Trade Archive

This week, India hosted representatives of 54 African countries for the third India-Africa Forum Summit in New Delhi, with security, investment and U.N. reform on the agenda. In an email interview, Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, the chief executive of the South African Institute of International Affairs, discussed India’s Africa outreach. WPR: How has India’s economic engagement in Africa expanded in recent years, and in what sectors and countries has India invested the most? Elizabeth Sidiropulos: Indian companies have been present on the continent for many decades, particularly in East Africa where, historically, there has been a large Indian diaspora. However, the relationship […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to India in early October was the second summit-level meeting she has had with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the span of a month. These talks have themselves been preceded by a flurry of other high-level exchanges. Both sides seem keen to dispel any notion of a lack of momentum in bilateral relations, a view that has arisen ever since Modi failed to meet Merkel in Berlin during his trip to Germany last year. Germany is eager to take advantage of Modi’s renewed push for economic growth through clean energy initiatives and manufacturing. Germany has […]

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United Kingdom this week has largely attracted the wrong kind of headlines. Reactions from experts and officials in the United States and across Europe have been scathing, ranging from the bemused to the disturbed. Many contend that Britain’s China policy, at the instigation of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has been reduced solely to matters of commerce. Not only do strategic matters in Asia, human rights concerns, and threats to democracy in Hong Kong appear to be virtually absent from the U.K.’s considerations, the British government gives the impression of believing that […]

France’s increasingly close rapport with Saudi Arabia under President Francois Hollande has incensed some of his critics, who label him a hypocrite for touting a human rights agenda while maintaining cozy ties with the oil-rich Gulf nation notorious for public executions and beatings. Just recently, Riyadh stoked international outrage over news that 20-year-old Ali al-Nimr, arrested four years ago during anti-government protests—along with hundreds of other, mostly Shiite protesters in the city of Qatif—would be sentenced to death. Although France has not been particularly outspoken on Saudi Arabia’s frequent executions—175 in 12 months, according to an Amnesty International report from […]

Miguel Rodriguez can’t quite believe what he’s planning to do on Dec. 6. A father of six, the 47-year-old farmer in Venezuela’s central state of Aragua has voted for the late Hugo Chavez, or for Chavez’s followers and initiatives, in all 17 elections since Chavez was first elected president in 1998. But Rodriguez is breaking his streak this year, abandoning Chavez’s anointed successor, President Nicolas Maduro, and vowing to vote for Chavez’s opponents in the Dec. 6 congressional elections. “I believed in Chavez and the revolution,” says Rodriguez, looking over his fields, which now lay fallow. “But now there is […]