In-Depth Archive

The threats arrived in October by Whatsapp messages and pamphlets that were circulated around the northern Colombian town of Segovia. They placed a death sentence on every one of the 1,600 workers of Grupo Damasa, the business that operates the town’s richest gold mines, if the mining company did not pay a gold “tax.” “Stop working or we will stop you. We’re not playing,” they read. Within two months, four of the company’s miners were dead; two more had been shot; and one of its processing mills was attacked with a grenade. But still, Grupo Damasa’s owner would not pay […]

Long considered to be a post-conflict success story, Mozambique currently finds itself in a period of uncertainty, with past political progress and current economic opportunities threatened by unresolved tensions on both fronts. The government’s decades-long war with the Mozambican National Resistance, a rebel group turned political party that is known as Renamo, officially ended 24 years ago. After a period of postwar reconstruction, the country has enjoyed steady and solid economic progress. GDP growth has averaged between 7 and 8 percent for the past decade, and the discovery of significant reserves of coal and gas have driven robust foreign investment. […]

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. DAKAR, Senegal—“Africa’s luck is that it has youth on its side. But we need to harness that luck,” says Senegalese rapper Keyti, his voice ringing out to the crowd of young people before him at Cheikh Anta Diop University’s outdoor basketball court. It’s a mid-November evening in Dakar, Senegal’s capital. Hundreds of men, mostly youth, gather on plastic chairs or dangle their legs over cement ledges, gazing out onto center court, listening […]

In a scene from a compelling documentary called “Dreaming of Denmark,” two teenagers sit on a snowy European slope, chatting in Danish. When one of them, Mussa, describes himself as Danish, the other, his Afghan friend named Wasi, reminds him he’s Ethiopian. “Oh, yeah,” Mussa says, giggling. He had just obtained his Danish passport, after three years of living in a shelter for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Denmark, and was clearly well on his way to building a life in his new homeland. The scene was filmed in 2014, but couldn’t be more relevant today. The question on the minds […]

On Nov. 26, the editor-in-chief and the Ankara bureau chief of Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper, were detained on the grounds that they had “divulged state secrets” after they published articles and videos alleging that Turkey’s intelligence agency smuggled weapons to jihadists in Syria. The editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, had been scheduled to speak at a conference on press freedom in the Middle East at Boston College. He decided at the last minute not to attend, “for fear something might happen at Cumhuriyet while he was gone,” as one of the conference organizers told me. His fears were not unfounded. Turkish Prime […]