Cote d'Ivoire President Alassane Ouattara waves at reporters after a meeting with French President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace, Paris, Dec. 4, 2014 (AP photo by Christophe Ena).

A presidential election on Oct. 25 is likely to bring a second term for Cote d’Ivoire’s president, Alassane Ouattara. The economy is booming, with growth rates consistently above 8 percent, and in a region scarred by crises—from the ravages of Ebola to Islamic extremism in the Maghreb and around Lake Chad—Cote d’Ivoire stands out as an attractive proposition for investors. Abidjan has bounced back from the dark days of post-election violence in 2010 and 2011, with life returning even to the poor neighborhoods that saw the worst of the fighting. Ouattara, a smooth, bilingual technocrat, has maintained good external relations. […]

In this undated file photo, militants of the Islamic State group hold up their weapons and wave its flags on their vehicles in a convoy on a road leading to Iraq from Raqqa, Syria (Militant website via AP).

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria and work with Iran and Iraq to defeat the Islamic State has been met with a rather predictable response among Washington pundits: Putin is strong, and Barack Obama is weak. “Like Iran, Putin is willing to back up his pursuit of his interests with force,” writes Eliot Abrams in the National Review. “U.S. deterrence is dead,” says the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka. The Washington Post editorial page bemoans Obama’s lack of a strategy for Syria and noted that while “shortsighted and cynical . . . at least Mr. Putin […]

A convoy of Azerbaijani army tanks moves in the direction of Agdam, Azerbaijan, Aug. 2, 2014. (AP photo by Abbas Atilay).

Azerbaijan reported that three of its troops and nine Armenian soldiers were killed during clashes Sunday in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Armenia denies the losses and says more than 10 Azerbaijani troops were killed. This is only the latest incident in a year marked by a dramatic increase in hostilities between the two neighbors. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia began in 1988 when the Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, which was then an autonomous province of the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, started a movement calling for unification with Armenia. Regional violence became a full-fledged war after Armenia and Azerbaijan became […]

Thousands of Lebanese of Armenian descent, holding banners and a giant Armenian flag, march to mark the 100th anniversary of the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, Antelias, Lebanon, April 24, 2015 (AP photo by Bilal Hussein).

By a fortuitous coincidence I found myself in Japan the week of the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which preceded the Japanese surrender in World War II. A special panel advising the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was divided over the wording of the government’s official statement, which is issued on major anniversaries of the war’s end. Should the words “aggression” and “apology” be used, or was “remorse”—the oft-employed substitute for a stronger expression—enough? Abe’s refusal to apologize for Japan’s colonial past, including its treatment of Koreans and other wartime atrocities, has divided Japanese political elites and […]

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presents his annual report at the opening of the general debate of the U.N. General Assembly’s seventieth session, New York, Sept. 28, 2015 (U.N. photo by Loey Felipe).

As world leaders begin the annual marathon that is the United Nations General Assembly opening session for the 70th time, expect the rhetoric to be both sober and soaring. The institution is caught between honest assessments of its shortcomings and grandiose pronouncements of its future goals that will inspire some and irritate others. At the risk of simplification, one can evaluate the U.N.’s track record over its seven decades in three distinct areas: war and peace, norm-setting on complex transnational issues and responses to humanitarian, environmental and moral crises. On the question of war and peace, the verdict has to […]

A member of the Liberia National Police Anti-Drug Squad reviews the municipal dump where they are burning 880 lbs of drugs that were confiscated between 2011 and 2012, Monrovia, Liberia, March 1, 2013 (U.N. photo by Staton Winter).

This summer, Reuters reported on the rise in illegal drug trafficking and production in West Africa. In an email interview, Joanne Csete, an expert on health and human rights issues, discussed West Africa’s growing role in the global drug market. WPR: What role has West Africa played in the global drug market in the past decade? Joanne Csete: There is some evidence that significant transit routes have been established through West Africa for cocaine from Latin America destined for Europe, though the volume may have diminished in the past few years. It is hard to judge trends with seizure data, […]

Peacekeepers serving with the U.N. Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) patrol the town of Pinga, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dec. 4, 2013 (U.N. photo by Sylvain Liechti).

There are a lot of smug policy wonks in New York right now. As this year’s high-level General Assembly session kicks off at the United Nations, the media is focused on what the meeting could mean for Syria. It may achieve very little on that front. But analysts who take a longer view of multilateral affairs still see some reasons for optimism elsewhere. The most obvious is the adoption of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a sprawling but impressively ambitious list of global targets for 2030. Academics and activists have been celebrating this success all weekend. A special summit […]

Relatives of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa teachers' college students lead a march marking the one-year anniversary of the students' disappearances, Chilpancingo, Mexico, Sept. 26, 2015 (AP photo by Rebecca Blackwell).

A year after 43 rural college students were forcibly disappeared in southern Mexico, human rights activists, teachers unions and university students have again taken to the streets to demand justice. For many, the tragedy—known as Ayotzinapa, after the name of the teachers’ college the students attended—has become symbolic of the violence and impunity afflicting Mexico as a whole. Earlier this month, a long-awaited report by the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights cast doubts on the official version of events and pointed to extraordinary deficiencies in the investigation carried out by the federal government. On Sept. 26, […]

French Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius, left, and Moroccan Minister of Religious Affairs Ahmed Toufik, right, sign documents as part of a bilateral agreement on the training of French imams, Tangier, Morocco, Sept. 19, 2015 (AP photo by Alain

Last weekend, French President Francois Hollande met with Moroccan King Mohammed VI and signed an initiative to send French imams to the Mohammed VI Institute in Rabat, a center opened in March with the stated mission of promoting religious moderation and tolerance to combat radical Islam. The visit was an attempt to mend relations, which Morocco suspended last February for nearly a year following French allegations of human rights abuses. Although the France-Morocco initiative on imams is new, international religious training exchanges are part of an established phenomenon that Jonathan Laurence, a professor of political science at Boston College, calls […]

Islamic State fighters wave an Islamic State flag as they patrol in a commandeered Iraqi military vehicle, Fallujah, Iraq, March 20, 2014 (AP photo).

Russia’s deployment of military equipment and personnel to Syria, combined with revelations about failed U.S. efforts to train and equip Syrian rebels, has rekindled criticisms of the Obama administration’s strategy against the self-declared Islamic State. The U.S. approach has been attacked from both sides of the political aisle, characterized as mission creep by some and weak incrementalism by others. During last week’s presidential debate, in particular, most of the Republican presidential candidates vied to burnish their national security credentials by vowing to expand U.S. military operations to defeat the Islamic State. However, the urge to “do something” in Iraq and […]

Syrians gather amid the rubble of damaged buildings in the predominantly Christian and Armenian neighborhood of Suleimaniyeh, Aleppo, Syria, April 11, 2015 (AP photo/SANA).

Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the United States has rejected deep involvement, hoping that the conflict would work itself out or at least remain limited to Syria itself. These hopes are now bankrupt. Syria’s humanitarian disaster and refugee crisis is only growing, with tragic consequences for the Syrian people. It is destabilizing neighboring nations and threatening Europe. Containment of the conflict has failed. Yet there is no movement toward a resolution that reflects American interests. There is only stalemate and chaos. From the American perspective, the core problem is that U.S. strategy has been based on three […]

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is interviewed by the Associated Press at Blair House in Washington, July 21, 2015 (AP photo by Cliff Owen).

Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, spent three days last week in France, on his second major trip out of Africa since taking office on May 29. The items topping Buhari’s agenda in Paris—economic investment and security cooperation—reflected his main challenges at home: an economy in turmoil and the persistent threat of the jihadi movement Boko Haram. The visit also demonstrated Buhari’s patient, long-term thinking about Nigeria’s problems, which includes a greater willingness to work with neighbors and international partners than his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. At the same time, demands within Nigeria for immediate change confront Buhari with an imperative to demonstrate […]

Russian T-14 Armata tanks make their way during the Victory Parade marking the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Red Square Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2015 (AP photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko).

America, it seems, has a new foreign threat: Russia. “For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” read the lede in a Foreign Policy article last week, “the Pentagon is reviewing and updating its contingency plans for armed conflict with Russia.” Even worse, in recent war games that imagined a NATO conflict with Russia, “we are unable to defend the Baltics,” concluded one former Pentagon official. If this sounds familiar, it’s because you might have read it in the Daily Beast a month ago. “A series of classified exercises over the summer,” two unnamed sources told the […]

U.S. President Barack Obama during a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the US Ambassador's Residence, Amsterdam, Netherlands, March 24, 2014 (U.S. Embassy in the Hague photo).

Since U.S. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, met in Beijing last November, the United States and China have seen incremental progress in cooperation on climate change, Iran’s nuclear program and other areas, as well as continued strong trade. Yet these positive developments have been overshadowed by a deepening distrust over an array of other issues: the South China Sea, cyberespionage, the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the intensification of a human rights crackdown under an increasingly authoritarian Xi. With this gloomy and tense backdrop, Xi’s visit to the U.S. this week, starting Tuesday […]

A Bahraini man sits on a street by a wall covered in political graffiti, which is regularly sprayed over by authorities and reapplied by government opponents, Malkiya, Bahrain,, June 11, 2015 (AP photo by Hasan Jamali).

Last week, 33 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, signed a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council criticizing Bahrain’s human rights record, but also commending some of the government’s “positive steps” toward reform. It called on Bahrain to investigate claims of torture and abuse of detainees, hold perpetrators accountable and accept a visit by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture. “The human rights situation in Bahrain remains an issue of serious concern to us,” said the Swiss ambassador, who read out the letter in Geneva. It was the fifth such letter issued since Bahrain’s […]

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the opening meeting of the General Assembly’s seventieth session, New York, Sept. 15, 2015 (U.N. photo by Eskinder Debebe).

Leaders from around the world will soon be arriving in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. But it is Pope Francis, scheduled to speak at the Sustainable Development Goals summit on Friday, who is generating the most excitement. In the latest Global Dispatches podcast, host Mark Goldberg talks with World Politics Review columnist Richard Gowan about Pope Francis’ address and the other topics likely to dominate the 70th U.N. General Assembly: Syria, the refugee crisis and U.N. peacekeeping. For more on U.N. politics, read Gowan’s recent feature […]

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a news conference, Geneva, Switzerland, Sept. 14, 2013 (State Department photo).

American and Russian diplomats have proved to be congenitally unable to end the Syrian war. Could their military counterparts do any better? Last week, the Obama administration accepted a Russian offer of military talks over Syria. This is not necessarily a reason for much optimism. Moscow has sent aircraft, air-defense systems and significant amounts of new equipment to reinforce Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered regime. Some analysts believe that Russian troops will be fighting on the ground soon. This could make the war even more dangerous. The goal of the new Russian-American talks, which kicked off with a phone call […]

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