Archive

NARCO ANALYSIS: Who Succeeds Saied in Tunisia

2026/07/28

Tunisia is having a moment. A merciless heatwave has been suffocating the country for weeks on end. The electricity grid tried and failed to keep up. Blackouts are rendering air conditioners useless. People sweat through the night. There is no respite. Food is spoiling without refrigeration. Merchants throw out rotten meat and turned milk. Wildfires are scorching orchards, scrubland, and parched pasturage. Water shortages in the south are leaving taps dry and crippling industry.

NARCO ANALYSIS: Algeria's New(ish) Foreign Policy

2026/05/20

Back in February during a roundtable discussion in Washington, DC, Algeria’s Ambassador to the US Sabri Boukadoum said that Algeria’s foreign policy is pragmatic, a comment that elicited pushback from the roundtable’s other participants, who argued that Algeria’s foreign policy is too rigidly ideological. What Amb. Boukadoum was alluding to is a subtle evolution in Algeria’s approach to foreign policy that has begun to take shape over the last couple of months.

NARCO ANALYSIS: The Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline

2026/02/17

On 16 February, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced that he had ordered Algeria’s state-owned energy company Sonatrach to begin work on the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline project as soon as Ramadan ends on or around 20 March 2026. The announcement came following a meeting in Algiers with Nigerien President Gen. Abdourahamane Tiani, which itself signaled a rapprochement between Algiers and Niamey. The proposed pipeline would tie Nigerian gas infrastructure into Algerian gas distribution networks to Europe via Niger. Were it to come to fruition, it would simultaneously expand Nigerian gas export capacity, provide energy impoverished Niger with a reliable energy source, offset Algerian domestic gas consumption, and increase European gas supply. The project, which has been on the books for a quarter of a century, is neither impossible nor without challenges.

NARCO ANALYSIS: Algeria, the US, Morocco, & Western Sahara

2026/02/12

During a routine Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on February 3rd, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) asked the hearing’s witnesses if the Trump administration would apply Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) to Algeria were Algiers to order Russian fighter jets. Passed in 2017, CAATSA mandates sanctions on Iran, North Korean, and Russia, and allows secondary sanctions on foreign entities that transact with Tehran, Pyongyang, and Moscow. The response from Robert Palladino, a senior bureau official at State Department, was non-committal: Algerian purchases of Russian military equipment “may trigger” sanctions which is something that the State Department continues to “watch closely.”

NARCO ANALYSIS: Algeria 2026

2025/12/17

Algeria had a good enough 2025. No fireworks. Nothing exceptional. But nothing terrible either. Algeria is pretty impervious to international developments – sure, it’s impacted by them on the margins, but Algeria’s whole decoupled approach does insulate it from major shocks. It suffered some diplomatic setbacks. It had some domestic victories. But there was nothing that constituted a structural shift.

NARCO ANALYSIS: The Africa Atlantic Pipeline: a solution in search of a problem

2025/11/18

Geoff D. Porter

Morocco likes big. Big is good. In 1987, cooks in Agadir made the world’s biggest couscous. In 1993, it built the world’s biggest minaret and the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant in 2016. The world’s biggest soccer stadium is currently under construction in Casablanca. And Morocco wants to build the world’s longest submarine natural gas pipeline. 

NARCO ANALYSIS: Libya's Illicit Oil Sales

2025/08/18

The fragile, implicitly understood arrangment that has kept Libya’s oil revenue flowing – and by extension, the country somewhat stitched together – is at risk of completely collapsing. Historically, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) sold oil. The proceeds of those sales were deposited in the Tripoli government’s dollar-denominated account. But that arrangement is finally starting to unravel, the result of years of backroom wheeling and dealing to undermine the NOC’s monopoly on oil exports and the Libyan Central Bank’s (CBL) control of oil revenue.

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