Angolans at the beach in front of the capital skyline, marked by new construction, Luanda, Angola, March 8, 2010 (photo by Flickr user mp3ief, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license).

Forty years after its independence from Portugal and 13 years since the end of the civil war that immediately followed, Angola has made great progress in consolidating peace and stability, but continues to face many challenges. Foremost among them is managing an economic crisis, exacerbated by staggering inequality, while avoiding the potential social and political fallout it could generate. The country’s political landscape could also prove perilous: The ruling party, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), faces both a determined opposition and a potential internal battle over who will succeed longtime President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. The […]

Chinese President Xi Jinping and leaders of other countries line up for a photo at a ceremony to mark the decision to set up the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Beijing, China, Oct. 24, 2014 (Pool photo by Kyodo News via AP Images).

The golden age of American economic primacy has ended. Two years ago, China surpassed the United States as the world’s top trading nation, and late last year it also surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy in purchasing-power terms. China is an economic titan, but until recently, its impressive rise had not been accompanied by a vision to reshape the global economic order. However, this is beginning to change. Rather than accepting the status quo as given, Beijing is slowly working to revise foundational elements of the U.S.-led economic order. First, it has called into question the desirability […]

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon tests a communal water pump at Mwandama Millennium Village, Malawi, May 30, 2010 (U.N. photo by Evan Schneider).

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Sarah Hearn is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on vacation this week. At the end of March, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a new report about international aid and development, co-authored by myself and several colleagues at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation. The report, titled “States of Fragility 2015: Meeting Post-2015 Ambitions,” comes ahead of the United Nations Summit on the Post-2015 Development Agenda in September this year, which will adopt a new set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when […]

U.S. President Barack Obama and Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller during their bilateral meeting at the Jamaica House, April 9, 2015, Kingston, Jamaica (AP photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais).

U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement of $20 million in financing for private investment in Caribbean clean energy projects at a meeting yesterday with the region’s leaders in Kingston, Jamaica, comes at a good time: After a lost decade, during which easy access to cheap Venezuelan oil undermined incentives to seek alternative sources, the Caribbean now faces long-deferred decisions on how it sources and uses energy. The slump in global oil prices has hit Venezuela’s economy hard, threatening its Petrocaribe trade program, established by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2005 to sell subsidized oil and diesel to the group’s […]

Saudi King Salman meets with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 1, 2015 (AP Photo/Saudi Press Agency).

While Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi has his eyes on Yemen, with plans apparently hatched to commit Egyptian troops to a possible Saudi-led ground invasion there, the Sinai Peninsula still smolders. Last Thursday, militants attacked checkpoints in the northern Sinai near the Israel-Gaza border, killing 15 soldiers and two civilians. Threats to Egypt’s domestic security linger, but last week, el-Sisi said that Egypt was involved in Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen because “it was not possible for us to abandon the security of the Gulf.” That being said, Saudi Arabia and its fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation […]