Armin Rosen. The recent move by Boko Haram’s leader to pledge the jihadist group’s allegiance to ISIS caused widespread alarm and raised concerns that such an alliance would strengthen their ability to cause death and destruction and spread their ideology across the region. The oath certainly adds another layer to one of the most dangerous and consequential crises in Africa. Boko Haram has already killed thousands of people and jeopardized one of the world’s biggest democratic elections. A partnership with ISIS has the potential to stretch the Islamic caliphate’s borders, foster exchanges in operational expertise, and give both groups…
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Mahlet Woldetsadik. Worldwide, nearly 800 women die every day due to mostly preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. More than half of these deaths occur in fragile states torn by armed conflict and generalized violence. For women living in sub-Saharan Africa, the adult lifetime risk of maternal mortality is the highest in the world—one in 38 births—compared to one in 3,400 for women living in high-income countries. The United Nations Population Fund also reports that one in five women of reproductive age living in crisis-affected settings is likely to get pregnant. The chaos of conflict, the sudden loss of medical support, and…
Charles Ellison. Perhaps not, but there’s not much dispute on the reasons for President Obama’s most recent trip to Africa. It is actually growing economically, despite the incessant stream of conflict zone news and worries that militant Islamic terrorism could be on the rise there. And, as the first Black president who also struggles between two cultural universes within the Black Diaspora (one Kenyan, the other African American), there’s also acknowledgement that the Black migrant population from African and Caribbean countries is growing fast. Many experts predict the foreign Black population in the United States will increase to 16 percent…
By Joseph Stiglitz. Reviewed By Brandon Wicks. Once upon a time, not altogether too long ago, we talked about something called “class.” There was a lower and working class. There was an upper class. It was understood that these were different groups, with different amounts of power and different, often conflicting interests. Eventually, in the industrializing West, the chasm between these classes grew so great that something had to be done. In 19th-century Europe, workers formed unions and the modern welfare state was born. In the U.S., in the wake of the Great Depression, the New Deal massively expanded public-sector…
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, explains why Nigeria’s Excess Crude Account and Sovereign Wealth Funds are empty – CASADE (Watch full speech in the Video section)
Emile Ouédraogo at the African Center for Strategic Studies provides a must-read for African policy makers, and military leaders in his timely and well-researched work entitled ‘Advancing Military Professionalism in Africa.’ Vivid examples of weak military professionalism in Africa are regularly evident in news accounts of instability on the continent. Militaries collapsing in the face of attacks by irregular forces, coups, mutinies, looting, human rights abuses against civilian populations, corruption, and engagement in illicit trafficking activities are widespread. This pattern persists decades after the end of colonialism, despite billions of dollars of security sector assistance and longstanding rhetoric on the need to strengthen civil-military relations on…
Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. By Janice Boddy. Reviewed by Tanya Luhrman. A woman in the Islamic northern Sudan lives what appears to be a beleaguered life. Before she is 10, a midwife circumcises her, snipping off her clitoris and stitching together the outer labia. In her late teens, she beautifies herself for marriage by removing all her body hair and scraping off the outer layer of her skin. Reliably virginal at marriage, she is soon abandoned by her husband for most of the year – he works in the city, she remains in the…
Carol Lancaster. Imagine the following advertisement for Al Qaeda: “Wanted: Educated individuals (preferably with a graduate degree in a technical field) who have foreign-language skills (preferably fluency in English) as well as a deep antipathy to their own and others’ political leaders. Must be comfortable with violence and available for training and important assignments in foreign countries during a period of months or years.” The terrorists of Al Qaeda were educated, from well-off families, and mostly from countries that have long ago graduated from the category of the world’s poorest. It was not poverty that motivated them. Indeed, we do…
Joseph Siegle. Africa has a problem of presidents not leaving office when it’s time to do so. The latest illustration of this is the maneuvering of Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza. After 10 years in office, he is attempting to stay on for a third five-year term – in contravention of Burundi’s constitution that limits presidents to two five-year terms. Nkurunziza’s determination to stay in power has brought the country to the brink of another civil war. (It’s estimated that 300,000 people were killed in Burundi’s ethnically-based civil war of 1993-2005). The government’s hardline response to protests against a third term…
Reviewed By Chris Nelson. Andrew Cockburn. Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. It’s not often that a book review coincides with current events. Books, particularly nonfiction, are usually written and published months, if not years after an event has occurred. That’s because good nonfiction is written in retrospect: writers have spent some time absorbing their subject, researching and analyzing the facts; authors are hesitant to be rash in judgment or thought. However, there are exceptions. Some pieces of nonfiction, particularly journalists’ works, are appropriate now — not later. Andrew Cockburn’s new book, Kill Chain: The Rise of…