Aid and Development Archive

Uganda has been celebrated for its progressive approach toward refugees. But its open-door policy is being tested by the ongoing flood of arrivals from neighboring South Sudan. The conflict in South Sudan has been raging for more than three years, but it has proliferated after a tentative peace deal collapsed in July 2016. Since then, more than 841,000 South Sudanese have fled the country, raising the total number of refugees to nearly 1.7 million, according to the United Nations. Roughly half of them have headed to Uganda. Listen to Andrew Green discuss this piece on WPR’s Trend Lines Podcast: On […]

Can Antonio Guterres save the United Nations from the tyranny of overinflated expectations? The U.N. secretary-general, who has been on the job for four months, seems clear about the limitations of his post. When the Security Council selected Guterres for the job last October, he declared that the Syrian war would be his top priority. But speaking in London last week, he implied he could not do much about it. Peace will only be possible, Guterres noted, “when all the parties in the conflict understand and believe they cannot win the war.” This is not exactly a revelation: U.N. officials […]

Echoing the symbolic spark of the 2011 uprising, a Tunisian vendor set himself on fire on Wednesday in the town of Tebourba outside Tunis, after police had instructed him to close his fruit stand. Riots ensued, and a crowd of young men clashed with police as the vendor was hospitalized for treatment. The incident took place at a tense moment in Tunisia’s stumbling democratic transition, which entered its seventh year in January. Protests over economic marginalization have multiplied across the south of the country, and on Tuesday, Chafik Sarsar, the head of the country’s electoral commission, resigned—refusing, he said, to […]

Emmanuel Macron has never said anything noteworthy about the United Nations. But his victory in this weekend’s French presidential election increases the chances that France and Europe still have a role to play in defending international cooperation. It is probable that the three main European powers—Britain, France and Germany—will be active supporters of the U.N. and other multilateral bodies for at least the rest of this decade. They may be able to offset, at least in part, the Trump administration’s retreat from multilateralism. Just a few months ago, it would have been hard to make even this guardedly optimistic statement […]

Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, went on his first visit to the Gulf last month, spending six days in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain. In an email interview, Aaron Jed Rabena, resident fellow at the Ateneo Teehankee Center for the Rule of Law and associate fellow at the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations, explains what was on the agenda, including protections for migrant workers and the conflict in the southern Mindanao region. WPR: How have ties been between the Philippines and the Gulf evolved in recent decades, and what have been past areas of cooperation? Aaron Jed Rabena: Traditionally, […]