Africa Policy Journal

Thanks to all those who attended Monday’s discussion with Glen Mpani. Glen spoke on his views of the military coup in Zimbabwe, countries’ responses, and the impact on democracy. The talk was hosted by the Harvard African Law Association (HALA) and moderated by Priyanka Naidoo who serves as HALA’s Secretary and as the APJ’s Interview Editor.

In recent years, the first thing that normally comes to mind when talking about food crises is climate change.  Indeed, “given our failure to act on greenhouse gases,” as Paul Krugman has warned, “there will be much more, and much worse, to come.”[1]  But there is another worrying trend in the disruption of food production.  […]

On the evening of May 12, 2008, armed with machetes and clubs, neighbor turned against neighbor in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township. Gangs of young men raped and murdered black foreigners. Their belongings were looted and scattered in the streets. During these pogroms, local disdain for the makwerekwere, the foreigners, was clear. What began in Alexandra township […]

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has long been under fire for almost exclusively selecting and prosecuting cases on the African continent. Critics of the only permanent criminal tribunal of its kind have pointed to atrocities committed in Iraq, Argentina, or Ukraine as evidence that the ICC is not so much an impartial body, holding governments […]

The average person can turn on the nightly news any day and see stories of terrifying acts—and clear crimes—ranging from the bombing of children in Syria to the massacre of Tamils in Sri Lanka. But if one were to refer only to the cases brought by the International Criminal Court (ICC), they would be left […]

The withdrawal of Burundi, Gambia and South Africa from the International Criminal Court (ICC) has reignited an old discussion: whether the Court unfairly targets African states and citizens for prosecutions. The ‘African bias’ critique adopts different forms, ranging from neo-colonialist (“the Court seeks to control African politics through ICC investigations and prosecutions”) to realist (“the […]

The following article contains excerpts from an interview that was conducted on October 30, 2016 by APJ staff member, Abdul Carrupt. Abdul: Could you tell us a bit about yourself and where you grew up? Ahlijah: I’m from Ghana but I was born in Nairobi, Kenya where I spent the first few years of my […]

Innovation is now at the epicentre of Angola’s drive towards economic diversification. Innovators build business from the ground-up; creating new job opportunities and contributing to a diverse, healthy supply chain. It’s a model that made America the world’s biggest economy and has sustained the developed economies through good times and bad. Indicative of how important […]

In the past two years, the pace of economic growth in Africa has been decelerating while the political space for democratic contestation has been shrinking. Combined, they can be considered to be major drivers behind the intensifying levels of social unrest throughout the continent. While weaker economic expansion can be principally attributed to global headwinds […]

Before the balkanization of the African continent into arbitrary pieces, it was one vast space made up of different cultures and identities. The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885 resulted in random demarcations being drawn across the continent to appease the European countries’ colonial interests. The arbitrary lines of yesteryears currently serve as the borders […]

I recently stumbled upon an argument on Facebook that was started by the claim that, from a GDP perspective, Africa was irrelevant on the global scene. It wasn’t an afro-pessimistic jab but a call to action for those who, having fallen under the illusory spell of the Africa Rising narrative, refuse to acknowledge that the […]

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) appears on the brink of another major crisis, just as the country begins to recover from successive decades of war. Presidential elections scheduled for November 2016 look increasingly likely to be postponed by the Congolese government and tensions are fast on the rise. The authorities have cracked down on […]