Diplomacy & Politics Archive

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—The images that circulated on social media following last month’s bloody attack on the village of Solhan, in northeastern Burkina Faso, weren’t as gory as those that are often shared online after towns have been hit by armed groups. But even in a country where such killings are a near-daily occurrence, there was something about the photographs—showing dozens of bodies wrapped in woven prayer mats and piled into a mass grave—that jolted many people to take to the streets.  “It was horrible, but it showed us the limits of our state and the current regime in finding solutions […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about the African continent. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. If you’re a regular reader of Africa Watch, it’s possibly because you were tired of reading about “Africa” as if it were a monolithic country of 1.3 billion people with all the same traits, habits and perspectives. Or better yet, that might have been your own impression […]

Last week, the authoritarian government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced it would allow the country’s main opposition coalition to compete in regional and municipal elections that are scheduled for November, lifting an electoral ban that was first imposed in 2018. It was one of several concessions Maduro has made recently, signaling his desire to improve his global image and seek sanctions relief from the United States.  The lifting of the electoral ban on the Democratic Unity Roundtable, or MUD, came as government and opposition representatives prepare to restart direct negotiations, with a new round of Norway-brokered talks reportedly set to take […]

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. There’s still a lot of confusion about the circumstances surrounding the attack that took Haitian President Jovenel Moise’s life and seriously wounded his wife, who is being treated at a hospital in Florida. But one thing is certain: The power vacuum it created has exacerbated a political crisis that already seemed […]

Beginning April 28, Colombians took to the streets for weeks of mass protests that nearly brought the economy to a standstill. The strikes and rallies were sparked by an unpopular tax reform proposal, but the roots of the unrest lie in a starkly unequal system that, to many poor and middle-class Colombians, seems rigged against them.  While organizers have announced a temporary pause in their activities, further demonstrations are planned for later in the month. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, Elizabeth Dickinson, senior analyst for Colombia at the International Crisis Group, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman from Bogota to […]

Many years ago, an acquaintance told me a story from her childhood in the country then known as Swaziland that sounded like something from out of the distant past. One day, she said, officials from the king’s palace came to her high school and left with one of her friends, a beautiful girl, in tow. The country’s king, Mswati III, had caught sight of the girl and decided he wanted her as one of his many wives, who now number 15.  As startling as Mswati’s predatory marital practices are, so too is the fact that the depth of his despotism, […]

Whatever other misdeeds they may have committed, one would not think of either Evo Morales or Jeanine Anez as being a “terrorist.” Yet, however implausible the accusation may seem, being criminally investigated for “sedition and terrorism” in the past two years may be the only thing the two former Bolivian presidents have in common. After Morales resigned and fled the Andean nation in 2019 amid allegations of fraud in that year’s presidential election, the Justice Ministry under Anez’s interim presidency leveled the controversial charges against him, along with “genocide” for good measure. The indictment was based on both the socialist […]

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 […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Addressing a 70,000-strong crowd gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mark the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping delivered a defiant speech that seemed aimed as much toward Washington as toward the millions of Chinese households watching on television. “We have never bullied, oppressed, or […]

After Colombians took to the streets on April 28 to protest a tax reform plan, President Ivan Duque quickly rescinded the unpopular proposal. But that didn’t stop the demonstrators, who continued to march in support of more fundamental economic changes to address persistent inequality and poverty, which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Colombian security forces responded to the unrest with a typically heavy-handed approach, and at least 60 people have died so far, many at the hands of the police. Protest leaders have paused their activities for now, but are planning more strikes and demonstrations for later in […]

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 […]

Editor’s Note: This is Andrew Green’s final week authoring our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, although he’ll continue to be a valued contributor and friend of WPR. We’d like to thank Andrew for having done such an amazing job with Africa Watch since taking it over. Tune in next week for an update about the newsletter moving forward. You can subscribe to receive it by email every Friday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. After more than two years and 100 newsletters, I’ll be signing off from Africa Watch. […]

There are at least two ways in which the newly approved Congressional Select Committee on the events of Jan. 6 might go about investigating the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on that day. One is to treat the assault as a one-off—an aberrant security breach in which thousands of people who supported former President Donald Trump stormed the seat of American democracy to protest the 2020 certification of election results that put President Joseph R. Biden in the White House. Another is to approach the mob violence that day as the culmination of a yearslong influence […]

On June 22, Mauritanian authorities arrested former President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz as part of a corruption investigation that began in January 2020. The immediate trigger for Ould Abdel Aziz’s arrest was that he had refused to check in with a judge. As the case moves forward, the current administration led by President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, a former ally of Ould Abdel Aziz, faces a dilemma: Allowing Ould Abdel Aziz to escape the charges would give the former president a symbolic political victory and would undermine the rule of law, but convicting him of corruption would raise the stakes in […]