From the monthly archives: March 2019

My book Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019) has just been published and I am launching a three part blog series introducing  the main themes of the volume. In this post, I begin with the two questions that prompted the research behind the book.

The first emerged out […]

Continue Reading

In South Sudan’s political marketplace, a bad peace deal—or a badly-implemented peace deal—can be as bad as no deal at all. A collapsing peace deal has the potential of unleashing exceptionally severe violence.

According to the ‘do no harm’ precept, those who design peace agreements and steer their implementation, should not allow optimism of the […]

Continue Reading

Just over a year ago, I wrote an article, ‘Who is arming the Yemen war? (And is anyone planning to stop)’, surveying arms supplies to the conflict parties. This article updates the information with the latest available data, including the most recent edition of the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, released on Monday 11 March.

Continue Reading

In March 1990, Africa Watch (the Africa division of Human Rights Watch) published a report on Sudan entitled Denying ‘The Honor of Living,’ Sudan: A Human Rights Disaster. Chapter 4 was entitled ‘Starvation as a Weapon of War’. It was the first HRW report to document links between human rights violations and the […]

Continue Reading

The Conflict and Research Programme at the London School of Economics, of which WPF is a partner, has just published a new South Sudan Policy Memo, “The Perils of Payroll Peace.”

South Sudan’s peace is structured to create material incentives for political elites and soldiers to stick to the agreement. But it also […]

Continue Reading

Monuments to Famine

On March 4, 2019 By

Since 1995, more than a hundred memorials to the Irish famine have been erected, from St Stephen’s Green in Dublin to sites in Sydney and Toronto. There are modest memorials in Liverpool and Cardiff – but nothing in London. The closest Britain has come to an apology was in 1997, when Tony Blair acknowledged the ‘deep scars’ of the famine. But the famines in India and Ireland are not yet part of our national story. A public monument, in White- hall, opposite the Treasury, or in St James’s Park, near the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, would be a first step – one we could take actively, rather than prevaricating until apologies are demanded by formerly colonised peoples. The memorial should leave space available to inscribe the names of famines in which British government complicity might come to play a part. ‘Yemen’ will be the first to be added.

Continue Reading