Currently viewing the tag: "political marketplace"

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 […]

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On the anniversary of Meles Zenawi’s death six years ago, the WPF has published a new Occasional Paper, “The Future of Ethiopia: Developmental State or Political Marketplace?” by Alex de Waal. In it, de Waal notes that “Today’s changes in Ethiopia are rapid, confusing and disruptive. They promise openness and democratization, but also contain perils. Like many […]

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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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The cultural critic Mark Fisher writes, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’.[i] He continues:

“Once, dystopian films and novels were extensions of such acts of imagination—the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways […]

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Is there an Islamic path to state-building? Historically, Islam has provided many of the tools needed by rulers looking to institutionalize their authority: a lawbook that extends to regulating commerce and diplomacy, a shared language, and an international cadre of trained jurists and administrators.

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As my framework of the “political marketplace” becomes more widely referenced among people who study Africa and the Middle East, I am increasingly asked, “doesn’t it apply in the United States as well?”

Since January, we have been finding out. The lens of transactional politics works remarkably well for understanding the conduct of the current […]

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