Africa

This article is bring published in collaboration with Pangyrus BY BOYAH J. FARAH I stood in the fourth-floor lounge at Cambridge Innovation Center, my gaze switching back and forth between the innovators—who were drinking their morning coffees and teas—and the Syrian refugees on the large flat-screen TV. While the news watchers seemed sympathetic, I knew […]

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.  […]

BY CLAIRE CHAUMONT “From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us.” The Plague, A. Camus, 1947[1] On 24 January 2014, the head of Meliandou health post, a sparsely populated village in Guinea, West Africa, informed district health officials of five cases of an unknown infectious disease characterized […]

BY MARTA MILKOWSKA “This technology will save millions of patients!” This was the elated comment from the head of a tuberculosis health facility in Lesotho, in response to my prototype of a mobile phone application. Last summer, I was exploring the value of machine learning in predicting patients’ default rates in HIV and tuberculosis treatment […]

Youth unemployment is a major driver of radicalization in Tunisia, which supplies more fighters to Syria and Iraq than any other country.

BY CHRISTIAN ASANTE African societies have made enormous strides with respect to women’s rights and empowerment. Mother’s Day is widely recognized and celebrated in many parts of Africa.  On that holiday, people will call and send text messages to their mothers; hashtags will trend; and politicians, governments and gender ministries will issue press statements praising […]

Former Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki spoke about human rights, Tunisian democracy, and US support for Middle East dictatorships.

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 […]

Water is the cornerstone of human life – but what happens to countries when they start running out of “blue gold”?