Diplomacy & Politics Archive

KAMPALA, Uganda—As Burundi’s president, Pierre Nkurunziza, is learning, subverting constitutional term limits can be a tricky business. In April, Nkurunziza announced he would be running for a third stint ahead of a June vote, despite a constitutional limit of two terms. His announcement was met with immediate protests, still ongoing, and an attempted coup. The election is now delayed until at least July. His counterparts in nearby Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo must be watching warily. Both are about to bump up against their own term caps—the DRC’s Joseph Kabila next year and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame in […]

This fall the United Nations will celebrate its 70th birthday. As for most 70-somethings, the commemoration evokes nostalgia for a more idealistic time, reflections on creaky joints and renewed hopes for the future. To be sure, this grand edifice of mid-20th century geopolitics needs some serious refurbishing to align its mission and capabilities with the demands of the 21st-century world. Migration crises affecting Africa, Europe and Asia in unprecedented numbers; war in Sudan and enduring conflict in Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere; and failing U.N. peace processes for Syria and Yemen show clearly that the current global […]

Last week, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has a warrant out for his arrest by the International Criminal Court, left South Africa without incident, even after South Africa’s High Court ruled that he was to be prevented from leaving. In an email interview, Pierre de Vos, professor of constitutional law at the University of Cape Town, discussed South Africa’s judiciary. WPR: How has South Africa’s judiciary evolved since the end of apartheid, both as an institution and demographically, compared to other government branches, and has it been cleared of all apartheid-era judges? Pierre de Vos: The composition of the South […]

Policy papers from the United Nations rarely make for scintillating reading. Last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released “Uniting Our Strengths for Peace,” a new report by an expert panel on the future of peace operations. Running to over 90 pages and full of familiar bromides such as “the universal legitimacy of the United Nations is one of its greatest strengths,” this does not at first glance seem like an exceptionally enticing text. On closer inspection, it proves to be a subtly subversive summary of what is wrong with peace operations, and indeed the entire U.N., today. Ban convened the panel […]

Last week, the Lebanese army tested advanced TOW-II missiles, its newest weapon supplied by the United States. The live-fire demonstration took place at an army base in the Baalbek region, not far from the Syrian border. In late May, the U.S. agreed to provide more than 200 of the anti-tank guided missiles and dozens of launchers, at a cost of over $10 million, to help guard Lebanon’s border from Islamist militants and the threat of spillover from Syria’s civil war. Lebanese soldiers have come under attack by militants near the Syrian border in the past two years, including from the […]

In the winter of 2013, then-Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta came out of a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama with the idea that the United States, too busy with other issues, had delegated the solution of the turmoil in Libya to Italy. This perception soon percolated into both the foreign policy and the defense establishments in Rome: Libya was now important not just because of geography and longstanding ties, but also because it was one of the few areas of the world in which the rest of the West would look to Italy for a solution. Yet two years […]

A recent memorandum by Undersecretary of State Richard Stengel painted an ominous picture of America’s failure to counter propaganda from the so-called Islamic State (IS). Across the board, the U.S. narrative is, as Stengel put it, “being trumped.” To a great extent this competition of narratives takes place on the Internet, particularly in social media. The Islamic State has made mistakes in that venue, but a number of indicators—its continued flow of recruits, the number of other extremist movements seeking to affiliate with it and its ability to inspire attacks in the West—demonstrate that the United States is losing on […]

Nearly 60 million people last year were displaced by war, conflict and persecution, the highest number ever on record, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) annual report today. The largest source of refugees is Syria, with 3.9 million Syrian refugees in 107 countries. Syria overtook Afghanistan in the U.N.’s ranking; Afghanistan had previously held that position for more than 30 years. As U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonia Guterres said, “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required […]

The political change heralded by the 2010-2011 wave of protests across the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring never reached Lebanon, but the small Mediterranean country of 4 million has been suffering from the repercussions of those momentous events ever since. To the north, fighters and goods are still being smuggled to embattled Syria. To the northeast, a war of attrition is underway with Islamist militants, who have already seized vast swathes of territory from northern Syria and Iraq. To the south, there is the ever-volatile border with Israel. Indeed, in all directions, Lebanon’s fate is […]

Over the past month, Myanmar’s multiple domestic crises have spilled over its borders and into South and Southeast Asia, setting back the country’s reforms just before Myanmar’s highly anticipated national elections this fall. Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence and discrimination in western Myanmar have attracted the most global news coverage. Their plight in rickety boats with little food or water has sparked international calls for Myanmar’s government to take stronger measures to end discrimination against the Rohingya and address the crisis at its source. But the flight of the Rohingya is just one issue undermining Myanmar’s stability. Fighting has flared again […]

Among the many questions left unanswered by the surprise results of Turkey’s recent parliamentary elections are whether and how the country’s foreign policy will change now that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has lost its ability to single-handedly control the legislature. On June 7, Turkish voters delivered a stunning blow to the AKP and its founder, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After having handed him more than a decade of landslide victories, voters denied Erdogan the two-thirds supermajority that would have opened the way for the AKP to rewrite the constitution without submitting it to a referendum, making Erdogan […]

With all eyes on Greece, especially after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) walked away from debt negotiations last week, bringing Athens that much closer to default, it is easy to miss that last week also marked the one-year anniversary of Portugal completing its bailout program. Portugal isn’t in the clear just yet: Its employment rate increased to 13.7 percent last month and debt to GDP ratio is 129 percent. But its economic situation has stabilized, and the government is repaying its debts on time, if not early. Portugal signed its 78 billion euro economic adjustment program with the so-called troika […]

Sometimes what a politician says matters less than what he or she doesn’t say. Case in point: Hillary Clinton’s big presidential announcement speech this past weekend. Clinton had a lot to say about income inequality and the need to rebalance an economy in which a privileged few accrue enormous benefits, while the many make do with meager crumbs. She had detailed policy proposals on early childhood education, infrastructure, voting rights and strengthening the social safety net. But in a more than 4,000-word speech, she spent all of 325 words on foreign policy. While she went into full wonk mode on […]

In late March, Jane’s reported that Angola would soon receive the first batch of Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets as part of an ongoing military modernization program that kicked off four years ago. The modernization program aims to boost the number of troops in service and renew Angola’s military hardware in order to improve the operational capabilities of its armed forces. But when it was launched, resource-rich Angola was awash in oil revenue. The drop in global oil prices since last summer raises questions about the sustainability of Angola’s military modernization, as a growing economic crisis has already forced the […]

Russia has been skillfully using its ground forces to support pro-Moscow separatists in Ukraine and keep NATO guessing over Russian intentions in that country, the Baltic states and Moldova. In addition, Moscow’s air force has for the first time since the Cold War sustained a high tempo of operations in NATO’s vicinity for more than a year. But the revival of the Russian navy has been another key element of Moscow’s use of military force to press its great power status. Naval considerations were actually a major factor driving Moscow’s insistence on maintaining control over Crimea. The naval base at […]

Earlier this month, lawmakers in Uruguay announced they were working on legislation that would classify femicide—the gender-motivated killing of women—as a crime. In an email interview, Patricia Leidl, a Vancouver-based international communications adviser, discussed government responses to crime against women across Latin America. WPR: What has prompted the recent public outcry against violence against women in Latin America? Patricia Leidl: The “recent” outcry over violence against Latin American women is in fact not recent at all. Since the early 1990s, human and women’s rights defenders have been raising the alarm over steadily climbing rates of gender-based violence in Mexico, El […]

They had predicted success with breezy self-confidence, but even the leaders of the Kurdish-rooted Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) were likely surprised by their historic gains in Turkey’s parliamentary elections earlier this month. Sweeping 13 percent of the national vote, the HDP became the first majority-Kurdish party to formally enter parliament in Turkish history, pushing beyond the 10 percent election threshold that had forced Kurds to field independent candidates in elections past. For HDP voters, victory seemed all the sweeter given the blow it delivered to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) failed to secure a […]