Many of the world’s conflicts are in places where institutions have failed and violent transactional politics rules. Often, the battlefield is only the tactical arena—what counts strategically is the material resources on which the belligerents can call. Among those material resources, what matters most are political funds—the money that can be used to buy political […]
Continue Reading →Sudan’s civil war is senseless but was forseeable. The prospect of street fighting in the national capital, comparable to Mogadishu in 1991 or Tripoli in 2012, was too awful to contemplate, especially given the reputation of the metropolitan Sudanese for restraint within their heartland. But any frank analysis of the logic of Sudanese politics pointed […]
Continue Reading →A shift from a political economy predicated on the distribution of oil revenues to one based on the apportionment of positions and licenses has intensified inequality in South Sudan and enabled continued elite domination.
Continue Reading →Illicit financial flows (IFFs) in Africa (and indeed, elsewhere) are more than the corrupt syphoning of off poor countries’ wealth. They are a cycle of extraction and investment. There’s a reverse flow of political funds. Both flows are extraordinarily hard to measure.
IFFs have received a great deal of policy attention, and rightly so. In […]
Continue Reading →Alex de Waal
“Re-introducing the Political Marketplace to Ethiopia” is available in both English and Amharic (see below).
Re-introducing the Political Marketplace to Ethiopia
I first began developing the concept of a ‘political marketplace’ fifteen years ago. I argued that the dominant concepts of statebuilding—the international project of creating governmental […]
Continue Reading →by Jared Miller
A manmade humanitarian crisis is a tragedy, but for some, it is also a lucrative opportunity. As the crisis deepens prompting massive security and humanitarian spending, along with the increasing cost of rebuilding, for certain individuals, the ensuing crisis economy becomes more lucrative than the peacetime economy. While some benefit, millions suffer. […]
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