To mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations in 2020, its member states issued a collective declaration to express their commitment to transformative change and new efforts to address the major challenges of the 21st century. In the same declaration, they also committed to “listening to and working with youth.” But what does this mean in practice? When young thinkers and activists are asked what needs to change with regard to how the international system engages with them, the word they most often use is “tokenistic.” They are sick of being asked to speak at events, ostensibly on behalf [...]
Opposing corruption is not “easy” nor is doing so a “convenient distraction” from addressing “the world’s most persistent ills and injustices,” as Gabriella Cook Francis and Christopher Sabatini argued in a recent World Politics Review article titled, “The Corruption Obsession is a Convenient Distraction.” To the contrary, we insist that the “ills and injustices” to which the authors refer will never be properly addressed while endemic serious corruption, kleptocracy and state capture are allowed to persist in modern states. Our interest in the topic and our desire to correct what we consider to be the misconceptions in their article stem from our [...]
Last week, the United Nations’ top court ordered Uganda to pay the sum of $325 million to the Democratic Republic of Congo for the East African country’s role in the brutal war there at the turn of the century. The International Court of Justice, or ICJ, ruled on Feb. 9 that Uganda had violated international norms as an occupying force between 1998 and 2003, and was responsible for the deaths of up to 15,000 people in Congo’s eastern Ituri region. Ugandan troops were also found to have looted precious gold, diamonds and timber from Congo. The case is both an [...]
