Once African and Asian leaders looked towards each other for guidance. What possibilities can a renewed cross-continental solidarity offer?
Parliament’s failure to enact laws to bring women into elected national leadership has only exposed its soft underbelly, revealing a combination of narcissism and incompetence.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s ordeal has significantly tarnished the image of Western governance, both in terms of the information that Assange compiled and systematically distributed, and also in the way he is being treated for having done so. His case forces all onlookers to abandon any illusions they may have had about the true nature of Western power.
The wealthy elite know that banning elections wholesale would be suicidal. It is for this reason that they use different forms of low-level, extralegal violence against ordinary people to produce the elections results that they want, or to negotiate power with each other at our expense.
Voter suppression, a biased Supreme Court and foreign interference could help Trump win the 2020 election. However, a groundswell of anger among American youth might just tip the scales towards Biden. But with Trump having been infected with the coronavirus, it is hard to tell what November 3rd will bring.
Brutal incarceration has the primary means by which the Kenyan state has engaged with its citizens. Without fundamentally reforming and rebuilding the logic of the state, changing how it deals with Kenyans will be impossible.
Malawi can alleviate poverty and become a model for development and democracy by investing in and improving the quality of human capital, the quality of infrastructure, and the quality of institutions.
Kenyan prisons today carry the DNA of their forebears – the colonial prisons and Mau Mau detention camps. They are about brutalising prisoners into submission and scaring the rest of society into compliance with the state. And like their colonial predecessors, they are also sites of forced labour.
Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Western Kenya, Mario Schmidt argues that local interpretations of Give Directly’s unconditional cash transfer program unmask how the NGO’s ‘myth of unconditionality’ obscures structural inequalities of the development aid sector. Schmidt argues that in order to tackle these structural inequalities, cash transfers should be ‘ungifted’ and viewed as debts repaid and not as gifts offered.
NGOs have been notably absent in the fight against COVID-19, despite claims they exist solely to ensure accountability and transparency by government.
