Kenyan scholar Firoze Manji gives his thoughts on the ‘aid industry’, an industry which hampers Africans’ recovery of their continent, made rotten with corruption and the pillaging of natural resources.
Despite pointing the way to nonviolent revolution, Gene Sharp was once viciously attacked by the left.
Will protests lead the Obama administration to implement real changes on how America approaches foreign policy in Africa?
The International Labor Rights Forum and Foreign Policy In Focus congratulate thecongratulates the Firestone Agricultural Workers’ Union of Liberia (FAWUL) on its selection by the U.S. Department of Labor as the 2011 recipient of the Iqbal Masih Award. The annual award was established by the U.S. Congress to recognize the work of an individual, company, organization, or national government to end the worst forms of child labor. It will be presented to FAWUL by U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield today in Liberia’s capital city of Monrovia
In 1875, as Europe set its sights on Africa’s vast riches, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to his ambassador in London, “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” It’s America’s turn now, and it appears that the Obama administration – like Bush before him – is driven by a similarly disturbing vision: a new scramble for Africa.
A nation is like a marriage, or so Lenin imagined it to be, with each partner or province having a right to get out if things go horribly wrong. The Soviet constitution of 1918 provided this right to each of the republics. It wasn’t an innovation that many other countries followed. And yet, constitutional provisions or not, the S word – secession – has occasionally brought nations to the brink of dissolution.
Puntland, an autonomous state in northeast Somalia with a population of three million, has declared that it is no longer interested in working with the current Somali government. Puntland’s decision stems from the hesitation of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu to embrace a draft constitution supported by the international community that would allow Somalis to form regional states within a federal structure. TFG President Sharif Ahmed’s supporters in Mogadishu and in the diaspora have lobbied hard against federalism, which they believe will lead to the balkanization of Somalia.
Despite threatening to behead gays, His Excellency President Professor Doctor just wants to be liked.
Polarised and violent political crises that recur in nation states signal that the political formulae adopted to resolve the crises have not worked. Such is the stark reality in Côte d’Ivoire. The United Nations’s (UN) strategy to oversee elections and install a winner-takes-all Western-style ‘democratically elected’ state president has failed.
High turnout and jubilation on the part of voters is a reflection of their desire to free themselves from decades of oppression by Northern Sudan-dominated regimes.