Ever since 1979, Iran has pursued its interests in the Horn of Africa. To Tehran, this volatile and impoverished part of Africa has represented a region where it could gain strategic depth and undermine agendas of countries seeking to weaken and isolate the Islamic Republic.
Throughout the Sahel, international borders are porous, poverty rates are high, and there is a history of violent conflict making social fabrics acutely fragile.
China and India have never been friendly neighbors. The laws of geopolitics set the two Asian giants against one another. In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s confrontation with the US and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitions for a powerful and global India have inflamed...
With border closures, supply chain interruptions and loss of income due to lockdowns caused by COVID-19, the number of people facing acute hunger around the world is estimated to rise from 135 million to 265 million this year. This is particularly the case in sub-Saharan Africa, where before the...
What happens when Westerners discover and acknowledge a series of identifiable facts? According to Western logic, that body of knowledge puts them in a position to create the tools that will enable them to solve problems. Those tools fall into two broad categories: methods and technology. The...
My Kenyan friends have long asked me to write on their country. After much hesitation, I am penning my impressions. At the outset, readers must know that I am no expert on Kenya. So, they must take everything I write with a fistful if not a pinch of salt. The most striking impression I have of...
Democracy is in crisis across the globe. The problem of understanding what “the people” want or whose authority they will accept has become a dilemma for both the new democracies with their fragile economies that emerged in the period of European decolonization following World War II and the...
The violation of human rights across the African continent began as a struggle for self-rule in the mid-20th century. Except for Liberia, which European countries assumed was an American colony, and Ethiopia, which was never colonized due to Haile Selassie’s resistance to Italian invasion,...
The African continent is home to 54 countries, more than 1.2 billion people and around 2,000 languages. Its challenges and success stories are as diverse as the breadth of its landmass. In terms of GDP growth, Africa is the world’s second fastest-developing region. A 2018 report by the Overseas...
Central Africans have good reason to be skeptical about the peace process. This week will start the next, and possibly final, round of an African Union-led peace dialogue on the Central African Republic (CAR) held in Khartoum. The talks will bring together the CAR government of the 14 armed...
