Global Politics

While the West seems hell-bent on withdrawing from the global stage and focusing instead on domestic issues, recent developments in Africa point to the continent pulling in the other direction: towards concerted action and deeper integration. The firm response from the Economic Union of West African States (ECOWAS) to the Gambian president’s refusal to accept […]

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Donald Trump is correct: The American intelligence community misled us about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. So that means it’s also mistaken about Russian cyberattacks on the United States. Right? Wrong. On New Year’s Eve, Trump called the Central Intelligence Agency’s claims about WMD a “disaster”—his signature slur—and implied that the agency was fibbing […]

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  On the cusp of a war in which millions lost their lives, borders shifted and modern warfare was revolutionized, Winston Churchill made an observation of Russia: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” For decades, Russia has fascinated […]

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    Hun Sen’s increasingly despotic grip on Cambodia, and his family’s oligopoly of the country’s economy, should invite stronger condemnation and countermeasures from the West.   In July of this year, the NGO Global Witness published an excoriating exposé of Hun Sen, prime minister of Cambodia. The thrust of their criticism was directed at […]

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This piece was originally published by the Centre for Global Constitutionalism The release of over 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian based law firm, has revealed the lengths to which individuals and companies will go to avoid their national tax obligations. When asked about the problem of tax avoidance, President Barack Obama acknowledged that those […]

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  Camille van Gestel has an interesting business card: CEO, co-founder and “agent of light.” That last title captures the passion the Dutch entrepreneur and his business partner, Maurits Groen, bring to Waka Waka, the social-impact company they launched after a 2010 trip to South Africa. Since then, the solar-powered Waka Waka lights and mobile […]

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Last March, the African-American website Grio ran a tongue-in-cheek article listing the five best places for black Americans to move if Donald J. Trump won the presidency. First on the list was Ghana, which the article identified as “one of the more stable democracies” in Africa. That’s true. But as Ghana prepares for its own presidential elections […]

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Turkey has a history of strict censorship which still remains a prominent issue in modern day Istanbul and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Media censorship is at an all time high with 140 press censorship cases already known in the country, newspapers have been shut down and journalists imprisoned. Now censorship is spreading to the […]

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                      Mozambique had the luck of a lottery winner in 2010 when vast gas reserves were discovered offshore in the Rovuma Basin. Amounting to some 85 trillion cubic feet, this is one of the biggest gas discoveries of recent times. If properly harnessed, the discovery […]

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Due to the International Association of Athletic Federations’ (IAAF) June 17th decision to maintain the suspension of the All-Russian Athletic Federation (ARAF), Russian track and field athletes will be largely ineligible for competition in the 2016 Olympic Games. Due to contrasting statements by the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on June 21st, however, there reportedly remains […]

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The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union is certain to have far reaching consequences both domestically and internationally. Dominating early headlines is the idea that this decision could lead to the fragmentation of the UK as geographic divisions have been thrown into sharp relief. With Northern Ireland and Scotland both voting to remain – Scotland […]

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In 2012 a 30 minute documentary about a rebel leader in Uganda set the internet alight. KONY 2012 brought to the public view the gruesome activities of Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and his kidnapping of young children. While the campaign itself was short lived, the Bush and later Obama administrations had already pledged […]

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CC Image courtesy of Rareclass This piece was also published in Huffington Post on 23rd June 2016 Something we in Scotland learned the hard way in 2014 is that referendum questions are dangerous because they make both choices on the ballot paper seem equally plausible. By giving the people a choice we somehow assume that […]

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In trying to puzzle through the populism animating the right and left after the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2015 European migrant crisis, we can draw a worrying parallel between the UK referenda and social and economic populism in the US. As in the US presidential race, the UK’s Remain/Leave debate is complex: it […]

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George Orwell famously wrote that “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Having lived through the Scottish independence referendum, it is hard to believe that less than two years on from that experience the people of the UK are […]

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There are few people who can lay claim to having shaped how the world’s only superpower uses modern technology, but Alec Ross is one of those few. Having played a critical role in developing then Senator Barack Obama’s technology and innovation plan during the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross went on to serve as senior innovation advisor to […]

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Modern crowdfunding—the idea of grassroots fundraising via the internet—officially began in 1997 when the British rock band, Marillion, ran a successful internet fundraising campaign with their adoring fans to finance the band’s North American tour. Since then crowdfunding sites have burgeoned, utilizing dedicated internet platforms to connect entrepreneurs and social-movement-mobilizers with crowds of netizen-investors and supporters to […]

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Many parts of Europe currently face a renaissance of the xenophobic political right. Thus, it is certainly no coincidence that in a recent issue of the “New Statesman” Rowan Williams reminds us that “the toxic brew of paranoia and populism that brought Hitler to power” may not be so far away from liberal democracies as […]

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As a very active supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, I have for the past nine months lived in fear of the day when the strong economy, and the Democratic Party machine’s systematic opposition would finally see off our campaign. The fear was never so much that we wouldn’t get Mr. Sanders, although I am a […]

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On 9th February 2016, Yanis Varoufakis, the unofficial leader of the ‘Democracy in Europe Movement 2025’, and a coalition of activists gathered together in Berlin to launch the ‘DiEM25’ manifesto.  They declared: ‘The EU will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate!’ The former Greek finance minister believes the European Union to be a beautiful conception, […]

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