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In recent years, the impressive economic performances of Ethiopia and Rwanda have meant that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development. Beyond the obvious concern that donors become complicit in human rights violations, the main question facing authoritarian development in Africa has always been whether the economic gains achieved under repressive rule are sustainable.

if Ethiopia is no longer seen as a success story, then the case for authoritarian development in Africa falls apart. Already, the EU has suspended nearly €90 million ($110 million) in budgetary aid to the country because of concerns over the government’s handling of the conflict in Tigray. Growing evidence that authoritarian politics can have devastating developmental consequences will also give a shot in the arm to organizations like the Westminster Foundation for Democracy that argue that the international community should be doing development democratically.

it has become more common for international donors and aid practitioners to question the value of democracy for development—and to suggest that authoritarian governments that can force through necessary reforms might be more effective in some cases.

In 2019 SOS International (SOSi), a Virginia company with links to the U.S. military, won exclusive access to mines across Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani’s brother is a major shareholder of a SOSi subsidiary. President Ghani granted this SOSi subsidiary, Southern Development, rights to buy artisanally mined ore. Southern Development operates a mineral processing plant on the outskirts of Kabul. The inroads made by SOSi and Southern Development into Afghanistan’s mining sector have roots in a 2011 initiative by U.S. special forces to work illegally with members of a pro-government Afghan militia on mining in Kunar province. Although shut down after an inquiry, these Kunar projects have since been quietly restarted as a private venture, and are benefitting those closest to the president.

The Taliban and other armed groups have battled both the central government and each other for control of the mines, using them to fund their insurgencies. Even former U.S. President Donald Trump coveted Afghanistan’s gold, lithium, uranium, and other mineral riches. In 2017, Trump was persuaded to keep troops in the country by its president, Ashraf Ghani, who dangled the prospect of mining contracts for American companies.

In 2011, American Special Forces operators introduced an eastern Kunar paramilitary commander, Noor Mohammed, and his deputy, known as Farhad, to a small Pentagon business development office called the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations. The Task Force, which operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, aimed to create jobs for locals in key industries like mining as part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy. In theory, good jobs would stop Afghans from joining the militants. “Their mission, to create small-scale, sustainable mining operations for the Afghans, was a solid fit to our FID [Foreign Internal Defense] mission,” said Heinz Dinter, a former Special Forces officer. The commandos asked the Task Force to help the two local warlords, who were illegally dealing in chromite, a valuable anti-corrosion additive used in stainless steel and aircraft paint. Afghan chromite is prized for its exceptional purity. With a crusher provided by the Pentagon, Mohammed and Farhad began to process their ore at Combat Outpost Penich, a small NATO base in eastern Kunar.

Millions of people are being pushed towards hunger by the coronavirus pandemic, which could end up killing more people through lack of food than from the illness itself, Oxfam has warned.

Closed borders, curfews and travel restrictions have disrupted food supplies and incomes in already fragile countries, forcing an extra million people closer to famine in Afghanistan and heightening the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, where two-thirds already live in hunger.

Oxfam said that up to 12,000 people could die from hunger every day globally – 2,000 more than died from Covid-19 each day in April

My research has shown that as the Green Revolution project reaches its 2020 deadline, crop productivity has grown slowly, poverty remains high, and the number of hungry people in the 13 countries that have received priority funding has risen 30% since 2006. Few small-scale farmers have benefited. Some have been thrown into debt as they try to pay for the high costs of the commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer that Green Revolution proponents sell them. This disappointing track record comes in spite of $1 billion in funding for AGRA and $1 billion per year in subsidies from African governments to encourage their farmers to buy these high-priced inputs.

For the last 14 years, governments and donors have bet heavily, and almost exclusively, on the Green Revolution formula of commercial inputs, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and agro-chemicals. That gamble has failed to generate agricultural productivity, even as the continent has seen a strong period of economic growth. Rural poverty remains high. Hunger is rampant, with the United Nations warning that Africa could see a 73% surge in undernourishment by 2030 if policies don’t change

agroecology, with its innovative combination of ecological science and farmers’ knowledge and practices, can restore degraded soils, make farms more resilient to climate change, improve food security and nutrition by growing and consuming a diversity of crops, all at a fraction of the cost — to farmers and to African governments — of the Green Revolution approach

Political leaders are usually insulated from major health scares by their wealth and access to private health care. But the coronavirus has already impacted leaders across the world

The consequences will be very different in countries where political institutions are weaker and where the illness or death of a leader has been known to generate the kind of power vacuum that might inspire rival leaders, opposition parties, or the military to launch a power grab. This is a particular problem in countries where checks and balances are weak and political parties don’t have strong decision-making mechanisms, which is true in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Europe

In countries where politics are more personalized, the death of a leader can trigger damaging succession battles that can split the ruling party and, in the worst cases, encourage a military coup

18 October marks the 35th week of mass demonstrations involving millions of people in cities across Algeria. It follows a week of even larger marches, by students, workers and the general population for democracy, against repression of young people in the protests, against corruption and that an illegitimate parliament is now attempting to debate laws such as the Hydrocarbon Bill.

Upon the trigger of President Bouteflika’s decision to stand for a fifth mandate, violating the constitution, following Friday prayers, millions of Algerians took to the streets to demonstrate for democracy –breaking a wall of fear against protest.And they have occupied that space ever since.

Every Friday since that date, millions of Algerians have marched in every city of the country. Every Tuesday millions of students have marched. And every week, concessions and reforms have been made in response.

addressing children’s concerns is definitely a political anomaly. Even though they represent close to a third (!) of the world’s population

Even though children can’t vote, they definitely have a worldview of their own. And it’s quite a clear vision. They worry about transnational issues and don’t trust politicians to do good by them.

Taking children’s perspectives seriously is key to understanding the world around us more clearly, and may even present a path to a more humane kind of politics.

shadowy, nominally legal practices can contribute to corruption, and perhaps should be considered corrupt themselves. An important manifestation of this phenomenon is the pipeline between government military intelligence services and the private intelligence industry

many 8200 veterans go on to develop technologies for private intelligence and to found or work for private intelligence companies like Psy Group, Black Cube, Mitiga, and NSO Group, to name just a few.

former intelligence officers are often marketing their familiarity with—and ability to replicate—the very same technologies that are used by the military intelligence services. This is not analogous to former government officials using their expertise to get more lucrative jobs in industry; it’s more like former government officials selling government-developed technologies and techniques for private gain. The violation of public trust is similar

How do we recognise government attempts to deform a liberal democracy so as to get their way? As Putin, Erdogan and a host of others have demonstrated, there must be 50 ways to lose your constitution as any kind of constraint on incumbents exercising raw power as they wish. Perhaps the majority party calls the legislature to consider new laws at 5.30am (without informing the opposition). Or perhaps the opposition is notified but opposing MPs are intimidated by an induced deadline crisis and media blackguarding in every lobby. Perhaps a president suspends the legislature for a lengthy period and governs alone using decree powers supposedly reserved for an emergency, as many a Latin American banana republic did before the transition from authoritarian rule.

All the ‘British constitution’ texts have long reiterated the same message. The lack of codification of the UK’s constitution presented no substantial dangers, but instead gifted the country with a set of legal and constitutional arrangements that could easily flex and adapt for changing times and situations. The UK would have none of the irresolvable legacy problems of written constitutions gone obsolescent, such as the USA’s current enduring problems over the Second Amendment on the carrying of firearms. A great deal of faith was also placed in British elites’ developed respect for Parliament, for public opinion and for legality.

Theresa May’s government demonstrated not an elite responsiveness to MPs after 2017, but instead an increasingly frenzied exploitation of a host of parliamentary micro-institutions to bulldoze the May-Whitehall compromise Brexit deal through a reluctant Commons where government policies had no majority. This was the curtain raiser for the Johnson government’s more grand-scale effort to unilaterally rework the UK constitution so as to give the PM ‘governance by decree’ powers.

Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.

this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.

The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.

In Liverpool, shocking new data shows that there has been an unprecedented rise in infant mortality in recent years, with academics attributing at least a third of those deaths to rising child poverty.

we now have clear evidence of how the government's agenda over the past 10 years has directly and negatively affected people's lives

This week, Professor Sir Michael Marmot's review into Health Equity in England was published, 10 years after he first warned that growing inequalities in the country would lead to worse health outcomes for people.

"If you could name one thing that would really change your life, what would it be?" I ask. I’m expecting him to say a better house, or more food, or a doctor, or education for his kids. I’m expecting him to mention one of the things relief money often provides for.But Lebrun grins broadly at me, revealing a missing tooth, and says, "What would help me most? A land registry."

What Lebrun needs is security – security he can build a future on. And he needs agencies to safeguard that security. What Lebrun needs is bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is also the system that organises everything into procedures that are the same for everybody. It’s what holds societies together. It’s not excessive; it’s indispensable.

Vietnam seems to be the consensus pick for winner of the U.S.-China trade war, as Chinese and other manufacturers shift production to the cheaper Southeast Asian nation. If there’s a loser, at least in terms of missed opportunities, it may be the countries of South Asia.

Faced with rising costs, Chinese manufacturers must decide whether to invest in labor-saving automation technologies or to relocate. Those choosing the latter present an enormous opportunity for less-developed countries, as Chinese companies can help spark industrialization and much-needed economic transformation in their new homes. 

The only proven pathway to long-lasting, broad-based prosperity has been to build a manufacturing sector linked to global value chains, which raises productivity levels and creates knock-on jobs across the whole economy

Urgent necessities of a domestic nature have determined the timing of Operation Peace Spring that Turkey launched Oct. 9 along the Syrian border east of the Euphrates against the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been building a self-rule in the region thanks to US protection and military support.

the operation came in the wake of the local elections earlier this year in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered major losses. The economic crisis bruising Turkey proved a major factor in the party’s debacles in big cities in the March 31 polls and the June 23 rerun of the mayoral vote in Istanbul, giving impetus to rupture trends within the AKP.

Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting

The authoritarian normalization that continues to mark relations between Turkey’s political and military echelons since the 2016 failed coup is now affecting the policymaking process in the country's defense industry. The industry is the new favorite of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as the bruising financial crisis heavily hit his former favorite sector, construction.

Four major reasons are behind Erdogan's piqued interest in the defense industry: First, Erdogan's popular support drastically increased after Turkey’s Oct. 9 incursion into Syria, known as Operation Peace Spring. Second, the defense industry is a good tool for producing success stories to divert public attention at a time of economic crisis. Third, success in the defense realm offers political gains in foreign policy. And finally, it creates profitable export opportunities to several countries including Qatar, Pakistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and some African nations.

In December 2017, Erdogan issued a decree placing TSKGV under his auspices. Since then, however, Erdogan hasn’t quite managed to establish full control over the institution, which mainly remains under the influence of the retired generals.

Hundreds of children in Indonesia are believed to have died from COVID-19, giving the Southeast Asian country one of the world's highest rates of child deaths from the novel coronavirus, which experts around the world say poses little danger to the young. Paediatricians and health officials in the world's fourth-most-populous country said the high number of child deaths from a disease that mostly kills the elderly was due to underlying factors, in particular malnutrition, anaemia and inadequate child health facilities.

Since Indonesia announced its first coronavirus case in March, it has recorded 2,000 deaths, the highest in the Asia Pacific outside China.

Indonesia, a developing country of 270 million, suffers from a "triple burden of malnutrition," which includes stunting, anaemia among mothers, and obesity, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Indonesia has passed a wide-ranging bill that will weaken environmental protections and workers’ rights in an attempt to boost investment, a move condemned as a “tragic miscalculation” that could lead to “uncontrolled deforestation”.Groups representing millions of workers said they would strike on Tuesday in response to protest against the bill, which will amend about 1,200 provisions in 79 existing laws after it was pushed through parliament with unprecedented speed

The bill has also been criticised by both environmental experts and some of the world’s biggest investors, who expressed concern over its impact on the country’s tropical forests.

The government argues that the bill will make the country more attractive to investors at a time when the economy is reeling from the impact of Covid-19. Millions of people have lost their jobs as a result of the virus, which has infected more than 300,000 people and claimed 11,253 lives.

hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined

hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”