Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Five years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. public seems to understand that the fight against terrorism is a struggle that’s here to stay. The challenge for government officials is to manage the threat without exacerbating it, or allowing terrorism to monopolize the time and resources at the expense of other compelling public policy needs. Most people get that—that is, until the next attack happens and the second-guessing starts. It was five years ago this week that the U.S. launched a successful operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, targeting the leader of al-Qaida. Bin Laden was killed in the […]

It is always a risk to claim that the tide may be turning in India-Pakistan relations, where contentious security and political concerns have famously trumped avenues for collaboration time and time again. It is prudent, then, to approach last week’s meeting between India and Pakistan’s foreign secretaries with a degree of caution. It is far too early at this stage to know the actual significance of this brief meeting. But even if it did not lead to any breakthroughs, the meeting itself should not be ignored. It was an outcome, and a reflection, of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s perseverance […]

There will be a major crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) before the end of 2016, and nobody really knows what to do about it. This is neither an alarmist nor even a particularly contentious statement. Diplomats, United Nations officials and independent analysts agree that trouble is looming over the DRC’s presidential election, which is supposed to take place in November. The constitution bars the sitting president, Joseph Kabila, from running for a third term. However, almost all observers believe he intends to cling onto power, potentially unleashing serious violence. Nobody can predict exactly how ugly this could […]

Earlier this year, the U.S. Congress passed the Electrify Africa Act, ensuring the continuation of U.S. President Barack Obama’s “Power Africa” initiative, which aims to expand power-generation capabilities across the continent. In an email interview, Ilmi Granoff, a senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute, discussed the state of Power Africa and power generation in Africa. WPR: Broadly speaking, what are the current power-generation capabilities of sub-Saharan Africa, and where are the biggest shortfalls? Ilmi Granoff: The entire installed capacity of sub-Saharan Africa is about 76 gigawatts (GW). The shortfalls are enormous: South Africa has 48 of those 76 […]

The 13th Summit of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) wrapped up in Istanbul last month, chaired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The summit was notable for the fact that it attracted over 30 heads of state, the highest number in the OIC’s nearly 50-year history. As usual, the OIC’s final resolution reflects a hodgepodge of bilateral, regional and global issues of interest to the Muslim ummah, or global community. This included pledges to fight Islamophobia, promote economic and scientific cooperation, combat terrorism, and deal with long-standing territorial conflicts in Israel-Palestine, Cyprus, Jammu-Kashmir and Nagorno-Karabakh, among others. But despite […]