Western Europe Archive

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. Following years of negotiations between the German and Namibian governments, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas officially acknowledged last week that Germany had committed genocide against Namibia’s Herero and Nama people at the start of the 20th century. As part of the agreement, Berlin […]

While Americans commemorated their fallen soldiers on Memorial Day this week, a group of activists in Luxembourg were inaugurating a different kind of war memorial. Handicap International Belgium, that country’s chapter of an NGO originally dedicated to civilian victims of landmines, unveiled a sculpture by artist Manolis Manarakis commemorating the civilian dead of all modern wars. It was the latest in a series of monument unveilings, including another just last month in Brussels, meant not only to recognize civilian victims of war, but to underscore their absence in the global culture of war memorials. In the United States, Memorial Day […]

Developments in the Eastern Mediterranean region are unfolding at a breakneck pace. Blink an eye and one is bound to miss a new multilateral initiative, an impressive military exercise or even the creation of an international organization. Greece is very much in the middle of this diplomatic and military frenzy, so understanding Greek foreign policy can provide penetrating insights into developments in the region. Athens views the Eastern Mediterranean as a source of turbulence and instability—a transit route for waves of refugees, bordered by war-torn states like Libya and Syria, and with the potential for jihadist terrorist attacks. The recent […]

A decade ago, while researching a book about Chinese migration to Africa, I made an extended stay in Namibia, then one of a small number of African countries I had never visited in a lifetime of writing about the continent. To get to know the place as well as I could, I rented a car and drove with my brother, James, throughout much of the country, a land more than twice the size of Germany. The reference here is appropriate, because it was Germany, a relative latecomer to European imperialism in Africa, that colonized Namibia toward the close of the […]