Out of context, all concepts and issues find themselves under the mercy of the dimwitted and exploiters.
Some see the recent political upheaval and violence in Burundi as just another sad reminder of the plight of Africa’s struggling democracies. The travails of this tiny country, however, pose a threat to U.S. legitimacy on the African continent.
Kenya has garnered praise for becoming one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growing economies. Now, its government is coming under fire for some recent troubling developments affecting its fourth estate.
Is a re-think of the Western-led international security enterprise needed to respond to a set of interrelated trends that have little to do with conflict between great states and far more to do with dysfunction within fragile states?
Since the Egyptian military ousted former President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood government in a coup in July 2013, a stricter and an increasingly oppressive rule governs Africa’s third most populous country, but one that may not be that unwelcome with the U.S. or its allies.
Nigeria, a country of 170 million, spread out in several hundred ethnic groups and split right down the middle between a Christian south and a Muslim north, will head to the polls on Feb. 14 to elect its new president in what promises to be the country’s defining democratic moment.
If the reports of the dead are true, this would be Boko Haram’s deadliest attack to date. War between the Islamic extremist group and Nigeria began in 2009, and has claimed an estimated 13,000 lives in six years.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest state, faces a serious prospect of ethnic civil war. When it gained independence from Sudan in July 2011, after decades of war between north and south, the world’s attention was focused on the disputed territory of Abyei. A declining oil-producing region Inhabited by southern farmers and visited regularly by northern […]
Al-Qaeda’s incursion into Iraq’s Fallujah area last weekend illustrates the conflict as primarily a stability operations battle – a test over who can legitimately and ably govern – and not a weakness of the U.S. withdrawal or shortfall of Iraqi forces. Predictably dozens of policy pages began trumpeting that the U.S. had too long delayed […]
Millions of citizens of African countries will go to the polls in Presidential, parliamentary/legislative, state/provincial, and local elections in 2014. We will surely cover many of those here at the FPA. Here is an early preview of which elections are happening where (as of January 8) with brief commentary on several of them: Southern Africa: […]
This is something rare. Knowledge of a rapidly deteriorating situation in Africa and a somewhat timely, actual action by those in the world with the power to intervene. The situation is in the Central African Republic. And that intervening is the first step to stabilizing the slaughter and – hopefully – stopping another genocide from […]
When I heard the news that Nelson Mandela, our beloved Madiba, was gone, I had flashbacks to the first time I laid eyes on my South African wife. I didn’t know much about South Africa at the time, and for some reason or another I kept calling her “Mandela” over the course of the entire […]
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