claims; the island of Taiwan; the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. But even among those who follow this material closely, one flashpoint is frequently overlooked — the Horn of Africa. Packed with fragile states and bordering others weakened by conflict and insurgency, it is already a source of ongoing instability. Next year it could become something else entirely: the spark for a war that would reverberate not just across Africa, but through the Red Sea, the Middle East, and likely as far afield as Europe. The reasons are too complex to cover fully in one segment, but the basic version is that a series of overlapping and impending conflicts is pushing the region toward crisis. The most worrying involves Ethiopia and Eritrea. Although the two fought alongside one another in the Tigray War, Addis Ababa excluded Asmara from the peace talks that ended the conflict. Since then, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been vocal about restoring his nation's access to the ocean — something most analysts read as a threat to annex parts of Eritrea, given that it was Eritrean independence that robbed Ethiopia of its coastline in the first place. Longtime Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki has tried to counter this threat by getting increasingly involved in Ethiopia's internal conflicts. A massive offensive this autumn by the insurgent Fano militias in eastern Amhara is thought to have been possible only with Eritrean backing. But while the Amhara crisis may be Ethiopia's biggest current internal conflict, there are fears a far deadlier one could reignite. The Tigray War, fought between 2020 and 2022 in northern Ethiopia, remains one of the deadliest conflicts of this century. The specifics are extremely complicated, but the relevant point is that the peace agreement kicked the can down the road on a host of key questions — including the fate of Fano-occupied Western Tigray. The failure to resolve those issues led this year to a split in the Tigrayan leadership, with one faction moving closer to Addis Ababa and the other closer to Asmara. Even without a full-blown Ethiopia-Eritrea war, a civil war between Tigrayan factions could become a proxy battle between the two neighbors. Complicating all of this is the ongoing catastrophe in neighboring Sudan, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are fighting the official Sudanese Armed Forces. Because the RSF are backed by the UAE — which also backs Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa — Isaias Afwerki has tried to make common cause with the SAF, even visiting the de facto capital of Port Sudan in November. The SAF, who have backers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also maintain links to Tigray's regional forces, and might try to intervene if the region falls into civil war. And just in case the picture was not already complex enough, there is Somalia. Last year it briefly looked as though Ethiopia would strike a deal with the unrecognized breakaway state of Somaliland, exchanging recognition for one of its ports. This caused panic in Mogadishu, with Somalia's official government scrambling to forge an alliance with both Eritrea and Egypt to deter the move. While mediation from Turkey eventually killed the proposal, it exposed growing fault lines in the African Horn, with coastal states becoming ever more nervous about Ethiopia's desire to expand. That nervousness is forcing the region into two increasingly hostile blocs: one led by Ethiopia and backed by the UAE, and one led by Eritrea and backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. None of this makes a wider regional war inevitable. But the risk is clearly growing, with multiple potential triggers — from a meltdown in Tigray, to a direct confrontation between Addis Ababa and Asmara, to the rising prospect of direct military intervention in Sudan's civil war. 2026 could prove just another year of saber rattling in the region, or it could be the year a widespread East African war finally erupts. ## Myanmar's Civil War Continues Five years after the Myanmar military seized power in 2021, the war between the junta and various rebel groups shows no end in sight. For much of 2025, the story was the military — with China's help — reversing the gains the rebels had made. Beyond leaning on Beijing, the military changed its tactics, introducing conscription and expanding its drone fleet, playing to its strengths and trying to nullify whatever advantages the armed groups had enjoyed. The military's victories arrived at a particularly crucial moment, as Myanmar gears up for elections beginning on the 28th of December that will dominate coverage of the country for the foreseeable future — an election most regional observers believe is nothing more than a sham. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a non-governmental organization of leading judges and lawyers from around the world, believes that should the elections happen, they most likely will not be free, fair, or inclusive. The ICJ points to the amended Political Parties Registration Law, which imposes strenuous membership and financial requirements that effectively block long-established political parties from registering. The junta has also passed several other regulations denying political rights to individuals accused — often without due process — of involvement in "unlawful activities," a catch-all term used to target critics, activists, and members of opposition movements. According to an article in The Conversation by Nicholas Coppel, Australia's former ambassador to Myanmar, citizens who criticize the elections on social media have been sentenced to up to seven years in prison with hard labor. For some offenses, the death penalty applies. So if everyone agrees the elections will be a sham, why is the military pushing ahead? In Coppel's view, the elections are an attempt by the junta to gain legitimacy at home and abroad — a legitimacy it has sought since first seizing power, but which has so far eluded it. When the rebel groups won major victories in 2024, they exposed just how hollow the junta's control actually was. The elections, paired with the recent string of battlefield wins, are meant to reverse that narrative and show that the junta, despite its perceived weakness, remains the country's most dominant ruling faction. That will be a tall order. As Su Mon, ACLED's senior Asia Pacific analyst, noted for the organization, while the military's successes in 2025 were significant, the junta remains in a weakened position compared with where it stood before the rebel advances of 2023 and 2024, and is unable to assert effective control over the areas it has recently retaken. There is also the simple fact that most rebel groups will keep fighting, elections be damned. In Myanmar, then, 2026 is shaping up to be a battle of narratives. For the junta, it is a battle to show the world it can rule the entire country, not just the pockets where its forces are concentrated. For the rebels, it is a battle to show that the victories of 2024 were not a fluke but the beginning of a permanent shift in power that no rigged election can reverse. ## Sudan's War Will Get Even Worse By most measures, Sudan's civil war is already the worst conflict happening anywhere on Earth — deadlier for civilians than Russia's invasion of Ukraine, more chaotic than Myanmar's civil war, and characterized by more starvation and atrocity than Haiti's meltdown. While no one knows how many have been killed, reasonable estimates run as high as 400,000 — a figure calculated before the fall of El-Fasher, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces may have slaughtered close to 70,000. This is an apocalyptic conflict, one that makes most wars look like a Sunday picnic. And yet all signs point to 2026 being even more catastrophic. There are many reasons for that pessimism, but the basic one is that the war at this stage is likely unwinnable. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) had a spectacular start to the year — recapturing the breadbasket state of Gezira and driving the RSF from the capital, Khartoum — but that success was possible only because the paramilitaries had overstretched themselves. After falling back to their home base of Darfur in the west, the RSF consolidated and captured the last remaining major holdout city of El-Fasher. Now it is the military that finds itself overstretched by its drive into Kordofan, falling back as the RSF once again marches onward. In recent weeks alone, the paramilitaries have captured the strategic oil fields of Heglig — though control was later transferred to neutral forces from South Sudan — taken the SAF base at Babanusa after a long siege, and begun pushing toward the North Kordofan capital of el-Obeid. Cities like Kadugli and Dilling have been placed under siege. But while the RSF is now on the front foot, there is no indication the group has the firepower or stamina to drive back into the central regions and retake Khartoum. That is a problem, because, as analyst Dallia Abdelmoniem told Al Jazeera, RSF leader Hemedti "was never going to be satisfied with just controlling the Darfur region — he wants the whole country." On the other side, the SAF consider the parallel government Hemedti has established in the west to be an affront — one they cannot allow to persist, despite their inability to retake Darfur. So it seems likely the two sides will keep fighting, with Kordofan becoming the main focal point of the bloodshed. Speaking exclusively to WarFronts, senior Africa analyst at ACLED Ladd Serwat noted that violence is unlikely to diminish in 2026 and may even spread to the Northern Region, which has so far been spared the worst of the fighting. With the UN warning that Kordofan may become "another El-Fasher," it appears Sudan's tragedy is set to continue for at least another year. ## South Sudan Could Yet Implode In many ways, South Sudan in 2025 was the dog that didn't bark. As of this analysis, the world's newest country technically remains at peace — the sort of fragile peace in which everyone is tense and paranoid that something awful could happen at any moment, but peace nonetheless. To call this surprising is an understatement. Across the past twelve months, Juba repeatedly seemed on the brink of total collapse. The economy had been battered by a loss of oil exports stemming from the civil war in Sudan. President Kiir was increasingly ailing, purging rivals and allies alike. Ethnic militias like the White Army were seizing whole towns. And, to top it all off, Vice President Riek Machar was put on trial for treason. Given that Machar represents the Nuer ethnicity that fought President Kiir's Dinka group in the civil war between 2013 and 2018 — a conflict defined by ethnic cleansing and massacres — this should have been explosive. As Crisis Group put it, "The trial of South Sudan's First Vice President Riek Machar represents one of the greatest threats to the country's stability since the end of its civil war." And yet, somehow, things just about held together. Even as the country risked being dragged into the civil war in Sudan, the expected fighting never erupted. When WarFronts published its latest update on the situation back in September, it would have been astonishing to learn the country would end the year at peace. And yet it may not be worth celebrating just yet. For all that 2025 proved better than expected for the world's newest country, the conditions for state collapse remain firmly in place. Kiir is elderly and infirm. Soldiers still do not receive regular wages. Pressures from the war in Sudan are still causing cracks; the economy remains a basket case; and more and more elites are being purged. Ethnic tensions are rising, and there is a sense that something, at some point, has to give. Rather than a cause for celebration, it may turn out that 2025 merely postponed the country's crack-up. ## Russia Expands Its War With Ukraine In Eastern Europe, Russia's primary military objective in 2026 should be obvious — barring, of course, a surprise peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv. Assuming no such deal materializes, Russia's focus will remain concentrated mostly on Ukraine until it reaches some kind of resolution there, whether through victory, defeat, or — more likely — a ceasefire arrangement that leaves both nations on edge. But that does not mean Russia's objectives will be limited to its Ukraine invasion, any more than they were in 2025. For one thing, Russia is likely to continue pursuing its hybrid-warfare strategy in Europe, relying on a combination of disinformation, drone surveillance overflights, material sabotage, and at times targeted assassination. Russia's objectives appear straightforward: to probe and analyze NATO defenses and response times, to challenge NATO's resolve and willingness to protect itself, and to sow discord among the alliance's members. Russia tends to probe its adversaries in all directions at once, and while it generally backs down once it meets resistance, it redoubles its efforts wherever it finds an apparent vulnerability. What Russia does across Europe in 2026 will most likely depend on the weaknesses Europe reveals. Then there is the possibility of limited military action by Russia in non-NATO countries — possibly Georgia, possibly Moldova, possibly both. Georgia would be the most likely candidate, already neutered and brought into alignment with Moscow by its pro-Russian government, and now poised to serve as a showpiece for whatever message Russia wants to send. If Russia wants to use Georgia to demonstrate the benevolence and mutual enrichment that supposedly come from an alliance with Moscow, then perhaps Georgia and its elites are about to get a lot richer. If, on the other hand, Russia has been fattening Georgia up for the slaughter — to demonstrate just how powerful it can be when it really wants to capture an entire country — then Georgia's elites may find themselves double-crossed, made an example of for the rest of the world. Moldova would be harder for Russia to attack outright, but could come under threat from disinformation, hybrid-warfare campaigns, or even long-range strikes, especially after Moldova's warnings of Russian interference in its 2025 elections seemed to amount to nothing. Other nations could be on the chopping block too, including Kazakhstan, whose leaders have made clear they view Russia as a long-term threat — though a Russian offensive in Central Asia is far less likely this year. And if Russia and Ukraine do reach a ceasefire, there is a non-zero chance the invasion could conclude, restart, and conclude again, all within the next twelve months. Russia has shown across this recent round of negotiations that it really wants control of the entire Donbas — which would also hand it the rest of Ukraine's fortress belt, the best defensive line left between the front lines and Kyiv. That indicator, along with others from the Kremlin and Western intelligence, suggests that if Russia can get Ukraine to agree to a peace, it probably does not intend for that peace to endure. Instead, the objective would be to rest its troops, refresh its arsenal, and re-invade — betting on the kind of days-long offensive it originally planned for in 2022. But suppose no ceasefire, not even a cynical one, is reached. What happens instead? ## Ukraine's 2026 Looks Bleak According to Orysia Lutsevych, Deputy Director of Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, a peaceful settlement in Ukraine remains far from reach. In her view, as long as President Putin continues to insist on controlling Ukraine's eastern edge, the American-led negotiations are unlikely to be enough to stop him. Lutsevych is not wrong to be skeptical. Despite the optimistic press conferences and declarations about a peace deal being closer than ever, the fundamentals have not changed. Russia still believes it is winning. Ukraine still cannot accept losing a fifth of its territory. And the Trump administration, for all its deal-making bluster, has not figured out how to square that circle. That means Ukraine will most likely see a continuation of what has unfolded throughout 2025: a grinding, attritional war in which each side exchanges thousands of men for meters of territory. And that is not an exaggeration. According to DW, by December 2025 Russia controlled 19% of Ukraine's territory — only one percentage point more than it controlled at the end of 2022. Yet according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), nearly one million Russian soldiers were killed or injured to gain that ground. It is precisely the ratio of mass casualties to minor gains typically associated with the Western Front in World War One. For Ukraine, the situation may be even worse. The country has lost approximately 10 million people — roughly a quarter of its prewar population — mostly through emigration, but also through casualties and plummeting birth rates. Its military, which began the war with volunteers flooding recruitment centers, now sees only 12% of new recruits volunteer. The rest are conscripts, many of them older men. The average Ukrainian infantryman, according to the military outlet War on the Rocks, is 43 years old. So in 2026, if a peace deal cannot be reached — and it looks likely it will not be — Ukraine will continue fighting a war in which survival depends on Western nations maintaining their willingness to fund an indefinite stalemate. Russia, meanwhile, will keep trying to grind forward at massive cost, betting that its larger population and war economy can outlast Ukrainian manpower reserves and Western political commitment. The result will likely be neither dramatic offensives nor decisive battles, but another year of artillery exchanges and drone strikes in which thousands die for villages destined to become forgotten footnotes in history books, while each side hopes the other collapses first. Barring an unexpected change at the top in the Kremlin, things may remain this way for a very long time. ## The Threat of World War Three Finally, no survey of 2026 would be complete without addressing World War Three. As things stand, a true global war appears unlikely for 2026 — though that assessment comes with fingers firmly crossed. As improbable as it is, two major offensives must be acknowledged as remote possibilities: Russia against NATO, and China against Taiwan. In both cases, Western experts have pinned down a likely date for military action around 2027 or 2028, before either the nations of Europe or those of the Indo-Pacific rearm to the point where they could fully deter Russia or China respectively. But rearmament on both sides of the globe is now happening quickly. If Russia, China, or both evaluate that their window of opportunity is closing, that presents a problem. Should Russia and China come to suspect that their window could shut by, say, 2028, will they abandon their wider ambitions? Or will they chase those ambitions in 2026? There is no way to say for certain. What can be said is that the coming year is likely to prove as chaotic and destructive as most of this decade has been so far — and the hope, when it finally comes time to assess 2027, is for a less pessimistic outlook than this one. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Which frozen conflicts turned hot in 2025, and why do they remain flashpoints? Four stand out. Iran and Israel fought their first major direct military engagement during the twelve-day war last June. India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, clashed in a large-scale showdown across April and May. Pakistan and Afghanistan saw skirmishes near the Durand Line escalate into a proper border conflict. And Thailand and Cambodia fought for four days in July, paused, then resumed fighting in early December. All four remain dangerous because each side has a structure of incentives that makes a return to violence acceptable if it serves a broader goal — not because any party is actively seeking war. ### What makes Syria the most likely candidate for the first new conflict of 2026? The flashpoint is the standoff between Damascus and the Kurdish-led region of Rojava, protected by the SDF. Reintegration talks have stalled, and Turkey — which views the SDF as an extension of its own Kurdish paramilitaries — has demanded reintegration by the end of 2025 and signaled willingness to go to war. Turkish military convoys are massing on Syrian territory, Syrian forces are gathering in the north near oil-rich Deir ez-Zor, and the US now appears unlikely to intervene on behalf of the Kurds, raising the risk of a Turkish offensive that could also trigger Islamic State prison-camp breakouts. ### Why is the Horn of Africa hardening into two hostile blocs? The region is splitting between Ethiopia backed by the UAE, and Eritrea backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Abiy Ahmed has been vocal about restoring Ethiopian sea access — widely read as a threat to annex parts of Eritrea — while Eritrea has backed the Fano insurgency to destabilize Ethiopia internally. Somalia panicked over a possible Ethiopia-Somaliland port deal and forged an alliance with Eritrea and Egypt. Sudan's civil war adds further volatility, with the RSF backed by the UAE on one side and the SAF tied to Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the other, potentially pulling the whole region into a wider East African war. ### How much territory has Russia gained in Ukraine, and at what cost? According to DW, Russia controlled 19% of Ukraine's territory by December 2025 — just one percentage point more than at the end of 2022. CSIS estimates nearly one million Russian soldiers were killed or wounded to achieve those marginal gains, a casualty-to-territory ratio reminiscent of the Western Front in World War One. Ukraine, for its part, has lost roughly a quarter of its prewar population through emigration, casualties, and falling birth rates, and only 12% of new recruits now volunteer, with the average infantryman 43 years old. ### How likely is World War Three in 2026? It appears unlikely but not impossible. Western experts generally date the most probable window for a Russian move against NATO or a Chinese move against Taiwan to 2027 or 2028 — before Europe and the Indo-Pacific can rearm enough to deter them. The risk is that rapid rearmament convinces Moscow or Beijing their window is closing sooner, prompting action before they abandon their ambitions. Should Russia and China evaluate that their window is shutting in 2026, the calculus could shift faster than most analysts expect. <!-- youtube:Z16OCa_ddWY -->