Aid and Development Archive

A concerted effort to portray the protests in Ukraine as a pivotal moment pitting the Euro-Atlantic community against a resurgent Russia has not gained much traction among the American public in general or the Obama administration in particular. Washington apparently has little interest in matching the Russian “bid” for Ukraine, despite dire warnings that a failure to do so will imperil the security of the Western world. Some of this may be due to “revolution fatigue” engendered after a decade of watching the promise of popular uprisings to usher in new eras of freedom, democracy and pro-American governments fade away. […]

Among the most damning criticisms of human rights law is that when it is needed most, it is nearly impossible to enforce. To understand how this is so, think about someone being detained and beaten by police officers in a police station. This probably happens to thousands of people every day all around the world, and it is a very simple matter in international law. It’s called torture, and it is illegal. Always. That’s the theory, anyway. When a system of law is enforceable in practice, it should be possible to turn a clear legal right into something actionable—say, a […]

Last month, the governments of Kenya and Somalia signed a tripartite agreement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) agreeing in principle to begin working toward the return of the half-million Somali refugees living in Kenya—mostly in refugee camps—to their country of origin. This agreement has caused a great deal of anxiety among the Somali population, particularly those living in Kenya, as many people feel that it is premature to begin to repatriate people to a country that is still at war with itself and where even the most basic services and livelihood prospects are lacking. It is […]

This summer in Jordan, I met some of the individuals behind the often anonymous news accounts of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war. In Zaatari refugee camp, I met an accountant who carried his six-day-old daughter across the border in the dead of night after his house was destroyed, and a widow who fled with little more than $11 in her pocket after her husband died. And in a hospital in Amman, I met refugees recovering from torture so brutal that even the healing wounds were painful to look at. Despite the horrors they endured, all the Syrian refugees I met […]