Government bulldozers flattened the Badia East squatter district in Lagos earlier this year. Suppose its nine thousand residents had drawn maps, kept records, and documented their community’s dynamism over the past thirty years. Would it have been quite so easy to evict them? Read More

Sudanese demonstrations, starting in the city of Niyala in Darfur and extending to engulf Wad-Madin and Khartoum, took most observers by surprise. Few countries came out in support of the uprising. This uprising has now become strong enough to be called Sudan’s Revolution. Read More

Respect for human rights is a common denominator in the Western Sahara conflict that the international community should back at all costs. Read More

Millions of people are being forcibly displaced by sudden and slow onset disasters related to climate change. The problem: there is no international legislation providing a clear and secure basis for their rights and protection. A look at what this means for refugees in Kenya and Egypt.Read More

Conflict and population displacement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is portrayed as impossibly complex. There are four competing accounts, depending on which side is telling the story. Interpretation of history will always be contested. A more inclusive narrative can clear the way to constructive solutions. Read More

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The disease can be eradicated by 2018—with sufficient funds, commitment, and resolve.Read More

The terrorist assault on one of Algeria's central natural gas processing plants posed a direct challenge to the structure of the country's military-industrial complex.Read More

The Arab Spring opened up new partnership opportunities for Morocco, Africa’s only non-African Union member country, which has been long isolated by the Western Sahara conflict and its rivalry with neighboring Algeria. Read More

Political unrest after a disputed presidential election in Kenya left some eleven hundred people dead and three hundred thousand other homeless. But the turmoil also inflicted damage on the country’s knowledge system—the universities and research institutes that generate economic progress and are a key to strengthening democracy against ethnic-based politics.Read More

The future of Egypt is on the brink of an Islamist abyss. The Freedom and Justice Party’s tattered poker-faced mask has finally fallen, revealing the bloody fangs of a power hungry vampire, intent on destroying anything that stands between it and its evil, Quran-wielding project to turn Egypt into medieval Afghanistan.Read More

When special people depart this world for another, as New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid did earlier this week, those of us who are left behind feel like a rowboat bobbing in the rolling waves of a large luxury yacht or ocean liner that has left us in its wake. We are slightly disoriented, momentarily losing our balance and direction, focused only on regaining equilibrium, and later anchorage, in a suddenly turbulent and frightening world. Acids that are only occasionally activated for special assignments go to work in the pit of our stomach. They generate sadness at the passing of his life, fear because we have been alerted to the fragility of our own lives, and also small jolts of confidence and hope -- because his life and death remind us that our world was, and remains, full of gifted people like him. Read More

The massacre committed in Port Said on Wednesday night when thousands of fans of the home team Al-Masry, which had secured a rare 3-1 victory over Al-Ahly, stormed the pitch and launched a deadly attack on Ahly fans in the bleachers, was no spur-of-the-moment act of mob behavior. It was a carefully premeditated counter-revolutionary plot to sow sedition and set Egyptians against each other to eventually justify the continued presence in power of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).Read More

In the quest for solutions, here’s a deceptively simple idea: provide Africans with better business education.Read More

U.S. relations with Pakistan have been on the rocks since Navy SEALs buzzed into Abbottabad unannounced in a pair of modified MH-60 helicopters and took out Osama bin Laden. The move, which 68 percent of Pakistanis viewed as a “severe” compromise of their country’s sovereignty, according to a Gallup poll, prompted the humiliated Pakistani military to expel U.S. military trainers from the country and refuse visas to other American personnelRead More

How the rise of developing economies–exemplified by BRICS– is changing the old way of doing business Read More

President Jacob Zuma presides over a country that after decades of international isolation under white minority rule is taking an increasing role in African and global affairs. Read More

After Apartheid: Reinventing South Africa? Edited by Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau. University of Virginia Press, 2011. 368 pp.Read More

South Africa's liberation leader taught us a vital lesson when he navigated a peaceful end to apartheid: it is possible to be a great politician and a great human being at the same time. In reaching out to his old enemy, he bequeathed his nation the rule of law, freedom of speech, and free and fair elections. Read More

The results of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun proved once again that nations are not serious about addressing the danger posed by global warming. Non-stop consultations between developed and developing countries must achieve tangible and effective compromises before the follow-up conference in Durban in November.Read More

The pandemic is not out of the danger zone, but apocalyptic predictions about the collapse of armies, state crises, and a vicious interaction between HIV/AIDS and violent conflict -- especially in Africa -- have not come to pass. Careful analysis gives far less cause for pessimism than many imagined would be possible even half a decade ago.Read More

A promising African country is decimated by wars, violence, and lack of individual liberties. President Omar Al-Bashir, who elected himself multiple times through fraudulent and farcical elections, has ruled the country with an iron fist and explosive violence for more than two decades. But the county is revolting, from its peripheries. Read More

An American perspective Read More