In-Depth Archive

“Di war don don,” declared Sierra Leonean President Ahmad Kabbah, in Krio, at a ceremony in the capital, Freetown, in 2002: “The war is over.” The small coastal West African country of Sierra Leone had emerged limping and gasping for air from a decade of one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa, a conflict that had spilled out across the entire region from Guinea to the north and west to Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire to the east. It was a war over power and the toppling of a corrupt regime, but it became infamous for its “blood diamonds” and […]

BETHLEHEM, West Bank—Shivering at his desk inside a dilapidated office building housing the Bethlehem branch of the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s Interior Ministry, Ayman al-Azza feels trapped. More than 20 years ago, al-Azza, now 48, returned from the U.S. to the refugee camp he grew up in ready to build the promised Palestinian state. Drawn by the optimism surrounding the signing of the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, more commonly known as the Oslo Accords, tens of thousands of Palestinians living abroad did the same. Two frustrating decades later, al-Azza is ready to call it quits. He’s not […]

The uprisings beginning in late 2010, known as the Arab Spring, shook the Middle East to its foundations. Yet the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan appeared to be a virtual oasis of calm in the midst of turmoil. In a volatile neighborhood, Jordanian stability remains nothing short of remarkable. But is Jordan an oasis or a mirage? Neither characterization seems entirely accurate: Jordan’s stability and security are not figments of the imagination, especially considering the revolutions, civil wars and endemic terrorism that seem to have afflicted most of the country’s neighbors. Yet the calm may not be sustainable, as Jordan confronts […]

In September 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court ruled that Juliana Deguis Pierre, who was born in the country to Haitian parents in 1984 and registered as Dominican at birth under Dominican law in effect at the time, should be retroactively deprived of Dominican nationality due to her parents’ migratory status. The decision touched off a political and humanitarian crisis that stretches beyond the island nation’s borders and deep into its political, economic and social history. By judicial fiat, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of undocumented individuals like Pierre were definitively stripped of Dominican nationality, with no immediate indication […]

On Dec. 16, 2014, seven gunmen broke into a school in a high-security zone in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar, shooting indiscriminately into crowds of children, before splitting up and going room by room to execute dozens more. Armed with explosives, suicide jackets, automatic rifles and pistols, these men cornered their targets in their classrooms, setting one teacher who attempted to resist on fire as a lesson to the rest. Once in the school’s auditorium, they first shot and killed all those attempting to escape, and then went row by row to execute those who were left. Many were […]