Posts by: Aditya Sarkar

From the Nigerian people to scholars, and even Nigerian government officials, the Nigerian government is often described as an elite cartel focused on dividing up the immense oil spoils. Oil has historically accounted for 65 – 85 percent of government revenues, but what happens when the oil money dries up?

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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 […]

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Aditya Sarkar & Alex de Waal

Ethiopia and Sudan share a common border, the Blue Nile, and political and economic challenges ranging from separatism to chronic food insecurity. Both states nearly collapsed at the cusp of the 1990s. Yet they are rarely compared in academic or policy literature — despite a thought-provoking contrast in their […]

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In the countries where the Conflict Research Programme conducts research, democracy activists and external actors (we use the catch-all term ‘policymaker’ in this blog) usually have multiple goals. They want to end armed conflict, build governance institutions (once conflict ends), reform the security sector, and promote democracy and justice. Since these goals are extremely […]

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What causes violent conflict? And how can it be prevented in an interdependent world? These are the key questions taken up in the new World Bank – United Nations report: Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict. These questions are not new, of course, and a huge amount has been written on […]

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WPF’s researcher, Aditya Sarkar,  published a piece with Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, Loren Landau, and Romola Sanyal in Citiscope on April 25, 2017. We re-print it below.

In October, world leaders gathered in Quito to officially adopt the 20-year road map on sustainable urban development known as the New Urban Agenda. Notably, that document […]

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