A police officer walks past a portrait of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 2, 2019 (AP photo by Lefteris Pitarakis).

Dozens of countries took Saudi Arabia to task at the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this month for its human rights violations, demanding accountability for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The rebuke came just days after U.S. President Donald Trump was revealed to have admitted on tape that he helped shield the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, from scrutiny by obstructing Congress’ inquiries into Khashoggi’s brutal murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, in October 2018. “I saved his ass,” Trump reportedly said of the crown prince in an interview with the journalist Bob Woodward. […]

DACA students celebrate after the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to end legal protections for young immigrants, Washington, June 18, 2020 (AP photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta).

As recent polling has confirmed, the prestige and image of the United States have suffered a precipitous decline under President Donald Trump. As for Trump himself, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed that people in a variety of other countries place more stock in the leadership of both China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin than in America’s president. Although domestic issues are likely to dominate the upcoming U.S. presidential election, for these reasons and others, a key feature of Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign to send Trump into political retirement has appropriately been addressing the damage to […]

Refugees and migrants flee a fire burning at the Moria camp on Lesbos island, Greece, Sept. 9, 2020 (AP photo by Petros Giannakouris).

Until a couple weeks ago, Moria was the largest refugee camp in Europe. Situated on the Greek island of Lesbos, it housed roughly 13,000 people in facilities that were designed to hold 3,000. But starting on the evening of Sept. 8, a series of fires swept through Moria, reducing it to a smoldering ruin by the end of the week. Greek authorities have charged four young Afghan migrants with arson in connection with the fires. With nowhere else to go, thousands of Moria’s residents were left homeless, without access to basic services. Their plight casts a harsh and damning light […]

Metal barricades line the shuttered main entrance to the United Nations headquarters in New York, Sept. 18, 2020 (AP photo by Mary Altaffer).

The opening of the 75th United Nations General Assembly finds international cooperation in crisis and the U.N. in the crosshairs. Many critiques, especially from the United States, focus on the institution itself, as if it were somehow disembodied from the interests and policies of its major member states. The U.N.’s troubled anniversary is an opportune moment not only to reassess its strengths and weaknesses, but also to temper expectations of what multilateralism can possibly deliver when the U.N.’s leading members turn it into a geopolitical football—or are absent without leave. With these ends in mind, I offer the following 10 […]

Demonstrators clash with police during protests in Bogota, Sept. 9, 2020 (AP photo by Ivan Valencia).

Security forces killed 13 people during two days of violent protests against police brutality last week in Colombia’s capital, Bogota. Sixty-six civilians and nearly 200 police officers were wounded. More than 200 buses were vandalized, and 54 small police posts were destroyed. If those numbers described a battle during the country’s 50-year internal armed conflict with guerrilla groups, it would have been one of the bloodier ones. It was a jarring sight to behold in “post-conflict” Colombia, four years after the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC, signed a peace accord […]

A Mozambican soldier Gorongosa National Park, about 170 kilometers from Beira, Mozambique, Thursday, Aug, 1, 2019 (AP photo by Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi).

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Human rights groups are demanding an independent investigation into apparent military abuses in Mozambique, after videos circulated recently showing men in state military uniforms executing a civilian and torturing suspected members of an Islamist militia in the country’s restive province of Cabo Delgado. There are fears that the images could stoke local grievances and generate support for the militants. Officials from Mozambique’s government have accused the militia of shooting the footage to undermine the military in Cabo Delgado. Fighting between the Islamist […]

A policeman handcuffs Paul Rusesabagina, right, whose story inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda,” before leading him out of court in Kigali, Rwanda, Sept. 14, 2020 (AP photo by Muhizi Olivier).

Paul Rusesabagina is best known as a former manager of the upscale Hotel de Mille Collines in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where he sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the 1994 genocide. He held machete-wielding killers at bay, plying them with beer and bribes, in a story made famous by the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda.” A vocal critic of President Paul Kagame’s government, Rusesabagina has lived in self-imposed exile in Belgium and the United States for some 20 years, successfully evading Kagame’s attempts to capture him—until now. Last month, he flew from Chicago to Dubai for […]

Military cadets march at a training center in Owiny Ki-Bul, South Sudan, June 27, 2020 (AP photo by Maura Ajak).

It’s been two years since South Sudan’s leaders signed an agreement to end a crippling five-year civil war that killed almost 400,000 people and displaced millions, yet peace remains elusive. The country is reeling from escalating communal violence and a deepening humanitarian crisis, made worse by an ongoing political stalemate. In February, President Salva Kiir swore in opposition leader Riek Machar to once again serve as his deputy in a unity government, providing a glimmer of hope that the war-torn nation might turn a corner. It was the latest attempt for the two leaders to share power, after the last […]

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres attends a Security Council meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York, Feb. 11, 2020 (AP photo by Seth Wenig).

Expectations will be low this week as the United Nations kicks off its first General Assembly by Zoom. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has come up with a catchy theme—“The Future We Want, the UN We Need”—but don’t expect any breakthroughs. The most significant accomplishment will be a general Declaration of Principles issued on Sept. 21, in which member states recommit themselves to multilateralism. Beyond that, the world body is in a holding pattern, awaiting the outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election and the eventual passing of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a pity, because the U.N.’s 75th anniversary finds the world racked […]

A gathering of pro-democracy protesters in Bangkok, Thailand.

Thai students and other activists have staged a series of escalating pro-democracy protests in recent months, drawing some of the biggest crowds since the country’s last coup in 2014. Their demands initially focused on constitutional reforms and new elections, after last year’s vote was widely seen as skewed toward a party aligned with the military. The demonstrators also called for an impartial investigation into the apparent abductions and murders of anti-government activists living abroad. Several Thai dissidents who had been living in Laos disappeared last year, while the bodies of others were found in the Mekong River, disemboweled and filled […]

A sheep herder in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, Aug. 6, 2014 (AP photo by Jack Chang).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Authorities have detained at least 23 people in China’s Inner Mongolia region following protests last week against new rules requiring classes in primary and secondary schools to be taught in Mandarin, rather than Mongolian. Activists are warning of a broader campaign to chip away at Mongolian cultural identity, and based on recent reports from the region, a strict crackdown on ethnic Mongol communities is already underway. The “bilingual education” program in Inner Mongolia, announced just days before it was […]

A young girl is taken to an ambulance after showing signs of Ebola in the village of Freeman Reserve, north of Monrovia, Liberia, Sept. 30, 2014 (AP photo by Jerome Delay).

Across West Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing back painful memories of the Ebola epidemic, which spread from the remote forest region in Guinea to Liberia and Sierra Leone, infecting over 28,000 people and claiming the lives of more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016. As the region grapples with a new virus, have civil society groups and policymakers applied the lessons they learned from Ebola to the fight against COVID-19? Or are West African countries repeating the same fatal mistakes? With so much public mistrust of the governments in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, local human rights groups and […]