The establishment of a human rights monitoring mechanism in the Western Sahara, preferably through an expansion of MINURSO’s mandate, would change the underlying dynamics of the conflict and allow for progress in the negotiation process.
Turkey’s EU accession negotiations completed their fifth year on 3 October 2010. However, despite annual declarations on the Turkish side that each new year would be ‘the year of the EU’, negotiations seem to be progressing very slowly and the prospects for their timely completion look dim.
The so-called ‘Egyptian Revolution’, led by the country’s middle-class urban youth, has led to sweeping social and cultural changes that constitute the main asset for a transition towards a more democratic regime, despite the uncertainties regarding the political future following the fall of Mubarak.
The Saleh era has been marked by rampant corruption, personalisation of the State, the distortion of culture, social divisiveness and rent-seeking. In the eyes of many Yemenis, President Ali Abdullah Saleh is now part of the problem, not the solution.
Security and the intervention of external powers are at the heart of the foreign policies of the Gulf countries.
Remarks by Joseph Mutaboba, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Guinea-Bissau, on the peace-building priorities in this country at the Elcano Royal Institute (Madrid) on16 February 2011.
After 23 years of reign without sharing, the regime of the president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fell after only a little less than a month of contesting of unprecedented scale. After more than two decades of silence and fear, Tunisians dared and tried the unthinkable.
Sensationalism and rumours cloud our ability to understand China’s growing engagement in Africa, and to craft appropriate responses. This paper dissects seven common myths on China in Africa.
The concept and measurement of ‘failed states’ is not generally helpful in understanding the economic and political realities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This analysis reviews the effects of climate change in Africa, the response measures undertaken in the continent and the expected position of African countries in Cancún, Mexico.
Mineral and fuel abundance does not determine either the political or economic trajectory of less developed countries.
This ARI addresses the analytical and empirical links between resource extraction, governance and development, with a focus on the resource-curse thesis. The rent curse is rooted in policy failure, which the theory of rent cycling attributes to the impact of rent on elite incentives and also on development trajectory. The paper provides some examples of conditions that have facilitated this process in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa.