Global Affairs

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference ended in failure today. Never mind the predictable rhetoric from several leaders who welcomed the tepid accord signed after two weeks of intense, acrimonious and chaotic negotiations.  read more »

Whether it is used to described rolling blackouts or civil wars, the catchphrase ‘Africa wins again' remains a favourite amongst naysayers naturalising the continent as a place where tragedies symbolise the realisation of Africa's innate ‘destiny' - to self-destruct.

ARMS AND ENERGY

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Challenging the imperialist dimensions of capitalism. Capitalism is in crisis, Samir Amin writes in Pambazuka News, creating new opportunities to challenge its imperialist dimensions.  read more »

Last Friday, October 30, the internet opened a new chapter in its long march towards internationalization. It entered a new era of multilingual globalization. Up to now, web addresses could only be displayed using Latin characters. This increasingly makes little sense as more than half of the world's 1.6 billion internet users employ non-Latin scripts including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, and Russian.

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The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama has provoked a strange storm of controversy. I say strange because the protagonists in the debate--the advocates, ambivalents, and antagonists of President Obama's unexpected award--seem to read too much into the award. As shown by their partisan passions they seem, despite their apparent disagreement, to invest the prize with a measure of worldly greatness that is simply untenable.

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 I might be the only African who is getting a little tired of the Obama phenomenon. And I might be the only one who was relieved that Chicago didn't win the bid for the 2016 Olympics. And I might be the only one who was pleasantly surprised that Chicago lost in the first round.

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As is common with most international gatherings, the G20 Summit which ended in Pittsburgh last Friday was long on symbolism and short on substance.  read more »

Tomorrow, September 21, the fourth round of voting will take place to elect the new Director General of UNESCO. Elections to leadership positions in UN agencies and other international organizations are ritualized performances in which nations and regions jockey for global recognition and sometimes power. It is often more about the symbolism of global rankings rather than substantive global power, for the latter continues to cohere around the complexes of military-industrial production and projection.

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The principle of infinite accumulation, which defines capitalism as synonymous with exponential growth, and the latter, like cancer, results in death. John Stuart Mill, who understood this, imagined that a 'stationary state' would put an end to this irrational process. John Maynard Keynes shared this optimism of the Reason. But neither was equipped to understand how the necessary overcoming of capitalism could come about.  read more »

While much of the world including Africa is understandably preoccupied by the current global economic recession, a development of potentially more lasting consequences is taking place behind the radar of public concern and scrutiny. A global land grab is underway in which rich countries and large corporations are buying up large tracts of land in poorer countries to secure food and biofuel supplies for the rich countries and multinational corporations.

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A little over a year ago I received an email with the subject line "Ok I wonder why you call yourself ‘black' and ‘African'" from a self-described longtime New African reader.  Even if subsequent emails have been less direct in their articulation of the same underlying sentiment, they all point in a similar direction: some people are confused about my racial background and about the way I racially identify myself.  Their need to seek clarification suggests that being able to label me is important to the way in which they understand the conten  read more »

All too often, the underlying ideas that frame public discourse and even policy remain unexamined. One of the most powerful of such ideas is the notion of civil society, which enjoyed particular prominence at the height of the new wave of democratization in the 1990s and early 2000s across much of the world including Africa. Civil society was generally seen as the repository of all that was positive and possible for Africa, which the heinous state had thwarted through its authoritarian inflexibilities, inefficiencies and instabilities.

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The African Competitiveness Report was released earlier this month preceding the official opening of the World Economic Forum on Africa held in Cape Town, June 10-12. Jointly produced by the African Development Bank, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum, the report discusses the short- and long-term challenges facing African economies including the current global economic crisis, as well as the successes that have been registered in recent years and how they can be spread and deepened.

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The current crisis in Iran is, quite predictably, eliciting conflicting and often contradictory commentaries in the media and reactions from governments around the world. As is often the case with charged political events, the prevailing opinions and responses usually reflect existing ideological and political predispositions and tell us as much about what is going in Iran as what the protagonists would like to see happen.

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On its thirtieth anniversary the Islamic Republic of Iran has reached a significant crossroads. After validating the questionable re-election of President Ahmadinejad on June 12^th, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has hesitantly but expediently instructed the Guardian Council to assess the allegations of voting irregularities and fraud during Iran's tenth presidential election.  read more »

Statement by Professor Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, United Nations Human Rights Council, Geneva, 3 June 2009

Mr President, distinguished delegates,

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Anyone who regularly reads the academic press from The Chronicle of Higher Education to the trade books on universities is sometimes overwhelmed by a sense of crisis gripping institutions of higher learning. Over the past few months The Chronicle has been full of grim stories about the challenges facing American universities and colleges.  read more »

Western civilisation has been going through a deepening crisis over the last 120 years - to be precise since around mid-1880s when serious colonisation began of the African continent as a desperate attempt to get out of the crisis created by the limits to growth within Europe. The present systemic crisis - whose most recent manifestations are the global financial crisis and the ecological crisis - is only its latest manifestation. Western civilisation's crisis is deeper than most people realise or willing to acknowledge.

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The G20 Summit is now over. It promised so much, but delivered so little. It offered a generational, even centennial, opportunity to restructure the global economy that has been in free fall since last September following the collapse of Wall Street. At the end some hailed the Summit for its unexpected "substantive" achievements but others were less impressed noting that it fell far short of the "global new deal" President Obama had called for.  read more »

The Internet has done wonders for higher education. The incorporation of information technologies into the activities of teaching, research, and publication has revolutionized knowledge production and dissemination. Online education helps remove the spatiotemporal constraints that limit access for nontraditional students, promote student interaction and cooperative learning, pedagogical experimentation, collaborative research, and transnational exchanges.  read more »