Subject: IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Front Lines

13 April 2026

WELCOME to Front Lines, Geographical’s weekly geopolitics newsletter, delivered to your inbox every Monday lunchtime.

This week, Tim Marshall discusses how geography determines which nations will be AI superpowers. Doug Specht looks at a town in southern Lebanon being erased through territorial advances, while Dr Alex Asamoah Ankomah considers how the world isn't ready for the next pandemic.

Victoria Heath

Digital Editor, Geographical

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AI

Is the dream of a free and placeless digital world over?

There is a widening gap between developed and developing countries in terms of AI implementation. Image: Shutterstock

By Tim Marshall

Once upon a time, in a faraway place called Utopia, came a proclamation: ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It was 1996, the dawn of the internet, and John Perry Barlow informed national governments: “You weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace…”

Apparently, this was a place where governments did not ‘possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear’. This ‘end of geography’ concept had traction in the web’s early days, but it has faded as every country in the world has, to some degree, regulated cyberspace. Many have even ensured they can cut most of their populations off from the internet.

In this decade, we understand that governments seek control over the transformational technology that is artificial intelligence, but there is limited awareness of – as there was with the internet – the relationship between AI and physical geography, politics and international relations.

To become an AI power, it helps to have access to spare land, huge amounts of water and electricity, a robust power grid, a highly educated population, stable government, a secure supply of critical minerals, and access to submarine fibre-optic cable hubs for high-speed connectivity. Having a relatively cool climate is also a positive.

You may have noticed that countries in the developing world are not known for being blessed with many of the criteria above. Hence, the current divide between the advanced technological countries and the rest may remain or grow wider.

Data centres require vast amounts of water for cooling, posing a serious environmental burden. Image: Shutterstock

The giga-sized data centres being developed for AI are immense. Some are the size of London’s Heathrow Airport. They generate serious heat and require massive amounts of water for cooling. This is why many are in cooler climates such as the Nordic countries, where lower air temperatures reduce water requirements. The need for water is fuelling research into how to reduce leaks, utilise treated wastewater and optimise desalination techniques, especially in the Gulf region. However, water usage is expected to rise even as weather extremes increase competition for water.

The bigger data centres consume power equivalent to that used by hundreds of thousands of households. This energy intensity requires a stable grid system – something the advanced tech nations mostly have, and the developing world often lacks.

The competition for the best AI scientists and engineers is well under way, and here again, the advanced countries have the advantage in not only producing their own top talent, but attracting it from other countries. Even language is a role. AI systems are trained mostly on data from the English language and, therefore, much of their learning about the world comes from a Western perspective. To avoid this, South Korea and Singapore are trying to develop their own large language models, but there are not many countries with the geographic, political, educational and financial advantages to be able to do the same.

Both Singapore and South Korea have added advantage of close proximity to the global digital submarine cable network, through which 95 per cent of international internet traffic passes. The closer you are to the network, the better your data connectivity. Landlocked countries are at a disadvantage.

The states that harness AI now will continue to be powerful. Those that do not will decline. Countries lacking the capacity to develop sovereign AI capability will have to leverage what they have to share in the benefits AI brings, while trying to avoid the negative consequences that sometimes accompany new technologies.

As with the internet, attempts at regulation will come, although the technology will be years ahead of the laws. Even Elon Musk, a major player in AI who used to champion unchecked development, now says: ‘I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level… I mean, with artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon.’

The UN has set up the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. The dialogue had better be snappy. We don’t know how fast AI will learn, but the sci-fi nightmare scenario is that it might make its own declaration of independence. That’s one of the reasons governments, fearing AI will control them, will move to control it.

The physical and geographical requirements for becoming an AI power cannot be wished out of thin air, nor developed by a group of brilliant scientists working alone. Geography ‘decided’ where the coal and oil were. Those fossil fuels helped create the modern technological states. Now geography partially determines which of them will become the AI powers.

Read more of Tim Marshall's columns here.

What do you think of Front Lines? Would you like longer pieces, shorter analysis or more links to the content we're enjoying here at Geographical? Or do you have any other ideas that you want to share with us? Let us know by emailing victoria@geographical.co.uk.

HOUSTON, WE'RE READY FOR TAKEOFF

In total, 4,510 objects were launched into space in 2025, surpassing the previous peak of 2,903 objects in 2023 by a large margin.

Data shows US agencies and companies were responsible for launching 3,708 of these objects – 82 per cent of the global total.

On the horizon…

Nigeria has begun prosecuting more than 500 suspects in one of its largest-ever terrorism trials.
China is set to ban the storage of cremated remains in residential apartments as authorities move to curb the rising use of so-called ‘ash flats’ driven by soaring cemetery costs.
India is facing a growing cooking gas shortage as disruptions to global shipping routes strain supplies, leaving migrant workers in major cities struggling to access fuel.

Naqoura: a town the world keeps erasing

A peace-keeping troop in Naqoura, Lebanon. Image: Shutterstock

As entire neighbourhoods are flattened in southern Lebanon, the border town of Naqoura becomes the latest place where history, geography and war collide

By Doug Specht

On Sunday 6 April 2026, footage released by the Israeli military showed what looked like a controlled demolition exercise. Row by row, residential blocks in the southern Lebanese coastal town of Naqoura shuddered, then collapsed in clouds of grey and white dust.

For the third consecutive day, Israeli bulldozers had been at work flattening entire neighbourhoods. The owners of those homes had already been forced to leave. The town, which sits almost exactly on the 1923 Paulet-Newcombe Line, the border drawn by British and French colonial powers between Lebanon and Mandatory Palestine, is being unmade in real time. Lebanon finds itself on the frontline of the war in Iran, and is likely to be the place where a ceasefire holds or breaks down. It’s border towns, like Naqoura, that carry the heaviest weight of that uncertainty, places that have already been carved up by colonial cartography once, and are now being erased again.

Situated on a rocky promontory where the Levantine coast meets the Lebanese-Israeli frontier, it is the westernmost anchor of the border that stretches from Ras al-Naqoura in the Mediterranean to the eastern hills above the Jordan Valley. The 1923 commission that fixed this line did so largely without consulting the Arab populations on either side. Between 30 and 40 Lebanese villages were absorbed into Mandatory Palestine in the process.

The village itself, recorded in Ottoman surveys of the 1870s and 1880s as a stone-built settlement of around 400 inhabitants with olive groves, palms, fig trees, and abundant springs, persisted through empire, mandate, civil war, and repeated invasion.

Since 23 March 1978, Naqoura has been best known internationally as the headquarters of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The force was created in the immediate aftermath of Israel's Operation Litani, its first major ground invasion of southern Lebanon, when UN Security Council resolutions 425 and 426 demanded an Israeli withdrawal and the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty in the south.

Lebanese diplomats fought specifically for UNIFIL's headquarters to be placed in Naqoura, fearing that without an international presence on the coastal frontier, Israel would permanently absorb the border strip. It was, from the very beginning, a calculated act of geographical claim-staking.

That fear has proved prophetic. UNIFIL's near five-decade presence has done much to protect civilians in surrounding villages, yet it has also served as an uncomfortable witness to successive cycles of destruction, never quite empowered to stop them.

Naqoura has been the home of the UN's Interim Force in Lebanon since 1978. Image: Shutterstock

The erasure of Naqoura

The current destruction of Naqoura is really a continuation of a long standing erasure. When a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect on 27 November 2024, residents of Naqoura hoped to come home. Instead, they watched from afar as Israeli forces continued their demolition of the village. By the time Israeli troops withdrew on 6 January 2025, the municipal council president, Abbas Awada, said Naqoura was 'almost entirely destroyed'.

A visit by Al Jazeera in February 2025 found 'nearly every home lay in ruin'. At Naqoura Intermediate Public School, Human Rights Watch investigators documented a classroom vandalism campaign: laptops smashed, projectors shot, blackboards covered with graffiti, dated to after the ceasefire. An Amnesty International report published in August 2025 placed Naqoura within a broader pattern of destruction involving more than 10,000 structures across southern Lebanon, concluding that the scale of damage occurred 'without apparent imperative military necessity', the threshold required under International Humanitarian Law.

While the threats and attacks on Lebanon never fully went away, it was dragged back into full war on 2 March 2026, when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in response to the US-Israeli strike that killed Iran's Supreme Leader. Israeli forces launched a new ground invasion, pushing into southern Lebanese territory and bombing bridges over the Litani River to sever the south from the rest of the country. Naqoura became, once more, a frontline.

By early April, Israeli forces were conducting large-scale detonations across the town for three consecutive days. In parallel, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz stated publicly that all homes in Lebanese villages adjacent to the border would be demolished, explicitly comparing the strategy to what Israel had done in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza. Plans were reported for a permanent 'security zone' extending three to eight kilometres inside Lebanon, with residents to be permanently barred from returning. Effectively as applying Gaza's yellow line logic to Lebanon, creating a depopulated military buffer which, as in Gaza, would gradually be entrenched as a de facto new border.

Geographic reorganisation

By April 2026, more than one million Lebanese had been displaced since the start of the new war. More than 136,000 people were sheltering in collective spaces; schools, stadiums, streets. What is unfolding in southern Lebanon follows a recognisable template: a contested border territory is cleared of its civilian population through a combination of bombardment and deliberate structural demolition, with the stated justification of security but the practical effect of territorial reorganisation. The 1923 line that made Naqoura a border town was itself drawn by external powers over the heads of local communities. A century later, the town finds itself again in the crosshairs of forces far larger than itself, and the springs and olive groves recorded by the Ottoman surveys are being buried, again, by a new arrangement of power on the map.

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NUMBER CRUNCH: 1.33 milliseconds. That's how much each day has lengthened between 2000 and 2020 due to climate-related factors such as sea level changes. Such a rise, researchers say, is unparalleled across the last 3.6 million years.

Why we're not ready for the next pandemic

Modelling suggests a roughly 27.5 per cent chance of a COVID-19 magnitude pandemic by 2033. Image: Shutterstock

By Dr Alex Asamoah Ankomah, Senior Analyst at Impact Global Health

The COVID-19 pandemic may seem to many like a distant memory we are eager to forget, but most experts believe that the next pandemic is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’. This could come in the form of the evolution of a known virus – for example H5N1 bird flu or mpox – or a new, as-yet-unknown pathogen, termed ‘Disease X’ by the World Health Organization.

Either way, we know two things for certain: that most of us will likely experience at least one more pandemic in our lifetimes, and that we are not ready for it.

We at Impact Global Health, in partnership with the International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat (IPPS), have conducted new research illustrating just how ill-prepared we are when it comes to having the necessary products to diagnose, treat and prevent a new pandemic. This has served as a stark wake-up call, highlighting just how far we remain from achieving the ‘100 Days Mission’ targets – ambitions designed to ensure that safe, effective and affordable diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines can be developed, approved and scaled within 100 days of identifying a pandemic threat.

Take funding, for example. Overall funding for developing pandemic countermeasures continued to fall, with substantial declines for Zika, Nipah and Marburg viruses between 2023-2024 – despite their continued risk and absence of licensed specific vaccines or treatments. Similarly, the product pipeline reveals clear ‘blind spots’ including Hantaan Virus (HTNV), which has no candidates in human testing and no approved products, and H5N1 bird flu, which has no candidates currently in late-stage trials.

We are also severely over-reliant on the US government for funding into diseases with pandemic potential, as illustrated in our pandemic preparedness Scorecard. The US government is the primary funder for developing countermeasures for ten out of 13 high-risk pathogens, providing over 85 per cent of the funding for seven of them and nearly all the funding for four.

A similar problem can be seen across investment in different product types, as well as diseases. For instance, the US government was the top funder across all three platform technology areas covered in the Scorecard, backing product development for multiple diseases as well as Disease X. It provided 84 per cent for therapeutics, 77 per cent for diagnostics and 52 per cent for vaccines.

As of March 2026, there have been more than 779 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide. Image: Shutterstock

The vulnerabilities from this dependence on the US have of course been exposed recently as the government has taken an historic step back from their global health commitments, forcing the world to seek out fresh, new funding models.

Others have also signalled that the bilateral agreements being pursued under the US’s new global health strategy could potentially impact coordinated pandemic preparedness efforts.

We also examined preparedness in Africa through our Africa Deep Dive, which revealed a striking concentration of capacity within a small number of countries and institutions. More than 40 per cent of clinical trial capacity is located in Southern Africa, while North Africa has relatively limited capability.

This imbalance presents real challenges. Data generated in Southern Africa may not always be applicable across the continent, given genetic and environmental differences. It can also skew research priorities towards diseases more common in that region, potentially overlooking others that are equally pressing elsewhere.

There is also a notable imbalance in who leads this research. Trial sponsorship is heavily concentrated among institutions from high-income countries. In Kenya, for example, only five of 107 trials were led by local institutions, compared with 14 led by the University of Oxford. While international expertise is invaluable, stronger African leadership in funding and directing trials is essential to ensure research reflects local needs and realities.

Beyond the need for new financing mechanisms and closing resource gaps, our findings point to a broader issue: pandemic preparedness cannot stop at national borders. COVID-19 demonstrated how quickly disease can spread across the globe, and future threats are likely to do the same.

National strategies alone are not enough. Instead, we need coordinated, multilateral approaches that strengthen global and regional collaboration, and promote more equitable sharing of resources and responsibility. Such an approach would better reflect the cross-border nature of pandemics while ensuring that capacity is shared and used more effectively.

Finally, we must remind policymakers that no country’s national security is complete without health security. We should therefore be discussing investment in pandemic preparedness and biosecurity alongside defence spending, as fundamental pillars of a nation’s resilience against external threats.

In the wake of the carnage from the COVID-19 pandemic, the public rightly expects us to be better prepared, not less, for future outbreaks and to collaborate more closely. As a global health research and development community, we have a duty to honour that expectation and ensure that we are ready for the threats of tomorrow.

Impact Global Health is a not-for-profit research and policy organisation focused on global health research and development across neglected diseases, emerging infectious diseases and women’s health.

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Every month in our print magazine, we feature a ‘Book of the Month’ – a title that stands out for its insight and storytelling about the world around us.

This month, we turn to Adéwálé Májà-Pearce’s Shine Your Eye. Reviewed by Shafik Meghji, the book offers a rich and compelling journey across 14 West African countries.

Read the full review here.

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