Southern Africa Archive

Earlier this month South Africa announced plans to relocate 200 rhinoceroses after anti-poaching efforts in Kruger National Park proved ineffective. In an email interview, Natasha White, a research assistant at the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, discussed poaching trends in Africa. WPR: What new tactics are governments adopting to curb poaching, and what is driving their adoption? Natasha White: Over the past few years, there has been a shift in the scale and nature of poaching. Governments are increasingly acknowledging the severity of its impacts, which stretch far beyond the devastating drop in elephant and […]

In a reversal of historical trends, emerging countries are now going to great lengths to buy into portions of Europe’s sluggish industrial system. In the gloomy context of an old continent struggling to overcome the crisis that has been gripping its economies since 2007, businesses from developing nations are queuing to purchase valuable European assets, often in countries that were once their colonial rulers. As a consequence of the growing importance that their own countries have gained on the world stage, private and public managers from China, India and the Persian Gulf countries are now familiar figures in the governing […]

The open feuding within Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, intensified last month, as rivals battled over the succession to 90-year-old President Robert Mugabe. This culminated in the dismissal by Mugabe of Vice President Joice Mujuru and her allies in the Cabinet, a move that handed Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa the advantage in the succession race. Mnangagwa benefited from the support of the president’s wife, Grace Mugabe. With Mujuru apparently neutralized, the question is whether that alliance will hold, or whether it will be undermined by rival ambitions. The purge of December 2014 still leaves a whole host of issues unresolved in […]