Election observation is at a turning point. Roughly 80-85% of elections around the world are subject to election observation. The majority of these are in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. While international election observation is important for democracy promotion...
This is a guest post by Dehunge Shiaka, Researcher and gender expert in Freetown Sierra Leone There has been increased international attention to the Ebola Viral Disease (EVD) and its spread in West...
In what I suspect is the least auspicious debut ever made by a Duck guest blogger, six months after being welcomed by the Duck team, I'm finally posting. It turns out that starting a new job,...
Todd Smith, Anustubh Agnihotri, and I have put together a new resource of subnational education and infrastructure access indicators for Africa, released as part of the Climate Change and Africa...
For all you fans of 'Dictator Survivor: Africa,' the forthcoming episode is sure to be the most dramatic one yet. Before this year, fans had gotten tired of some of the story lines and characters (I mean it seems obvious that Mugabe will win, so why bother watching right?), but this last season the international community producers have really intervened to make things more interesting. Forget about Charles Tayor. Sure he was considered at one time to be the front runner in the dictatorship survival race- from the beginning he was named one of the Top Ten African Dictators of all time (no,...
Don't feel bad though. It's disempowering.Look. I get the whole ‘stop the portrayal of Africans as victims’ debate. I really do. Empowerment and portrays of empowerment are important. But I can’t help but be slightly frustrated with this entry at UN Dispatch which discusses the “shock and awe” approach to fundraising for disasters.Penelope Chester (apparently a professional Canadian humanitarian) quotes Peter Gill (who has written on the Ethiopian Famine) stating that the West :certainly has no proper answers to the conflicts and dislocation that lead to starvation and deathIn northern...
While WikiLinks is dumping information from the US military all over the internets, the South African government is taking some rather disturbing steps to ensure that citizens, citizens and pretty much everyone in between will not have the right to access any information deemed a threat to "national security". What kind of information threatens national security? Well, according to the “Protection of Information Bill”, pretty much whatever government (local, regional, national) decides. It’s a dangerously vague bill that could possibly do great harm to South Africa. I don't think I need to...
I’m in Edinburgh, Scotland this week for the Political Studies Association Conference so my attention to all things blogging and internet is a bit short. However, as the Duck’s official Canadian ex-pat guest-poster, I did want to post this video (transcript here) of Robert Fowler, a former senior Canadian diplomat who gave a rather scathing critique of Canadian foreign policy at a conference this past weekend in Montreal.No wait – don’t leave! Trust me on this one.In it, he basically blasts both major political parties for their failure to enact any worthwhile international policies beyond...
The NY Times ran a story this morning on how three American evangelical Christians influenced the gay death penalty bill now pending in Uganda. While the emphasis in the story is on the influence of the American evangelical Christians, there is a line in the NYTimes article that deserves more attention: Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men can face death by stoning. (my emphasis) Likewise, Andrew Sullivan picks up the story and blasts the Americans. But he too has a line that is added...
The most recent Utne Reader includes a short piece from Katie Krueger about the practice of "joking cousins" in Senegal:This means that whenever we meet, as a sign of friendliness, we insult each other without hesitation. Every ethnic group in Senegal has at least one or two joking cousin groups, so meeting one is rare enough to be a delight but common enough that it is protocol.Professor Brett O'Bannon of DePauw University (a former graduate student of mine) has written an academic paper arguing that such "joking relationships" are threatened by the forces of globalization. Yet, he notes,...
Did you know that Djibouti is in the midst of a border conflict with Eritrea? I didn't, and for that I blame American news outlets. According to the BBC, French troops are providing logistical and medical support to Djibouti's forces. The United States has condemned "Eritrean aggression.". Eritrea, for its part, has condemned "'US meddling' in the Horn of Africa.". Which presumably refers not just to the large US base in Djibouti (Camp Lemonier), but to its backing of Ethiopia and its related proxy (as well as direct) activities in Somalia.Given the creation of AFRICOM, the fact that Africa...
Last summer, I noted the significance of the Pentagon's creation of an Africa Command in the unified command plan. My conclusion then was:By creating such a high-profile position for Africa, the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and the US Government as a whole, will see Africa in a whole new light.On Monday, the Washington Post ran an article based on analysis of a CRS Report on the new command (You can read the entire CRS Report here).There are two broad issues here that I think merit discussion and reflect more than just the basic reorganization of boxes on the Pentagon's Org chart.First is the...