“A History of the Balance of [Economic] Power”, from AD 1 – 2050 via Business Insider
“The True Size of Africa” via oranabutterfly.com
I have shown my students other versions of this map but I like the detail here.
Notes
Africa Notes: Gay Rights and the Alien Tort Statute
Do African politicians have a reason to support gay rights?
A recent conversation with some colleagues and the discovery of a post about “Gay Relief” on Ramblings of a Procastinator in Accra got me thinking again about the politics of homosexuality in Africa. In the blog post, Abena Serwaa writes:
Contrary to what most people believe, African leaders love gay people. In recent times, the African politician has come to realise that no single issue can galvanize and unite the citizenry across the usual divides than calls for gay rights.
As she mentions, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s call for African leaders to respect gay rights has not had its intended effects. Ghana’s President had this to say:
Ghanaian society frowns on homosexuality, if the people’s interest is that we do not legalize homosexuality, I don’t see how any responsible leader can decide to go against the wishes of his people.
And recent Nobel Prize Winner Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf also vowed to veto any bill legalizing homosexuality. Her Press Secretary said this:
Liberians should hold this government by her word. This President will not sign into law anything called same sex marriage. This government opposes gay rights. In fact, government will not compromise its religious belief for any (foreign) aid. We have listened to the vast majority of our people who have spoken on this issue and kicked against it, so this government has the will of the people and believes in the dreams and aspirations of the people and I can assure you that President Sirleaf will not sign that bill.
Of course, Africa is not the only part of the world that struggles to accept gay rights as Brian Whitaker notes, there is an “ongoing battle for gay rights in the Arab world.” And how can we expect this to happen any easier there than it does here in the US? Jimmy Carter, one of our most famous human rights campaigners, has just now come around to supporting gay civil marriages. And I think everyone knows how Santorum has felt about gay rights for some time.
The question becomes: what will it take to incentivize politicians in Africa (and elsewhere) to promote gay rights? No, I don’t yet have the answer.
Can Americans be sued for pursuing anti-gay agendas in Africa?
Indeed, just recently a Ugandan gay rights group, Sexual Minorities Uganda, has filed suit against American evangelist Scott Lively using the Alien Tort Statute (ATS; a statute I have written about here). As reported by the New York Times:
The lawsuit maintains that beginning in 2002, Mr. Lively conspired with religious and political leaders in Uganda to whip up anti-gay hysteria with warnings that gay people would sodomize African children and corrupt their culture.
The Supreme Court is currently hearing a different ATS case which may impact whether other cases such as this get heard. But this could be an interesting way to hold our own extremists accountable.
Africa Notes: Black Star Surf Shop
Surfing in Africa
The Economist, has this story on the “Beach Rush”. I don’t think the numbers of surfers going to Africa are all that substantial, but there are some cool scenes and great possibilities. In the story the mention the Black Star Surf Camp, which is run by theBlack Star Surf Shop at Busua Beach.
The story behind this outfit is pretty neat, involving some help form a couple former Peace Corps Volunteers in the mid-2000s. A brief documentary on their effort is available here:
Personally, I think the sign of their greatest success–or Ghana’s, at any rate–will be when local demand for their services consistently outweighs foreign demand.
Cool: Rachel Katz Hitchhiked Across China
Perhaps not something I would have “advised” a graduating student on a Fulbright to do, but still… pretty neat:
Rachel Katz Hitchhiked Across China.
“Trucks crowd the road, grunting, bundled in tarps and rope, lopsided in places, trundling along in a cloud of dust. They are like a fleet of bellowing whales submerged in the night, each vying for a spot at the front of the pack.”
Research Resources: KOF Index of Globalization
This might be useful. They describe their data:
The KOF Index of Globalization measures the three main dimensions of globalization:
- economic
- social
- and political.
In addition to three indices measuring these dimensions, we calculate an overall index of globalization and sub-indices referring to
- actual economic flows
- economic restrictions
- data on information flows
- data on personal contact
- and data on cultural proximity.
Data are available on a yearly basis for 208 countries over the period 1970 – 2009.
Africa Notes: Angola has had a busy week
I’m not the only one who has noted Angola’s busy week in politics. Africa is a country has a post on this. Here are the big themes:
Fall Elections
The elections are six months away. It is unlikely that the current ruling power, MPLA, will lose power, but that doesn’t mean others are not challenging them.
- A UNITA population, Abel Chivukuvuku has now created his own party to launch his presidential campaign: CASA, short for “Ample Convergence of Angolan Salvation” (Africa is a country)
- Independent newspaper, Folha 8, was raided by Angolan authorities.
- Anti-government protests took place in Luanda and its suburbs. There were minor clashes with police. Attempts to protest in Benguela as well were apparently blocked by police intervention. Concerns about the head of the electoral commission were central to these protests.
- Rafael Marque, who I was fortunate enough to meet not so long ago, testified this week regarding human rights crimes in Angola’s diamond mines (Africa is a country). If human rights is his cause, he might have more work cut out given reports on how the police have handled the recent protests: “Activists Beaten Just Days Before Protest.”
Meanwhile, the President is trying to bolster his self-image. Dos Santos announced new investments in small and medium businesses. Shrikesh Laxmidas at Reuters has a quick overview of the“Key political risks to watch in Angola”: succession, protests, the election itself, transparency, economic growth, and oil dependency.
Angola saves Portugal
The tone of this theme was set last fall, when news reports showed increased investment flows from Angola to Portugal. And, while it has been standard in recent years to discuss the problems of African immigration to Europe, it seems that migration flows are the other way around with respect to Angola. From Reuters:
Pedro Luz, 34, who recently graduated with a second degree in business management, is a typical young professional who has been drawn to Angola by opportunity and better pay. Sent out from Lisbon, he is working as a business consultant on a project that will last four months but expects to stay longer.
“As expatriates here we have a lifestyle we simply don’t get at home,” he said. “If we didn’t have this crisis in Europe, Angola wouldn’t be my first choice.”
Songangol is reportedly in talks to “buy more of Portugal’s Galp”.
Updated: I shouldn’t post things late at night. I accidentally pasted the wrong quote above in the original version of the post (a quote about migration to Brazil instead of Angola… both are covered in the Reuters article).
GEP Course Notes: Conservation in Africa, the Elephant
African elephants have been a major subject recently. News reports state that…
At least half the elephant population in Cameroon’s Bouba N’Djida reserve have been slaughtered because the west African nation sent too few security forces to tackle poachers.
(Reuters)
Over at Africa Unchained, Julie Owono notes that there is a major capacity problem for Cameroonian authorities. But clearly another major problem is that there is global–and in particular Chinese–demand for ivory. Last summer, Deborah Brautigam blogged about how “When China and Africa Dance, the Elephants Get Trampled”, citing an article in Vanity Fair. But today, over at the New York Times, Bettina Wassener, sees this demand traced to Cameroon’s recent elephant massacre (“China’s Hunger for Ivory…”).
But not all of the news is pessimistic. Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe have agreed to establish the “world’s largest wildlife conservation area”, to be known as the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA).
Africa Notes: Top Stories from West Africa
Violence and War
- Mali’s civil war is growing worse and there are discussions about whether ECOWAS should intervene:
- “Tuareg rebels take Mali garrision town, say sources.”
- “Mali Drought, Violence Spur Exodus.” (h/t Sahel Blog)
- “Ivorian general: Regional bloc mulling armed intervention in Mali to stem Tuareg uprising.” (h/t Sahel Blog)
- By the way, isn’t it amazing to see Cote d’Ivoire so quickly getting involved in regional politics? It was just over a year ago that they were on the brink of war.
- Boko Haram is still causing problems in northern Nigeria.
- My post about the failed kidnapping rescue.
- Update: “Boko Haram spokesman denies link to Nigeria kidnap.” But others disagree. The question is how united this organization is.
- My post about the failed kidnapping rescue.
In Court: Kiobel, Shell and Nigeria
- The US Supreme Court decided to hear new arguments in the Kiobel case, about Shell’s complicity in the torture of Nigerians in the Niger Delta. (For more on this case see my previous post).
- I had a chance to meet Justice Scalia when he was at our campus this past Thursday but he was tight-lipped on this active case. He did seem to suggest that he already knew what the outcome would be. And he didn’t seem too unhappy. So that could be a sign that we are about to see a more restricted interpretation of the Alien Tort Statute very soon. Also, I overheard him talking about the Citizens United decision and his view on the freedom of speech. From that I take it that he, at least, doesn’t see that decision really bearing much weight on the broader question of whether corporations are citizens.
- Knox at Opinio Juris seems to agree that we should be pessimistic about future use of the ATS to implement human rights law.
Elections and Democracy
- Senegal is getting ready for the run-off election between incumbent President Wade and challenger Macky Sall.
- Obama hailed Ghana as a “model” of African democracy while Ghanaian President Atta Mills was visiting the White House (Reuters)
Africa Notes: Boko Haram and a failed special forces rescue attempt
Boko Haram is increasingly capturing the media’s attention. Its members have engaged in an unfortunately consistent set of attacks on the Nigerian population over the last two years. As Richard Dowden says in a blog post today (“Boko Haram – More Complicated Than You Think”), this group began as a somewhat peaceful group. For Dowden, it was after their leader was tortured to death in 2009 that violence became part of their agenda. (See also Alex Thurston: “Boko Haram in National Perspective”.)
This group has raised a number of significant challenges for the Nigerian government, which still deals with instability in the Niger Delta. They have tried to ramp up their security, to try them in courts, and to engage in dialogue. It is still not entirely clear what they want (see Dickinson on “What Boko Haram Wants”and Anzalone’s discussion of this), but it is clear that their primary focus is on Nigeria-specific issues. So while their tactics and “jihadi” framing (and perhaps funding?) might tie them to Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), they haven’t yet emphasized that other group’s global agenda.
The impacts of these events are happening at multiple levels. Within Nigeria, there is the obvious political instability that such terrorism breeds. A report last Friday said that 10,000 people had fled Northern Nigeria for Niger and Chad (two of the very poorest countries in the world and not the first place I would go if I were escaping a calamity!). A recent report from Executive Analysis, Ltd at African Arguments, factors in Boko Haram’s activities in considering Nigeria’s “risks of a coup or civil war.” There are also important economic effects within Nigeria. Alex, at SahelBlog, also notes this (and is a great source for information on Boko Haram in general). Chikjioke Ohuocha reported recently for Reuters that the insurgency is “forcing extra spending on security…diverting money away from needed infrastructure spending and could be costing as much as 2 percent of the country’s economic output.” He also cited an investment analyst as saying that the scale and location of the attacks (far from the major commercial hubs) have meant that so far “foreign investors are prepared to live with the threat”.
At the global level, this is impacting international views on both Nigeria and the African continent. IR blogger Walter Russell Mead things Nigeria’s government is “doing little to defuse the threat”. And he uses Boko Haram as an example of how Africa’s problems are still really deep. All of that Afro-optimism that we have been hearing about economic growth across Africa, he suggests, is probably just another “false dawn”.
What happened yesterday: the failed rescue attempt.
British and Nigerian Special Forces failed in a rescue attempt of Italian Franco Lamolinara and British citizen Chris McManus, both of whom were kidnapped by members of Boko Haram. The kidnappers apparently killed the two hostages as retaliation during the rescue attempt. The Italian government is reportedly upset that they were not informed that this action was going to take place.
Alex Thurston at SahelBlog has an important take on these events. Many had said that Boko Haram was not yet engaging in kidnapping but these events suggest we now have clearer evidence to the contrary:
any doubts about whether it really was Boko Haram that kidnapped the Europeans – doubts that stem from the facts that Kebbi is far outside Boko Haram’s normal zone of operations, that Boko Haram never seems to have kidnapped a Westerner before, or that communications from the kidnappers never seemed to fit with the style of either Boko Haram or AQIM – may be swept aside as the narrative takes hold that this kidnapping was a Boko Haram operation, full stop. There are, indeed, many possible explanations that deserve consideration, ranging from the possibility that the kidnappers were opportunistic criminals to the possibility that they were copycats to the possibility that it was Boko Haram itself, or a splinter group. Those complexities, uncertainties, and nuances may now be ignored. Perhaps more importantly, the idea – or the reality (because I really don’t know) – that Boko Haram is kidnapping Westerners will play into larger narratives about what kind of threat the group poses to Nigeria and to the West.
At least some of the kidnappers have been arrested and President Goodluck Jonathan said in a statement “the perpetrators of the murderous act, who have all been arrested, would be made to face the full wrath of the law.”
International Women’s Day
While I “celebrate” International Women’s Day with a lunch and a talk by that famous defender of women’s rights, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, I thought it might be worth taking a moment to think about the broader picture. (Time: “Justice Scalia Mouths Off On Sex Discrimination“)
What does this day mean in the developing world? Duncan Green has a nice post on “what to celebrate, what to condemn“, rounding up much of what the blogosphere has been saying. I think, in short, that we have “come a long way” but there is clearly a long ways to go in ensuring women have equal rights and opportunities. And, of course, we may want to extend this category of rights to other forms of gender discrimination. We can think of the developments and trends at both the global and local levels.
At a global level, there has been the development of treaty law. In my International Law class we cover the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and I have them read Beth Simmons’ interpretation of that convention’s impacts (Mobilizing for Human Rights). She shows that these conventions have had their greatest impacts on countries that are neither strong democracies (who do much of this anyway) nor completely autocratic. The very act of ratification for that large group of countries in the middle enables activists and others in their organization and their ability to place demands on their own governments. In Japan, for instance, she shows it changed the political opportunity structure surrounding government employment practices (they began hiring more women). Last year, Nauru, became the most recent state to ratify CEDAW. (We have not.)
I had a brief view of developments in efforts to improve the opportunities for girls in the late 1990s. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was lucky enough to be a part of a team that helped start a Peace Corps Ghana Gender and Development program and set-up a national girl’s education confence. (Jennifer Miller was really the leader in this, bringing her ideas from a similar program in Niger. Heather Moran rounded out the team.)
Michael Nelson 