Archive for the ‘Africa’ Category

From April 10^th  to April 17^th , two students from the current IE Master in International Relations intake went on a study trip to Ghana with the Financieros sin Fronteras (FsF) microfinance NGO. The two students will be working with the founder of FsF, Maria Luque, towards a final project on financial inclusion and gender equality in Ghana that they will present in July. This is some of the feedback the students had upon their return.

“The trip to Ghana to work on our thesis with Financieros Sin Fronteras was an enriching and valuable experience. We met with and interviewed state officials in charge of policy-making, executives from international organisations and institutions working at the grassroots level as well as people from the small towns and villages who are actually the target audience for micro-finance. Not only was it a great opportunity to research for our papers but we also had the opportunity to meet and interact with students from various Finance masters and get a sneak peek into the world of Consultancy.  It was our first time in Africa and we were pleasantly surprised at how different Ghana was from our stereotypical expectations. The experience of being immersed in a totally new and different culture with warm welcoming people was wonderful and we only wish we could have stayed much longer!”  –Naushita Jaising and Xuyang Ma

By Fareed Zakaria

Egyptian protesters use camera phones on Monday to capture a burning state security armored vehicle that demonstrators commandeered during clashes with security forces nearby and brought to Tahrir Square and set it alight, in Cairo, Egypt. (Mostafa El Shemy/AP)

The chaos at the second anniversary of the Tahrir Square uprising is only the latest and most vivid illustration that Egypt’s revolution is going off the rails. It has revived talk about the failure of the Arab Spring and even some nostalgia for the old order. But Arab dictators such as Hosni Mubarak could not have held onto power without even greater troubles; look at Syria. Events in the Middle East the past two years underscore that constitutions are as vital as elections and that good leadership is crucial in these transitions.

Compare the differences between Egypt and Jordan. At the start of the Arab Spring, it appeared that Egypt had responded to the will of its people, had made a clean break with its tyrannical past and was ushering in a new birth of freedom. Jordan, by contrast, responded with a few personnel changes, some promises to study the situation and talk of reform.

But then Egypt started going down the wrong path, and Jordan made a set of wise choices.

Put simply, Egypt chose democratization before liberalization. Elections became the most important element of the new order, used in legitimizing the new government, electing a president and ratifying the new constitution. As a result, the best organized force in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, swept into power, even though, on the first ballot, only 25 percent of voters chose its presidential nominee, Mohamed Morsi. The Brotherhood was also able to dominate the drafting of the constitution. The document had many defects, including its failure to explicitly protect women’s rights — only four of the constitutional assembly’s 85 members were women — and language that seems to enshrine the traditional “character” of the Egyptian family. It also weakens protections for religious minorities such as the Bahais, who already face persecution. Read more…

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and editor at large of Time magazine.

As published in www.washingtonpost.com on January 31, 2013.

The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west.

By Glenn Greenwald

French troops board a transport plane in N’Djamena, Chad, bound for Mali.

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.

First, as the New York Times’ background account from this morning makes clear, much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato’s intervention in Libya. Specifically, “heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya” and “the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back” played the precipitating role in the collapse of the US-supported central government. As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column this morning in the Independent:

“This intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . . [T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback.” Read more…

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian.

As published in www.guardian.co.uk on January 14, 2013.