People walk past a large video screen outside a shopping mall showing Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking during an event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of China’s Communist Party in Beijing, July 1, 2021 (AP photo by Mark Schiefelbein).

To many people who follow events in China closely, two announcements made in the past month by the Chinese government seemed like reasonably foreseeable developments, if not entirely predictable in their timing or details. In the first, Beijing said that it was committed to combating the grueling common workplace culture known as 996, which stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Placing such heavy demands of self-sacrifice for the benefit of corporations was unhealthy for society, the state concluded, in a belated judgment that follows more than a generation of high-speed growth characterized by utter domination […]

Election officials wait for voters inside a polling station, in Rabat, Morocco, Sept. 8, 2021 (AP photo by Mosa’ab Elshamy).

Wednesday’s legislative elections in Morocco delivered a crushing defeat to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or PJD, a moderate Islamist party that had been the largest in Parliament since 2011. Thanks in part to mandatory quotas for female representation, the new crop of lawmakers is on track to be more diverse, with a greater number of women, as well as young people. But it will also be more deeply fragmented, and with royalist parties emerging as the victors of the vote, the incoming Parliament is unlikely to pose any meaningful challenge to King Mohammed VI, who controls nearly all […]

Civilians and soldiers line up to vote at a school in Conakry, Guinea, Oct. 18, 2020 (AP photo by Sadak Souici).

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 Friday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Early last Sunday morning, reports emerged of a shootout close to the presidential residence in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, between pro-government forces and an elite army unit intent on deposing President Alpha Conde. The Defense Ministry initially claimed the attack had been suppressed, but shortly thereafter, […]

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni speaks during a visit to Juba, South Sudan, Oct. 15, 2018 (AP photo by Bullen Chol).

KAMPALA, Uganda—Fifty-one Afghan evacuees arrived at Uganda’s international airport in Entebbe on a chartered flight on Aug. 25. They were shunted across the hot tarmac into buses and brought to lakeside hotels previously emptied due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Their arrival was the result of a deal Uganda made with the United States, in which Kampala promised to provide temporary shelter to some 2,000 “at risk” Afghan evacuees. The agreement was celebrated by Ugandan and American politicians, but the details of exactly how it came about, and the fate of the asylees themselves, remain shrouded in secrecy. The deal also […]

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken participates in a virtual bilateral meeting with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari at the State Department, Washington, April 27, 2021 (AP photo by Leah Millis).

U.S. President Joe Biden campaigned for the 2020 Democratic nomination promising not only to restore the defense of human rights and democracy to a central position in U.S. foreign policy, but also to “build back better” in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. But for Africa’s 54 countries and 1.4 billion people, despite a welcome change in tone from the administration of former President Donald Trump, there is little to show for the first nine months of Biden’s presidency when it comes to engagement on values—or anything else of substance.  In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden triumphantly […]

Chinese President Xi Jinping leading other top officials pledging their vows to the party during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing, China June 28, 2021 (AP photo by Ng Han Guan).

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 Wedenesday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Up until late August, Zhao Wei was one of the biggest stars in mainland China. Having shot to fame in the late 90s with the television drama My Fair Princess, the 45-year-old eventually became a household name, with a net worth of $1 billion. But almost overnight, […]

Elisa Loncon, president of the Constituent Assembly, raises an Indigenous Mapuche flag during the inaugural session of the Constitutional Convention in Santiago, Chile, July 4, 2021 (AP photo by Esteban Felix).

In June, Chile’s Constitutional Convention was seated, culminating a process that began with spontaneous protests in late 2019 and soon crystallized into demands for an overhaul to the country’s social model and rewriting Chile’s constitution, which dates back to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.  As central protagonists in the protest movement that led to the successful constitutional referendum in October 2020, Chile’s Indigenous peoples have sought to make sure that the new constitution drafted by the convention includes formal recognition of their status, as well as a designation of Chile as a plurinational state. Both demands grow out of the deep and […]

Guinean President Alpha Conde at the State Department in Washington, Sept. 13, 2019 (AP photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais).

As a college student in the United States in the late 1970s whose family had recently moved to West Africa, my studies focused on African politics, and I was particularly and irresistibly drawn in by the stories of the continent’s first generation of post-independence leaders. Their narratives were almost mythic in their richness and power. There was the doomed Patrice Lumumba, a former postal clerk who had become the first prime minister of Congo, publicly lecturing the king of Belgium on the eve of Kinshasa’s independence from that country about the Congolese people’s will to dignity. There was Ghana’s Kwame […]

A protester from the Uyghur community living in Turkey holds a placard during a protest in Istanbul, March 25, 2021 (AP photo by Emrah Gurel).

There is extensive evidence that the Chinese government is violating the human rights of ethnic Uyghurs, and that these violations include crimes against humanity and genocide. Satellite imagery, testimonials, demographic data and photographs substantiate the extensive allegations against China, which include the use of mass surveillance technologies throughout Xinjiang province, the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, the separation of children from their parents, systematic sterilization, rape, forced labor and organ harvesting. While survivors, relatives and diaspora communities have long sought to draw attention to the systematic […]

Visitors look at surveillance cameras made by China’s telecoms equipment giant Huawei on display at the China Public Security Expo in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Oct. 29, 2019 (AP photo by Andy Wong).

In the past few years, public awareness has grown about the race currently underway among states and corporations to dominate the development and deployment of new technologies. This isn’t only a race, however, to lock in the trade advantages that come with tech dominance. It is also a race to shape our societies and the values by which we live. And it is being run on many different tracks, some of them well-known by now—5G telecom networks and artificial intelligence—but others more obscure and unexpected. For example, in late 2019, the Chinese government proposed a change to the deep structure […]

An anti-government protester uses a sling in clashes with riot police during a protest in Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 11, 2021 (AP photo by Sakchai Lalit).

In recent weeks, Thailand, like several other Southeast Asian countries, has erupted in increasingly ferocious street protests. Throughout August, thousands of Thais, including many young people, took to the streets to express their anger at the current government and demand changes at the top. Some younger, desperate and increasingly uncompromising demonstrators have started driving around in groups, battling police and destroying small police stations. The demonstrations initially seemed to take the government, led by former coup leader and now Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, by surprise. But the situation has now become far more dangerous. Thai police have resorted to force, beating demonstrators and firing rubber bullets […]

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attends a ceremony to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Air Force at the Air Base headquarters in Brasilia, Brazil, Jan. 20, 2021 (AP photo by Eraldo Peres).

Brazil’s next presidential election is 13 months away, but already President Jair Bolsonaro has set out on a path that puts him on a collision course with democracy. With every passing day and every new dismal opinion poll, Bolsonaro sounds more like a man who, in the mold of his idol, former U.S. President Donald Trump, is prepared to put his personal political fortune ahead of the country’s democracy and stability. Last weekend, in a meeting with Brazilian evangelical leaders, Bolsonaro melodramatically remarked that he sees three possibilities for his future: “being arrested, killed or victory.” He then added that the first, […]

A student takes notes inside a classroom at a school in Harare, Zimbabwe, Sept. 28, 2020 (AP file photo by Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi).

The topic of my column last week, the first in an occasional series of a Q&As with interesting thinkers, was ostensibly the rapidly changing nature of cities in Africa. But an important subtext of the piece, present throughout the conversation, was African performance or, perhaps better stated, underperformance on a range of issues. My interlocutor last week, George Kankou Denkey, noted, for example, that Africa, a continent that is presently urbanizing on a scale never experienced anywhere before, generally lacks urban planners; even its universities seem unengaged with the topic. Elsewhere, he pointed out that although one of the largest megalopolises […]

Showing 18 - 30 of 30First 1 2