Who Are We?
The Fulda Gap’s contributors are a team of dedicated students focusing on international relations, global politics, conflict studies, and open-source intelligence gathering. Utilizing a mixture of traditional sources and modern techniques we seek to inform and educate our peers and the general public about topics so often disregarded as “too complicated” to discuss.
The topics of the articles featured in The Fulda Gap are mostly focused on contemporary conflicts, whether they are ongoing armed engagement between insurgencies and militaries, media wars of competing narratives and reporting of facts, or political and social struggles manifesting as popular protests. Conflicts that bear the tension of violent force also tend to be the ones that are most contentious in their media representation.
Although our intention is to provide a global-view in our articles, presently the majority of our content is focused on the regions of the Middle East and North Africa, and Eastern Europe. Our content is weighted in this way because these are the regions we have spent the most time studying and engaging with. We make no claims about impartiality in many of the subjects we cover — our research and experiences have shaped our positions on these subjects, and this is represented in our writing. We provide references that are hotlinked within the text of our articles, and we encourage our readers to read and explore some of the same source material we have engaged with.
One of our main goals is to answer common questions surrounding pressing issues of our day. While we have a general understanding of what questions people may have about our topics of coverage, we always welcome questions. Feel free to submit them to us at any time.
Our Logo and Name
The Fulda Gap is an area between the German states of Hesse and Thuringian which holds two corridors of lowland areas, a landscape conducive to mass armored warfare. During the Cold War period, this border region divided East and West Germany. In the event of a Third World War, the ground portion of the war would likely have ignited in and around the Fulda Gap, making it extremely strategically vital. This place and title are strongly evocative of the geopolitical struggles between the United State and the Soviet Union that ebbed and flowed during the Cold War decades spanning between the post-World War II period and the collapse of the Soviet political power bloc in the early 1990s. With the exception of some of the historical context we include in our articles, our work on the Fulda Gap does not dwell on the Cold War period specifically, and is focused rather on covering specific contemporary events. However, nearly all zones of conflict in the world in some way are struggling with the legacy of the Cold War. Reflected here is our conviction that onsidering the historical legacies that influence social, political and national struggles throughout the world is essential to understanding them.
Our logo was designed by a friend of one of our contributing authors, and is a combination of two separate images. The first image is of a broken, upside-down clock, representative of the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The Doomsday Clock is representative of humanity’s proximity to a global apocalypse. The closer to midnight, the closer to doomsday we approach.
The second part of the image is of the Sword of Damocles. The story of the sword is found in an anecdote thought to have originated with Roman orator Cicero. In the story, a courtier named Damocles comments to his king, Dionysus II, about how great it must be to be someone in such a position of ultimate power. In response, Dionysus offers to switch seats with Damocles. Damocles accepts eagerly, and is rewarded with all the royalties associated with the position of king. However, Dionysus had had a sword hung by a single hair directly above the new king’s chair, symbolizing the great fear with which those awarded great power tend to feel. Eventually Damocles begs the king to take his seat back because he no longer sought to be as fortunate as a king.
The story represents two separate thoughts; the first is that power brings with it danger, and with that danger comes constant fear. The second is the idea of impending doom, of a threat just around the corner, hanging by a single hair, waiting to strike at any moment. Implicit in this symbolism is the tremendous danger and enormous responsibility that comes with military and political power in this age of global economic co-dependance, informational interconnectivity, and nuclear armament.
