By Christian Smith, Hilary Davidson. “The Paradox of Generosity is a winner. It’s a terrific book full of interesting and important data and insights and, more important, meaningful lessons for each of us and for all of us. Parents should make this book required reading for their adult children as a roadmap to greater happiness, health, and purpose in life.” –Jack Brennan, Chairman Emeritus, The Vanguard Group “‘It is a sociological fact: by giving ourselves away, we flourish!’ Smith and Davidson provide data to support the truth of that statement as they unpack the rich learnings of Notre Dame’s ‘Science…
Author: CASADE
Ambassador John Campbell. Former President George W. Bush’s trip to Botswana and Namibia is a reminder of perhaps his signature achievement in office, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. In an April 7, 2017 op-ed in the Washington Post the former president urged the Trump administration to continue full funding for the program. He argued that PEPFAR was “a program that works” citing the almost twelve million lives that the program has saved since its inception in 2003. Africa has been the largest beneficiary of PEPFAR. Of the initial fifteen “focus countries,” twelve were in Africa.…
By Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, Michael Jerryson. Is religion inherently predisposed to violence? Or has religion been taken hostage by a politics of aggression? The years since the end of the Cold War have shown a noticeable shift in patterns of religious extremism, accentuating the uncomfortable, complex, and oft-misunderstood relationship between religion and violence. The essays in this succinct new volume examine that relationship by offering a well-rounded look at violence as it appears in the world’s most prominent religious traditions, exploring Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, African, and Pacific Island texts and practices. The essays in Violence…
Gavin Sarkin And Chris Hays. It’s easy to write off Nigeria as a place destined to perpetuate violence, corruption and plutocracy. Successive oil-enriched governments have followed the tradition of the nation’s military dictators, dividing the spoils between a Muslim north and a Christian south. Some lawmakers in the capital, Abuja, earn more than $1 million a year in salary and allowances. Lately, the collapse in oil prices has crippled the country’s finances. It’s battling waves of terror from the Islamist militants of Boko Haram in a deepening humanitarian crisis for tens of millions of people. Discontent has brewed among its 177 million citizens,…
As Africa struggles to take its rightful place in the global arena, it must, once again, face the dreadful prospect of re-colonization. This time by China. Howard French gives a fascinating account of this ominous possibility in his latest book, “China’s Second Continent.” The book is reviewed by Chris Hartman. In the annals of modern colonialism and hegemony, few phenomena are as intriguing as China’s aggressive movement into Africa, where, according to Howard W. French in China’s Second Continent, approximately one million Chinese have now migrated. In his important new book, French weaves a rich tapestry of anecdotes, interspersed with numerous…
John O. Ifediora. Nigeria, like its oil-exporting counterparts such as Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, and to a lesser extent, Indonesia, exhibits all the symptoms of a petrolized state —the near exclusive dependence on petrodollars to finance its fiscal expenditure, and private-sector consumption. But its development path, while yielding generally similar results to those of other oil-producing states is decidedly different. As is true with its peer oil-exporting countries, Nigeria’s development trajectory was determined by unique colonial experiences, and post-independence policy choices. In this regard, its decision to decentralize and diffuse political and economic power in the nation is pre-eminent in engendering…
Akachukwu Okafor* In September 2015, the United Nations adopted a set of seventeen global development goals called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which set out the development priorities that the global community should pursue. While each of these goals has its importance, the actualization of the seventh goal – universal access to affordable and clean energy may hold the key to the actualization of the other goals as globally adopted. According to the 2016 World Energy Outlook by the International Energy Agency (IEA), achieving universal energy access by 2030 will require a total investment of nearly $1 trillion ($979 billion), that…
Obinna F. Muoh. From the student in a rural town somewhere in Nigeria that is literally burning the mid-night oil to the industrialist whose cost of production puts her in an untenable market position, the socio-economic life of every Nigerian has been affected in no small measure by the upheavals in the power sector. When one considers the importance of electricity to modern life, it is understandable that Nigerians from all walks of life, rich and poor, old and young are frustrated with the user experience. Despite the less than ideal circumstances, Nigerians are expectant. In the 21 st century,…
By Francois Bourguigon. Reviewed by Michael West. Inequality not only seems to be an intractable problem, it also seems to be a slippery concept, hard to define with any precision and tricky to measure. Normally we talk about inequality within a national economy, and that’s difficult enough to deal with. But François Bourguignon goes a step further. He is interested in global inequality, “a rather complex combination of inequality between nations and inequality within nations.” (p. 9). In The Globalization of Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2015), an updated, expanded version of the book that first appeared in French in 2012, “the…
John Ghazvinian. Reviewed by Steven Martinovich. With continued instability in the Middle East and the political difficulty of drilling on its own soil, it’s not surprising that the United States has been casting about lately for new sources of foreign oil. The problem, however, is that most of the places that it and the rest of the world are looking to meet their insatiable need for energy are no more stable than the Middle East. As John Ghazvinian reports in Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, the newest hotspot for exploration dollars, yuan and rupees, is sub-Saharan Africa. Although we’ve…