Posts by: Alex DeWaal
The conventional explanation for South Sudan’s weak performance is that it lacked capacity. That was the premise on which international donors began major capacity-building programs immediately after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. But how public money is actually spent suggests something else.
The following figure, from the World Bank, “Public expenditures in South Sudan: [...]
Continue Reading →Introduction
A civil war ignited in South Sudan on 15 December 2013. Despite the best efforts of mediators from Ethiopia and Kenya, and pressure from the United States and others, the war has not stopped. The forces of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan (GoRSS) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and [...]
The South Sudanese people made extraordinary sacrifices to achieve independence two and a half years ago. That makes their leaders’ abject failure to build a viable South Sudan since then all the more galling. Now, a political crisis imperils the nation. But there is a silver lining: The turmoil could give South Sudan the opportunity to reset the national agenda. The country’s leaders cannot afford to squander this moment, and their first task is a sober appraisal of what has gone so disastrously wrong.
Continue Reading →My recent Oped in the New York Times on the Central African Republic described a chronically bad situation that had predictably and unnecessarily got worse. Correct and prescient analysis by the African Union had been ignored a year ago.
The major element of my argument on the French intervention in C.A.R. is the [...]
Continue Reading →This piece was originally published by The New York Times on December 18, 2013.
When France decided to send soldiers to the Central African Republic on Nov. 26, it did the right thing for the wrong reason.
France, the United Nations and the African Union dispatched some 4,000 troops soon after the French foreign [...]
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For more than twenty years, following his conviction and sentence to life imprisonment in 1964, the Apartheid government in South Africa banned pictures of Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners. This ban was so effective that in 1982, following a medical checkup in Cape Town, Mandela’s warders allowed him a stroll on a public beach, [...]
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