The reason DR Congo continues to be characterized by a plethora of institutions, tariffs and jurisdictions in its eastern borderlands involves the international community’s flawed attempts to coerce powerful protection rackets into an ideal-type post-war state.
Since the most recent coup in April, Guinea-Bissau has continued to seek new international partners. But only time will tell if growing foreign investment in Guinea-Bissau will help it escape failed statehood.
Senegal’s new president Macy Sall and his government face multiple challenges both in terms of domestic economic and institutional development and regional political stability.
We require a decolonization of the imagination. We need to abandon the search for alternative models of development and start imagining alternatives to development. The project today is not so much to rethink development, but to un-think it.
There is an emerging synergy between cyberspace and sustainability as they converge on the global policy agenda.
The deconstructive approach is similar to the agenda propounded by post-development analysts, but if anything it is more inclusive. Development should be considered as a continual process of improvement rather than as a final goal
While the western world is likely to turn inward as its middle-classes attempt to cope with the economic squeeze, the new middle-classes in the global south are less predictable and more likely to be a force for instability. The ability of governments in the global south to respond to the changing demands of their constituents and provide competent economic governance will profoundly influence the future, both domestically and globally.
It is time the U.S. and other governments took a more nuanced approach to politics in the Horn of Africa and followed the lead of international aid agencies on the ground in dealing with local leaders and communities, rather than seeking to impose a top-down central government. The solution to famine in East Africa lies in employment-generating development. It will not offer an instant fix, but it’s a start.
In the 1970s the world faced a very important paradigm shift of an economic and administrative nature, when the previously dominant Fordist system of production organization faced serious a crisis, and was replaced by a new mode of production which has been primarily based on flexible relationships among local actors, knowledge-oriented economies, endogenous innovation, networks of local industries, and social capital.
Winner-takes-all multiparty democracy is not appropriate for Africa’s nation-states. Much of Africa today is under the control of “Vampire states”. It has become a pattern: a sitting president reluctantly holds an election; deludes himself into thinking he will win; no one would dare tell him he might lose.
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