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 Much of the data is out of date and most of the analysis is familiar — yesterday’s fresh radical ideas that have become today’s cliches.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…
Author: CASADE
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…
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…
Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer. Abstract. We examine the productivity of informal firms (those that are not registered with the government) in 24 African countries using field work and World Bank firm level data. We find that productivity jumps sharply if we compare small formal firms to informal firms, and rises rapidly with the size of formal firms. Critically, informal firms appear to be qualitatively different than formal firms: they are smaller in size, produce to order, are run by managers with low human capital, do not have access to external finance, do not advertise their products,…
By Bertram I. Spector (ed.). The introductory chapter by Spector succinctly sets out the purpose and direction of the book. Simply put, the aim of the book is to provide policymakers with more reliable insight into which strategies are effective and which are not. The book takes as its starting point that corruption is the misuse of public authority for personal gain (Klitgaard, Maclean-Abaroa, and Parris 2000). It is a definition which the contributors adopt as a whole. The focus is on the public rather than the private sector. Spector argues that as corruption manifests in diverse ways it requires…
Alexander Beresford. When teaching undergraduate students about colonial legacies and the basics of underdevelopment and dependency, I project a map of colonial railways onto the screen and ask my students to comment on what it tells us.1 On the one hand, perhaps, this image of railways encapsulates ideas of modernity, progress, or even colonial benevolence. On the other hand, of course, when we force students to scratch below the surface, the image of rail networks linking mines to ports (and rarely cities to cities) reflects the manner in which the economies of Africa’s newly formed states were structured primarily toward…
Vlatka Bilas*, Sanja Franc. Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Zagreb Zagreb, Croatia ABSTRACT. Globalization is characterized by many accomplishments of the world economy: from regional trade agreements proliferation to the acceptance of international standards. One way of integrating Africa into globalization trends is through regional integrations. However, Africa’s dependence upon its colonial leaders has not reflected well on the process of regional integration. Regionalism in Africa was led by public sector organizations and it was done without the public support and the support of private sector. Information-communication technology represents another limiting factor to Africa’s integration into the globalization…