Aid and Development Archive

Video from North Korean state TV shows Red Cross distributing aid to the flood-ravaged countryside. World News Videos by NewsLook

Last week, Hillary Clinton began what is likely to be her last extended visit to Africa as U.S. secretary of state. On Tuesday, she met with officials in South Africa, one of nine countries she will visit over 10 days as the U.S. seeks to deepen its ties with the continent. “When I look at U.S. engagement with Africa from one secretary of state to another, I see a very coherent theme,” Mwangi Kimenyi, director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told Trend Lines. “They read from the same playbook.” While the themes of U.S. foreign policy […]

Editor’s note: Ulrike Guérot is on a two-week break. Guest columnist Richard Gowan will be writing the Continentalist while she is gone. Is the European Union about to engage in a proxy war in the Sahara? In late-July, European foreign ministers directed EU officials to come up with “concrete proposals” for supporting an African stabilization force in Mali. There’s no doubt that Mali needs stabilizing: Islamist separatists with links to al-Qaida have seized the north of the country, and the south has been in political turmoil since a coup in March. What can the EU do to contain and resolve […]

A common theme in international relations debates today centers on the need to move beyond stovepiped bureaucracies and policy solutions to more effectively respond to the interconnected challenges of a world defined by the forces of globalization. In particular, numerous governmental and multilateral strategic policy directives over the past few years have emphasized the importance of combining efforts that build defense and security capacity with projects to further development needs. While widespread and pragmatic implementation of this powerful rhetoric remains a relative rarity, recent efforts by the Japanese government offer a good example of one way forward for this kind […]