Human Security Archive

In late March, as many governments were enforcing lockdowns and restrictions on movement to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro posted a series of videos to social media that showed him strolling around a crowded marketplace near Brasilia. In one clip, Bolsonaro questioned the quarantine measures that were being implemented by local and regional officials in Brazil, which now has the second-worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the Western Hemisphere, with more than 87,000 confirmed cases and 6,000 deaths. He also touted the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, despite a lack of scientific evidence that it […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Zimbabwe was facing a food security crisis even before the coronavirus pandemic began, but a lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19 has exacerbated the country’s economic woes and further restricted the food supply. Now more than half the country’s 15 million people are in need of food assistance. The World Food Program was already assisting 3.5 million Zimbabweans before the coronavirus struck. Cyclical periods of drought and flooding have interrupted domestic food production, while hyperinflation, fueled by the government’s reintroduction of […]

Hundreds of thousands of Afghan migrants have returned home from neighboring Iran in recent months, fleeing one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. Iran has more than 94,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with a death toll of 6,000, although the real figures are likely higher. The exodus has raised concerns of an impending spike in coronavirus cases in Afghanistan. In an email interview with WPR, Annalisa Perteghella, a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Center at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, discusses the high risk of coronavirus transmission in Afghanistan and the impact the pandemic […]