Human Security Archive

For the third time in four years, Hondurans are calling for the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernandez, decrying him as a “narco dictator.” In early August, Hernandez was named in a 44-page court filing by the U.S. Southern District of New York, which alleges he funded his 2013 election campaign with $1.5 million in drug trafficking money. Hondurans have poured into the streets since the charges were announced, joining a protest movement against Hernandez that is entering its fifth month. Demonstrations kicked off in the spring against unpopular reforms his government proposed to health care and education. The U.S. […]

Migration barely came up at the recent G-7 summit in France—a far cry from just two years ago, when Italy hosted the G-7 in Sicily, which has seen an influx of migrants and asylum-seekers given its proximity to North Africa. The most prominent mention of migration in Biarritz took place on the sidelines of the summit, when President Donald Trump’s adviser, Stephen Miller—the architect of the administration’s restrictionist immigration policies—defended Trump’s efforts to make migrating to the United States even more onerous than it already is. Yet even if migration has fallen off the front pages, each member of the […]

Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. It was an early evening in May, and Stephane hurried his boyfriend out the door of their apartment so they would arrive before the tables filled up at Victoire Bar, a roadside dive in the Essos neighborhood of Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon. Sunday nights at the Victoire offered one of the few regular meeting points for the city’s secretive but closely knit community of men who identified as gay or bisexual—or […]

The peace agreement signed recently in Mozambique by President Filipe Nyusi and the head of the former rebel group Renamo, now a political party, addresses the two critical issues that have festered since an accord in 1992 never fully ended the country’s civil war. The deal includes provisions for the full demobilization of Renamo fighters, with the integration of selected Renamo personnel into the armed forces, and the decentralization of political power. It is the second attempt to end renewed conflict between rebels and the government since 1992, following an earlier agreement in 2014 that was supposed to end a […]

This weekend, leaders from the G-7 will convene for their annual summit, this time in Biarritz, France. French President Emmanuel Macron, who is spearheading France’s G-7 presidency this year, bills the meeting as a chance to relaunch multilateralism, promote democracy and tame globalization to ensure it works for everyone. More likely, the gathering will expose the political, economic and ideological fault lines threatening Western solidarity and international cooperation. What a difference five years makes. Back in 2014, the G-7 gained a new and unexpected lease on life after Russia seized Crimea and earned itself an ejection from what was then […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. After a two-day truce to observe the Eid al-Adha holiday, fighting has resumed in Libya. Any hope that the brief pause might signal a path to the resolution of a conflict that erupted in April, when military strongman Khalifa Haftar began his campaign to conquer the capital, Tripoli, quickly evaporated. Since Haftar launched his assault on Tripoli, 1,100 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced. Even as the truce was announced, a car bomb exploded in the eastern city of […]

Two weeks after the release of new government data showing a sharp rise in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, hundreds of indigenous women occupied a government building in Brasilia on Tuesday to protest what they called President Jair Bolsonaro’s “genocidal” environmental policies targeting their communities. The following day, a contingent of over 1,000 indigenous women joined some 100,000 other demonstrators in Brazil’s Women’s March on the streets of the capital. “We are all warriors on the front lines of this struggle against today’s political situation, which is so adverse to our peoples,” said Sonia Guajajara, who works with the organization […]

There is a simple metric that many will use to judge the performance of Guatemala’s next president: Can he stop the exodus of people fleeing the country? Alejandro Giammattei, the leader of the right-wing Vamos party who won Sunday’s runoff convincingly over Sandra Torres of the center-left National Unity of Hope party, says he has a plan. But there are many reasons to be skeptical. According to local estimates, nearly 250,000 Guatemalans left their country in the first half of this year, equivalent to 1.5 percent of the population of some 17 million, and most of them headed for the […]

In a sudden move on Aug. 5, India’s government announced it was eliminating the special, semiautonomous status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir by revoking Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The decision is a watershed moment in the 72-year-long standoff between India and Pakistan over control of the Kashmir region, as well as for the Kashmiri peoples’ long struggle for political autonomy. It opens an uncertain new chapter in Indian-administered Kashmir, with reverberations far beyond its contested borders. The historic arrangement under which Jammu and Kashmir was to have a greater degree of political autonomy than other Indian […]

In mid-July, government officials inaugurated operations at the sprawling Mirador mine in southern Ecuador. An open-pit copper, gold and silver mine in the Zamora-Chinchipe province near the Peruvian border, Mirador’s reserves reportedly include 3.2 million tons of copper, 3.4 million ounces of gold and 27.1 million ounces of silver. The amount of copper makes it Ecuador’s largest copper mine, but still smaller than the massive copper mines in Chile and Peru. The mine, which can already produce 10,000 tons of minerals per day, is expected to increase its output to 60,000 tons per day and potentially earn the Ecuadorian government […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. Last month, the Constitutional Court of Colombia upheld restrictions that it imposed in 2017 on the aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate to eradicate coca, the base ingredient in cocaine. But the court said aerial spraying could resume if the government meets certain conditions. The decision was a setback for President Ivan Duque’s efforts to restart the program, which was suspended by his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, in 2015, due to a finding by the World Health Organization that glyphosate […]

In a significant escalation, President Donald Trump announced a total economic embargo on Venezuela yesterday, issuing an executive order that would block all transactions with the government and its officials and freeze their property and assets in the United States. The move came on the eve of a meeting in Peru held by the Lima Group, a multilateral body of Latin American countries that supports opposition leader Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, rather than Nicolas Maduro. Fifty-nine countries, including the United States, are attending. The Venezuelan government and its few remaining partners, such as Russia, are not. […]

Facing a competitive reelection campaign, Argentine President Mauricio Macri took an unexpected gamble last month in his choice of a running mate: Miguel Angel Pichetto, an opposition stalwart who has nonetheless helped the government advance critical reforms from his perch as the most senior senator from the Justicialist Party, the main political vehicle for the opposition Peronist movement. The move was widely praised by analysts. Pichetto is a moderate, so he can help Macri lure Peronists who are anxious about their party’s more populist ticket, which includes the polarizing former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as its vice-presidential candidate. But […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series on prison conditions and criminal justice policy around the world. Sixty-two people are dead following a riot at a prison in northern Brazil earlier this week. Fifty-eight inmates were killed when a fight broke out between rival gangs at a prison in Altamira, in Para state, including 16 who were beheaded. Four more inmates were murdered while being transferred to a different facility. In an email interview with WPR, Robert Muggah, co-founder and research director at the Igarape Institute in Rio de Janeiro, explains why deadly prison riots are so […]

Latin America is experiencing the largest migration crisis in its modern history, with millions of people fleeing desperate conditions in Central America and Venezuela in search of refuge elsewhere in the hemisphere. Nowhere has the human drama translated into a more acute political battle than in the United States, where President Donald Trump has placed immigration at the center of his administration’s agenda, making it a prominent issue in the nation’s political debate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Last week, Judah Grunstein, WPR’s editor-in-chief and a longtime friend, offered a thoughtful analysis of the reasons triggering the […]