As President Obama plans trip to Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa, a press conference at the National Press Club will give voice to those calling for change in his Africa policy.
Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars details the growing use of extrajudicial assassinations by the U.S. executive branch to strike at targets around the planet, without any declaration of war or meaningful congressional oversight. And it documents the human toll of such unchecked power by featuring some of the innocent victims of this global war.
The British government’s offer of monetary compensation of £20 million to over 5,000 living Kenyan survivors of systematic torture during the Mau Mau anti-colonial revolt is a historic reckoning with an ugly past. It also dispells the myth that the British were more enlightened, benevolent, or liberal in their self-anointed “civilizing mission” than their imperial European counteparts.
“No Bio, no Salone!” shouted fervent supporters of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) as results were announced from the November 2012 presidential election. The party’s leader, Julius Maada Bio, had been defeated by incumbent President Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People’s Congress (APC). After a period of turmoil, the country is left with a question: Is “Salone with no Bio” a viable prospect for peace and development in Sierra Leone?
Over a weekend of memorials, I was remembering a friend who died of a broken heart. Her death certificate may not say so, but she did. Aurélie Lisette Talate died last year at 70 of what members of her community call, in their creole language, sagren—profound sorrow. Madame Talate died of sagren because the U.S. and British governments exiled her and the rest of her Chagossian people from their homeland in the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago to create a secretive military base on Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia.
The British anthropologist has published his second volume on growing instability in the Sahara.
Keith Ellison, who in 2006 became the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, has spent much of his tenure forging closer relations with Middle Eastern and African countries, from Malawi and Mauritania to Liberia, Libya, and Sudan. He’s traveled to the region more times than he can recall, most recently to Somalia in February, as the first member of Congress to visit the war-torn nation in four years.
Set amidst the cityscape of Kampala and the rolling hills of Ugandan countryside, the film God Loves Uganda, produced by Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, takes an extraordinary look at the influence of conservative American evangelicals on Ugandan society.
Emira Woods is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, and an expert on U.S. foreign policy with a special emphasis on Africa and the developing world. She has written on a range of issues from debt, trade and development to U.S....
Daphne Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) where she directs the Genuine Progress Project. The Genuine Progress project is utilizing a new economic indicator, now in place in the states Maryland and Vermont, the Genuine Progress Indicator...