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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By Aditya Sarkar and Tanya Aggarwal. The severity of the second wave of the pandemic in India is not an accident. It is the direct consequence of Mr. Modi’s deliberate and careful hollowing out of India’s institutions and centralization of power, unwillingness to listen to contradictory viewpoints, and efforts to win elections, no matter what the human cost. …Irrespective of what happens to Mr. Modi, the scale of this tragedy means that we, the people of India, will have to account for its personal and political costs in the years to come. Perhaps in ways we do not yet understand.
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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 […]
Continue Reading →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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