Clear away, for the moment, the repression, the bombings, the rocket attacks, the fence, the religions, the national aspirations and resentments — and just take a closer look at Israel and the West Bank. It’s not hard to do. Open Google Earth and cruise over this conflicted piece of territory, concentrating your attention on signs of human habitation.
Dar es Salaam hosted the World Economic Forum on Africa on May 5. This event — which brought together 11 heads of state with a thousand participants from 85 countries — offered a counter-narrative to the political and economic disorder described by policy pundits like Robert Kaplan that have long distorted U.S. appraisals of the region’s strategic importance. Western media often overlook the continent’s many success stories. With the Wall Street Journal opening an Africa bureau in late 2009, Africa’s increasing economic and political significance is only just beginning to be noticed in the West.
Zimbabwe is currently the subject of sanctions designed to pressure Robert Mugabe and his colleagues to cease human rights abuses and remove other barriers to democratization in the country. Yet despite some recent positive developments — such as the appointment of independent commissions on human rights, elections, and the media — the future of democracy in Zimbabwe remains highly uncertain.
The Obama administration’s redefined military mission in Afghanistan has dramatically increased pressure on the Afghan government to demonstrate it can provide for its citizens without U.S. assistance. Yet despite billions of dollars spent on military and civilian efforts, eight years of nation-building haven’t yielded adequate results.
The United Nations will host a Haiti donors’ conference at the end of March.
This conference will be quite different from last year’s event, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in two centuries. An agenda has already begun to take shape: It’s already clear that a future Haiti must be populated with environmentally sustainable, earthquake-resistant buildings, for example, and it’s also clear that the international community must do something to ease Haiti’s massive debt burden.
This essay is part of a strategic dialogue on the IMF. The accompanying essay by Martin S. Edwards is here and his response to Ambrose is here. Martin Edwards’ response is here.
The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing, even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years. As the much-heralded process of financial and trade interdependence went into reverse, it became the transmission belt not of prosperity but of economic crisis and collapse.
In this interview, IPS intern Daniel Atzmon discusses the situation in Afghanistan with Gyan Bahadur Adhikari (G.B. for short), who is the country director for ActionAid Afghanistan.
The conventional view of Robert McNamara, who passed away a few days ago, is that after serving as the chief engineer of the disastrous U.S. war in Vietnam, he went on in 1968, to serve as president of the World Bank. In this way, he sought to salve his troubled conscience by delivering development assistance to poor countries.
On the morning of May 27th this year, the staff of the Legal Affairs Office of the World Bank encountered an ugly racial slur scrawled on the wall outside their department. Very shortly, however, the words "N–––, go home!" were erased by order of World Bank management. This was the second such episode in as many weeks.