Defense & Security Archive

One of the most important problems in modern African history is also among the most widely misunderstood. For decades, both journalists and scholars have lamented that Africa’s borders were drawn up by outside powers, beginning with Europe’s so-called Scramble for Africa, between 1881 and World War I. This threw all sorts of linguistically, religiously and politically disparate groups into newly formed colonies and, soon afterward, new African nations, in which they were suddenly forced to try to get along together in the task of building independent republics. The mistake in this logic isn’t that these things didn’t happen. If one […]

In early May, in a televised address, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, declared martial law in North Kivu and Ituri, two provinces on the country’s eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda, and placed them under military rule. In justifying this draconian measure, Tshisekedi invoked the regular mass killings in the region, which have left more than 1,000 people dead since 2019 and have generally been ascribed to one local militant group: the Allied Democratic Forces. Days later, a delegation from the Ugandan army arrived in Beni to set up a coordination center for a joint offensive with […]

Glistening blue water, a stunning coastline, the smell of the sea, all nearby a bustling European city: The exquisite seaport of Trieste in northeastern Italy was supposed to be the idyllic in-person venue for this year’s European Dialogue on Internet Governance, or EuroDIG 2021. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the majority of sessions took place online. But one group—the Dynamic Coalition on Data and Trust, of which I have the good fortune to be a coordinator—met in person to discuss issues around the Domain Name System, or DNS, and practical responses to DNS abuse and cybercrime.  Geographically speaking, Trieste sits […]

Rarely has an election in a small post-Soviet country been watched so closely.  Armenia held a snap poll on June 20, after months of turbulence following its crushing defeat in an unexpected six-week war with Azerbaijan over the long-disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh late last year. At times, the passions and pressure generated by the war’s outcome had been so intense that it looked as though the Armenian state would not survive. Yet not only did embattled Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan survive, he won a strong new mandate, against all odds.  The fighting last year killed more than 7,000 people in […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which uses relevant WPR coverage to provide background and context to the week’s top stories. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th birthday Thursday, with the kind of grand pomp we’ve come to expect from Beijing for such occasions. The anniversary was an opportunity for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to vaunt the party’s accomplishments, particularly in lifting hundreds of millions of people […]

Back in February, several weeks after Myanmar’s military ousted the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, I spoke on the phone with a 25-year-old researcher in Yangon, the country’s largest city. Having joined popular demonstrations against the coup, he said he was surprised at the scale of resistance to the new junta. The movement, which quickly became known as the Civil Disobedience Movement, had galvanized hundreds of thousands of nonviolent protesters across the country, as massive strikes at public agencies, banks and businesses threatened to grind government functioning and the economy to a halt. The researcher, who asked […]