This post was coauthored with John Campbell. A group of Nigeria watchers, including myself, has sent the secretary of state a letter urging that northeastern Nigeria’s “Boko Haram” not be given a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation. Boko Haram is different from other FTOs, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Tamil Tigers, which have an [...]
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This post first appeared on Africa in Transition. Last week, SAIS hosted a conference on information and communication technology (ICT) and political participation in Africa. Participants explored the potential of ICT to improve governance in Africa by promoting dissent, organizing opposition, enabling large groups to express shared concerns, and reducing communication transaction costs; as well [...]
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This post was coauthored with John Campbell. Further to my post yesterday of continued military control of Mali’s south, Human Rights Watch has released a troubling report on atrocities committed by Tuareg rebels in northern Mali. The catalogue is grim: rape, use of child soldiers, pillaging, summary executions, and amputations. The abuses appear to be [...]
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Update: I was recently interviewed on NPR’s “On the Media.” You can listen here. When Invisible Children released its call to “make Kony famous” on April 20, Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker about the inadequacy of social media to affect social change came immediately to mind. The Kony 2012 video, with its eighty [...]
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My attention was recently called to a neat online anti-corruption tool–Ipaidabribe.com (h/t Debbie McCoy). As the name implies, the original founders set up a crowdsourcing website to report and track corruption in India. It is probably too soon to judge whether the site has had an impact on corruption (an oft cited success is an [...]
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