Aid and Development Archive

Violence has enveloped Burundi since last April, when protests broke out following President Pierre Nkurunziza’s controversial announcement that he would run for a third term, despite a constitutional two-term limit. On Tuesday, after meeting with Nkurunziza in the capital, Bujumbura, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that Nkurunziza had agreed to hold talks with the opposition. Nkurunziza also said that he would release 2,000 people detained by authorities amid the unrest. The president’s decision last year to run again was met with outcries from Burundi’s opposition, which called the move unconstitutional. In May, rogue military officers attempted a coup, which the […]

It is difficult to see how the United Nations can get through 2016 without taking the blame for one or more major catastrophes. Its latest efforts to make peace in Syria have gone off the rails. The Security Council is fretting about the risks of mass violence in Burundi. U.N. peacekeeping operations have had a shaky start to the year. Terrorists have kept up attacks on peacekeepers in Mali. Last week, violence in a U.N. camp in South Sudan spiraled out of control, claiming at least 18 lives. It may just be a matter of time before a similar incident […]

On Thursday, the White House announced that President Barack Obama will visit Cuba next month, the first trip there by an American president since 1928. Obama will meet with Cuban President Raul Castro and members of civil society, including dissidents who have criticized Cuba’s human rights record. U.S.-Cuba relations began to thaw in December 2014, when Obama and Castro announced the launch of a normalization process that would break decades of hostility. Last April, the Obama administration removed Cuba from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism List, and in July, the Cuban flag was raised over the embassy in Washington […]

For more than six decades following India’s independence in 1947, urbanization remained an afterthought for policymakers, who hardly recognized the positive relationship between urban expansion and economic development. It wasn’t until 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi became India’s youngest prime minister and brought with him a new, young brigade of leaders, that those in power began to acknowledge that urbanization could serve India’s economy. Gandhi’s initiatives on urbanization, while new, were nonetheless hesitant. Through the 1990s and the early 2000s, analysts increasingly spoke of India’s “urban turn” and hinted at the beginnings of a serious investment in urban infrastructure and connectivity. […]

Editor’s note: This article is one of three briefings on China’s rise and its implications for U.S. regional and global interests, coinciding with an upcoming panel, in collaboration with WPR, at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs on Feb. 17-19 in St. Petersburg, Florida. The second, on China’s naval modernization, will appear Wednesday; the third, on China’s cyber strategy, will appear Friday. Over the course of the past decade, China has been steadily laying the foundation of an international financial and monetary system centered on the yuan. While progress was initially slow, it picked up considerable steam in the […]

The global weather event known as El Niño has been blamed for droughts in Central America and northern South America and record-breaking floods in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. But some scientists warn that the worst could be yet to come. El Niño poses major challenges for Latin America’s governments, some of which are in the midst of economic and political crises. The weather phenomenon is also testing their ability to face the growing threat of climate change, now and in the future. Scientists believe that El Niño, a warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean about once every decade […]