By Terry Lynn Karl. “All in all I wish we had discovered water” Sheik Yamani, Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia. Terry Lynn Karl opens her book by recalling the fairy tale King Midas who turned everything he touched to gold. She traces the similar, dismal performances of a group of developing states to their common trait, an abundance of petroleum, and likens their “paradox of plenty” to King Midas’ affliction. Karl presents a convincing case, which may be particularly salient for new oil states today. The Myth of “Black Gold” The Paradox of Plenty includes a case study of Venezuela,…
Author: CASADE
Paul J. Smith. Since the Al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, there have been as many experts as there have been theories on the whys and wherefores of terrorism. The air is thick with sound bites and quotable quotes generated by an army of analysts and security experts who have rushed in to fill the public thirst for news and fuel the media’s quest for headlines. Into this inevitable, but not exactly helpful environment, comes Paul Smith’s book, cutting through the jargon with a lucid, nuanced, carefully researched handbook on terrorism in the twenty-first century. What sets this book…
The US-Africa Energy Summit 2017 to be held in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, on September 18-19, 2017, is a solution-driven summit that would offer firms and investors in the energy sector in sub-Saharan Africa the means and opportunities to seriously address the perennial shortage of electricity supply in their respective countries through collaborations and partnerships with US-based firms, funding from growth fund managers, and financial institutions that specialize in energy projects. In addition to these private sources of funding, federal and state governments in Africa, the World Bank, the IMF, and the Power Africa project led by the US government, have…
By Julius O. Ihonvbere. Reviewed by Gail Gerhart. Another perspective on Africa’s economic and political crises. This study reviews the debt problem, the failures of structural adjustment, the shortcomings of most African efforts at democratization, and problems of building successful regional cooperation. Much of the data is out of date and most of the analysis is familiar — yesterday’s fresh radical ideas that have become today’s cliches. But the newcomer to problems of African development may appreciate the author’s indignation, as well as his clear (if somewhat repetitive) explanations of major issues. Solutions are prescribed only in general terms: more…
By US Army College, John-Peter Pham, Strategic Studies Institute. For more than 2 decades, Somalia has been the prime example of a collapsed state, thus far resisting no fewer than 15 attempts to reconstitute a central government, while the 16th such undertaking, the current internationally-backed but struggling regime of the “Federal Republic of Somalia,” just barely maintains a token presence in the capital and along the southeastern littoral—and that due only to the presence of a more than 17,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force. In fact, for much of the period, insurgents spearheaded by the Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (Movement of Warrior…
David Rhode. Twenty years after the world body failed to stop two genocides, it’s still struggling with how to enforce its most basic mandate: protecting people. With a wave of his hand on Wednesday morning, Russian United Nations Ambassador Vitaly Churkin sent the U.N. Security Council back in time. He raised his hand to veto a resolution that uses the term “genocide” to describe the mass killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica 20 years ago this month. Churkin argued this would promote division in the former Yugoslavia. The veto was the latest example of Russian President…
Simon Adams. For five bloody months, the 250,000 civilians of rebel-held eastern Aleppo were besieged and bombed. Syrian government forces, often joined by Russian fighter jets, relentlessly targeted eastern Aleppo’s hospitals, schools and bakeries. Medieval siege tactics turned it into a place of starvation and death. Aleppo now joins Guernica, Sarajevo, Kigali and Grozny on the list of destroyed cities where atrocities occurred as the world grimaced but did nothing. Everyone I know who once lived there is either dead, missing, or a refugee. All sides of Syria’s civil war have committed atrocities. But even the crimes of the most…
Developing countries, since the end of the Second World War and the unset of the “Cold War,” have relied on material assistance of all sorts from their economically advanced counterparts. The establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions – The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – to facilitate such assistance increased cost to aid recipients through bureaucratically induced ‘deadweight’ loss. But as the years of economic assistance to developing countries dragged on, it soon became clear, even to the least interested observer, that there is a serious misalignment between the interests of both givers/lenders and receivers. This misalignment of…
Ottilia Anna Maunganidze. As global migration – primarily of people from the Middle East and North Africa towards Europe – continues to increase at an unprecedented pace, little is known about the people who facilitate the mass movement of these migrants and refugees. In-depth field research conducted by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), in partnership with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (Global Initiative), provides new findings on smuggling that add to the evidence base. The motivations pushing such unprecedented numbers of refugees and migrants to Europe are many: from escaping conflict, violent extremism and chronic poverty to…
Benn Eifert, Alan Gelb and Nils Borje Tallroth. Introduction. Most mineral exporters, and in particular the oil exporters, have done far less well than resource-poor countries over the past few decades, particularly when considering the massive revenue gains to the oil exporting countries since 1973. Many studies support the “paradox of plenty” (recent examples include Auty, 2001, and Gylfason, 2000 and 2001), even though there are certainly exceptions to this pattern. Some of the high-income OECD countries are resource-abundant, Botswana stands out as a successful mineral exporter, and Malaysia has grown and diversified away from resource-based production, including oil. But…