Briefing Archive

On July 13, with a handshake and a smile, long-ruling President Desi Bouterse handed over the reins of power in Suriname to Chan Santokhi, a former police chief who has tenaciously pursued mass murder charges against Bouterse for the last 15 years. “It won’t be an easy job,” said Bouterse, who had a parting trick to play on his rival. When Santokhi turned up to work the following week, he found his new office stripped of its IT equipment. Aside from procuring some new phones and computers, Santokhi faces three main challenges in governing this former Dutch colony on the […]

Black Lives Matter protests have erupted in cities across Europe in recent weeks, in solidarity with the uprisings in the United States following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May. Some European demonstrators have called on their governments to more formally acknowledge the connections between the slave trade and colonialism and racism in their countries today. In Europe’s two largest former colonial powers, France and the United Kingdom, there are signs that protests are eroding the popular indifference toward their history. While France and the U.K. have never apologized for their colonial past, they have […]

The British government has been vocal about the issue of human rights in China in recent weeks. It recently delivered a joint statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council, on behalf of 27 countries, on abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. And Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has strongly criticized Beijing for imposing sweeping national security legislation that severely undermines the autonomy of Hong Kong, which the Chinese government promised to respect in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. Raab specifically called out Beijing for violating its international legal obligations, while announcing that the U.K. would not shirk from its “historic […]

Earlier this month, a prominent researcher and security expert in Iraq, who was close to the new prime minister and to Western governments, was gunned down outside his home in Baghdad. While the identify of his assailants remains unknown, Hisham al-Hashimi had many enemies, given his history of speaking out against the Islamic State and against Iraq’s powerful Shiite militias. In the weeks leading up to his murder, he told friends and relatives that he had received serious threats from both Sunni and Shiite extremists. His associates, as well as Iraqi government officials, have focused in particular on Kataib Hezbollah, […]

Will the next U.S. president have any incentive to revive the Iran nuclear deal? The status of the agreement has steadily eroded since the U.S. unilaterally pulled out of it in May 2018 and subsequently reimposed punishing economic sanctions on Iran and any entities that do business with it. And Iran’s gradual and escalating breaches of the limits the deal imposed on its uranium enrichment program have led many to conclude that the clock is running out on the value of the deal. Skeptics of the deal’s chances clearly have the stronger argument at present, whether they ascribe the original […]

The global clout of OPEC, never one of the world’s most admired institutions, reached a nadir in April when a dispute between Saudi Arabia and Russia triggered a price war just as global oil demand was collapsing due to the coronavirus pandemic. Three months later, the cartel has re-emerged as a model of transnational cooperation and collective sacrifice, implementing historic production cuts in an effort to stabilize prices. Oil markets have noticed. After cratering below $20 a barrel in April, Brent crude, the international benchmark price, has hovered between $42 and $45 so far this month, even as demand remains […]

At the opening of the World Health Assembly in mid-May, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced his country would spend $2 billion over two years to help other countries fight the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, had already announced the U.S. would halt funding to the World Health Organization. His administration began the process of withdrawing from the WHO in early July. A week after Xi’s announcement, a 14-person medical team from China arrived in Tajikistan, which has had over 7,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 56 deaths. The Chinese squad brought 9 tons of medical equipment, bringing its total […]

Polish President Andrzej Duda narrowly won a second term in a hotly contested runoff election earlier this month, opening the door for the ruling right-wing populist Law and Justice party, known as PiS for its Polish initials, to continue cementing its power. But the vote, which was postponed from May due to the coronavirus pandemic, also illustrated the depth of the political divide in Polish society. On one side, a largely rural and older cohort of conservative voters handed Duda a narrow victory with 51 percent. His challenger, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, took the remaining 49 percent, mostly from metropolitan […]

“J’étouffe!”—I’m suffocating! Cedric Chouviat’s plea was repeated seven times as four French police officers sought to subdue him with a chokehold in early January, near the Quai Branly, which runs along the Seine River in central Paris. Chouviat, a 42-year-old father of five who worked as a deliveryman, went into cardiac arrest and died two days later. An autopsy revealed that his larynx had been crushed. His cry echoed that of Eric Garner, who also died after being put in a chokehold by a New York City police officer in 2014. A variation of the haunting refrain was heard in […]

Foreign ministers from China and the Arab world held their ninth meeting of the biennial China-Arab States Cooperation Forum earlier this month, at which they pledged to “deepen cooperation in various fields, and embrace new prospects in building a China-Arab community with a shared future,” according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. The meeting is sure to renew debates over the nature of Chinese influence in Gulf Arab states. China hawks in the United States often overemphasize China’s economic power in the region by focusing on the threats posed by companies like the telecommunications giant Huawei or BGI Group, a […]

The new coronavirus field hospital, in a Cairo convention center, has enough space for 4,000 beds. Like so many things in Egypt, it was built by the armed forces. When President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had once described the virus’s trajectory in Egypt as “reassuring,” toured its vast halls in late June, he didn’t look like he was worried about a surge of COVID-19 patients. Instead, flanked as usual by men in army fatigues, Sisi turned the hospital into another stage to project his authority. But after calling any and all critics of his government’s handling of the pandemic “enemies […]

As the coronavirus pandemic takes a terrible toll across Latin America, with over 3.5 million cases and nearly 150,000 deaths, the region is increasingly facing a financial and humanitarian emergency. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, GDP is forecast to contract by 9.3 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund—the region’s largest economic contraction on record, and far worse than the outlook for African and Asian economies. The United Nations expects the value of South America’s exports to fall by nearly a fifth this year due to shrinking international demand and weaker commodity prices. Foreign investment has also […]

As Americans have risen up in protest against police brutality, attention has understandably focused on the racist incidents of police killing Black Americans and their implications. How these outrages have come to light, however, remains underappreciated. They might never have been exposed without new technologies like smart phones and social media, whose use for accountability is transforming human rights. Until recently, documenting human rights abuses was a time-consuming and often imprecise activity. As a law student in the early 1990s, I worked on a United Nations project, led by the international legal scholar M. Cherif Bassiouni, to document war crimes […]

This time last year, countries in East Africa were leading the continent in economic growth. Now, much of that progress is at risk as the region faces a dangerous triple threat: torrential rain and flooding, voracious swarms of locusts and the coronavirus pandemic. The three crises are compounding each other’s impacts. Border closures that were put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19 have strained the supply of pesticides and other equipment to fight the locusts that have ravaged the region for months now. Food supplies that were already under siege from the pests have been further devastated by […]

The coronavirus pandemic has inspired a great deal of scientific research into developing a vaccine for COVID-19. The process is moving much faster than normal, with more than 155 vaccine candidates currently being developed, 23 of which are already in human trials. Vaccines can take years or even decades to develop and distribute, but the Trump administration is pushing to have one ready by early next year. Developing a vaccine is one thing, but making it available to people is another issue altogether—one that involves thorny questions of ethics, intellectual property rights, global trade and recouping research costs. This is […]

In April, the Kyrgyz news outlet Kloop posted a video on YouTube showing a new app called STOP COVID-19. Developed by the government of Kyrgyzstan, it allows the authorities to follow the whereabouts of those exposed to the coronavirus. The video shows the movements of two individuals being tracked by combining their digital profiles and phone locations with their government-issued IDs. In theory, STOP COVID-19 is a valuable tool in the government’s efforts to track and trace confirmed or suspected coronavirus patients. But the app goes much further than most Kyrgyz citizens would likely be comfortable with. In addition to […]

Shelby Rose, a correspondent for KATV news, was in the middle of a live broadcast in Little Rock, Arkansas, when someone in the crowd smashed an object on her head. It was May 30, less than a week after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and the first night of protests against the incident in Little Rock. Rose and her crew had set up near the state capitol. She recounted that they were swarmed by angry people who screamed at them. “I didn’t understand,” Rose said. “It was the first night of protests, so […]