Karim Haddad
Karim covers geopolitics, multilateral institutions and the systems that keep the world running — trade routes, treaties and the places where they strain.
Articles by Karim Haddad
The World's Trade Is Priced by a Handful of Chokepoints
Suez, Panama, Malacca, Hormuz, the Bosporus. Most of what moves by sea passes through a few narrow places, and the cost of everything on a shelf depends on whether they are open.
Remittances Are Now Larger Than Foreign Aid. The Fees Have Not Caught Up.
Migrants sent close to 700 billion dollars home to low- and middle-income countries last year, more than official aid and foreign direct investment combined. Sending 200 dollars still costs more than 6 percent on average, three times the global target.
A Hague return order sends a child back to a country, not to a parent — the Convention says so in a single sentence
The 1980 Child Abduction Convention allocates jurisdiction, not custody, and it asks courts to do it in six weeks. The most recent global study of applications found the average case took 207 days, and fewer than four in ten ended in a return.
Ninety-Eight Submissions Ask the UN Where Their Seabed Ends. The Body That Answers Them Is Barred From Settling a Single Boundary.
The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf is twenty-one geologists, geophysicists and hydrographers elected five years at a time. Its founding text says its actions shall not prejudice matters relating to delimitation of boundaries between States with opposite or adjacent coasts, and its own rules stop it from examining a submission caught in a dispute unless every party to that dispute consents.
Forty-Five Per Cent of the World's Cargo Capacity Is Registered in Three Countries. The Flag Is Not Decoration. It Is the Law That Applies.
UN Trade and Development's Review of Maritime Transport 2025, published in 2025, counts 112,501 commercial vessels and 2.44 billion deadweight tonnes of capacity at 1 January 2025 — and Liberia, Panama and the Marshall Islands account for 45.1 per cent of that capacity between them. Under the law of the sea, the register — not the owner, the builder or the crew — decides who must inspect, certify and investigate.
One Hundred and Thirty Countries Honour a Stamp That Certifies Nothing About What the Document Says.
The Hague Apostille abolished the consular legalisation chain for foreign public documents. What the square certificate actually vouches for is a signature, a capacity and a seal — never the truth of the paper it is attached to.
Nearly Four in Ten Deaths Worldwide Are Not Registered. Almost Everything Else Is Built on That Count.
Civil registration is the least visible piece of state infrastructure there is: a ledger of births and deaths that quietly underwrites legal identity, public health and the population figures the rest of the world argues over. In much of the world it does not work.
Four Narrow Waterways Carry the World's Trade. Here Is What Happens When One Closes.
Suez, Panama, Hormuz, Malacca: the global economy runs through a handful of chokepoints most people never think about — until they jam.
The Veto: How Five Countries Can Stop the United Nations, and Why That Was the Point
The Security Council's veto is the most criticised feature of the UN — and the reason the UN exists at all. An explainer.
More People Are Displaced Than Ever. The System Meant to Protect Them Was Built for a Different Century.
Over 120 million people are forcibly displaced, on UNHCR's count. The 1951 rules that govern their treatment were written for post-war Europe.