Recent coups in Mali and Guinea-Bissau have caused quite widespread alarm, certainly in Africa and among Africa-watchers elsewhere. In both Mali and Guinea-Bissau the existence of a lucrative cocaine trade is an element in the political equation. Guinea-Bissau has confirmed its reputation of being a so-called ‘narco-state’, in which groups financed by the drug trade [...]
The WPF sponsors an annual competition for Fletcher School students to conceptualize and organize a research seminar on the topic of their choosing, which is then paid for by the WPF. The first competition was held in the 2011-2012 academic year, and resulted in a number of very strong proposals. The winning group, composed [...]
This is why human rights need memorial practices. Human rights memorials and memorial museums, of necessity and of design, split memory in half: honoring the painful experiences of those who suffered abuse and rekindling the aspirations of a society to reject acceptance of such suffering. Memorials assert that the schism cannot be made whole again; it must be lived with or else suffered anew.
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Powerful nations still face the temptation of interpreting international law and norms in such a way that it suits their interests, and setting them aside when they don’t. I will argue that this is not only bad for international law and international security, but it is a particularly bad practice in Africa, because of the particularities of African history and contemporary African conflicts. These particularities include both the specific local details of African conflicts, which are best addressed by those in the neighbourhood who understand them best, and also the historically-grounded African distrust of outside interventions, which militates against the success of non-African initiatives.
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Left behind was a society scarred by the darkest period in Ethiopia’s modern history; a massive and systematic elimination of human lives, and essentially, one of the gravest human rights violations that has occurred in the history of the nation.
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Faced with the prospect of renewed full-scale war between the armies of Sudan and South Sudan, both the Africa Union and United Nations have issued strongly worded and well-matched resolutions, indicating a significant degree of international consensus on the way forward.
On April 24, 2012, a ministerial level meeting of the African [...]
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