Dear FPA Blog followers, As many of you know, FPA’s ‘Great Decisions’ program, dealing with the Arab Spring and its implications for U.S. policy came out earlier this year. I was asked to write a review of the program; that review later turned into a larger article, which also appeared on FPA Blogs. The following […]
Much of the feedback I receive from the various articles I post questions why U.S. foreign policy is so defensive/aggressive. Let me begin by saying that I am far from being an expert on most of these matters. While I did serve in the military and as a diplomat, I never reached a level where […]
Two decades have passed since the collapse of the Somali state. Twenty one years to be exact. According to Lee Cassanelli, Professor of African history at the University of Pennsylvania, this exact number matters in Somali politics – perhaps in a subconscious way. In August 2007, during one of his presentations at the Somali Studies […]
While much of the world’s attentions are rightfully focused on the election in Egypt, which appear set to go to a runoff between two starkly different candidates, little Lesotho is prepared to go to the polls as well in what is proving to be a tense election campaign. South Africa’s presence surrounding Lesotho means that […]
It is perhaps not surprising that South African rugby included the highest number of black Springboks in match rosters during former coach Peter de Villiers’ tenure. The recently released de Villiers was, after all, the first non-white Springbok coach (and yes, I hate defining him against what he was not, but that’s the history […]
Writing for both the Latin America blog and the Europe blog often has its advantages, and with so little attention being paid to Latin America at this past weekend’s G8 Summit at Camp David I am given some space to discuss how the global economy affects Latin America and other developing regions. The late 90s […]
South Africa will be hosting the African Cup of Nations, the biennial African football competition that will be changing from even to odd-numbered years in 2013. In many ways this is probably good news — South Africa has the best infrastructure in terms of stadiums and roads, it has the media facilities and the wherewithal […]
It was a simple statement from the State Department, almost lost in the daily flurry of transcripts, very public reactions and carefully nuanced policy papers aimed at high profile flash points in the world. The statement was from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulating the people of Algeria on their elections in mid-May. The […]
Africa is growing. Sometime two years ago the continent’s population surpassed a billion people. But this is not simply some sort of phenomenon of Malthusian proportions. For as Africa’s population grows, so too does its economy, in ways that most people probably do not realize. Howard French explains: Africa, with a population expected to roughly […]
This past Sunday’s presidential election in the Dominican Republic culminated a campaign full of color, passion, and energy. The campaign contrasted with American races in that it focused on personal differences between the two men vying for office; policy differences were minute and less relevant. I visited the DR in September last year on business, […]
U-2’s front man is an able writer on developmental economics, this much became clear when he penned the foreword to Jeff Sachs’ “The End of Poverty” in 2005. A few days ago, Bono published a column for TIME. His premise: the world is on the cusp of another natural resource boom, and it need not […]
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