Kenyans will head to the polls on Aug. 9 in a presidential election that will usher in a transition after President Uhuru Kenyatta’s two terms in office. Kenya has come a long way since 2007, when claims of electoral fraud led to serious violence. Nevertheless, the risk of instability this year is still nontrivial.
Chinese President Xi Jinping toured Wuhan last week in what amounted to a victory lap, triumphantly walking through production facilities and industrial sectors in the city that was the coronavirus pandemic’s Ground Zero when it emerged in December 2019. Xi’s visit was significant for two key, if distinct, reasons. One was to inspect “Optics Valley,” a burgeoning technology hub that symbolizes China’s ambitions to develop home-grown innovation and boost self-reliance. As with many of his visits to manufacturing facilities and incubators for critical technology sectors across China, Xi took photos with key personnel at the manufacturing sites and spoke about […]
In the days before Ukraine’s European Union candidate status was confirmed on June 23, a satirical clip from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s previous career as a comic actor began to circulate on social media. In a scene from the television series “Servant of the People”—in which Zelenskyy played a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes Ukrainian president, not long before Zelenskyy himself became president in real life—he takes a call from then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. After initially congratulating Zelenskyy’s character for Ukraine’s accession to the EU, Merkel—who remains an off-screen voice heard only through the phone—suddenly apologizes, realizing she’s made an error: […]
A year ago, in July 2021, a prominent environmentalist was killed in Kenya. Joannah Stutchbury had been a vocal critic of a development project that was about to begin construction in Kiambu forest, a protected area of more than 1,000 acres near Nairobi, the capital. A third-generation Kenyan with British ancestry, Stutchbury had been fighting against the illegal corporate takeover of these lands when she was shot dead while clearing branches outside her home. On the global stage, Kenya has a reputation as a center for wildlife conservation work, boasting 24 national parks, 15 national reserves, six marine parks and […]
Arise Ghana, a Ghanaian political pressure group, organized a two-day protest last week to express the public’s growing anxiety over economic conditions in the country, including unemployment, the rising cost of living and the depreciation of the Ghanaian currency, the cedi. The group called on the government to take “pragmatic steps to alleviate the suffering of the people of Ghana.” During the protests, demonstrators marched to the headquarters of Ghana’s Ministry of Finance, where they presented a petition calling on the ministry to “take urgent steps to ensure that inflation is brought down to the barest minimum to allow the […]
Can we predict the future of United Nations peacekeeping by looking back at its Cold War origins? Over the past two decades, the U.N. has prioritized large, complex blue helmet operations in countries like Mali and South Sudan. But these missions seem to be in slow decline. The Security Council last mandated a big blue helmet force in 2014, in the Central African Republic. The U.N.’s largest operation, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is very gradually winding down after more than two decades. In parallel, some experts on peacekeeping are taking a fresh interest in the organization’s longstanding missions […]
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health rolled back half a century of federally protected reproductive rights and reverted the authority to regulate abortion to the states. The ruling was celebrated by anti-abortion advocates and met with outrage from reproductive justice supporters. At the international level, it has been condemned by United Nations human rights officials and U.S. allies alike. It has also become a propaganda tool for U.S. enemies: The Taliban referred to the ruling to point out U.S. hypocrisy on women’s rights and argue that the sanctions against them should be […]
The pollution hanging over Mexico City is nearing its worst levels in decades, a direct result of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s energy policies. To make matters worse, those policies also conflict with the current geopolitical environment, global environmental standards and the country’s trade agreement with the United States. AMLO, as the Mexican president is known, is an energy nationalist. He believes that the oil and natural gas found both underground and offshore in Mexico should be explored, developed and refined by its state-owned energy company, Pemex, rather than foreign conglomerates, and that it should be sold directly to […]
One of the defining features of the United States is expressed by its Latin motto, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. This historical fact, that the nation was not born a solitary whole, but became one by merging its discrete parts, often hides in plain sight, even in the grammar used to describe the country: Though the states that make it up are plural, the United States is singular. And it is further obscured by an assumption, cooked into the national imaginary, that this resulting whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And yet, when the reality of […]
The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which entered into force on July 1, 2020, contains some of the most innovative trade standards in any free trade agreement to date. Negotiated under the Trump administration, USMCA passed the U.S. Congress with widespread bipartisan support, gained the approval of the AFL-CIO—the largest U.S. trade union—and could become a template in negotiations for other trade deals. Yet, since then, the U.S. has retreated from pursuing further free trade agreements, or FTAs, whether under former President Donald Trump, who was hostile to them, or his successor, President Joe Biden, who has historically viewed them more […]
International condemnation is growing against Morocco and Spain as more details emerge about the violent deaths of at least 37 migrants during an attempt last week to cross Morocco’s border with the Spanish enclave of Melilla. According to media reports, more than 2,000 people attempted to enter the enclave from the Moroccan city of Nador. Moroccan authorities initially claimed that the migrants died in a stampede or as a result of falling from the high, barbed-wire fence that separates Melilla from Moroccan territory. But human rights groups threw cold water on those claims, and video footage quickly emerged and circulated on […]
By a 5-4 vote last week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling that had established the constitutional right to abortion in 1973. As a result of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, for the first time in almost 50 years, there are no national-level protections in the U.S. for women’s right to choose, with abortion policy now fully relegated to individual states. From Louisiana to Ohio to Texas, many states have already put in place strict restrictions, if not outright bans, on abortions. Because the five votes in the majority decision to overturn Roe v. […]