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Bureaucracy, in short, is all the fundamental building blocks of civilisation some people have the luxury of taking for granted.

These days, a westerner can hardly imagine how complicated the world would be without bureaucracy. But try to picture it: living without an address, without a social security number. Could you open a bank account? No. Start a business? No way. Register to vote? Never.And yet, about four billion people around the world have no address.

imagine having no proper tax authority. Without one, a government loses out on billions of dollars of potential revenue. There’s no money for social services or infrastructure. People living in poverty stay living in poverty.

people living in poverty own much more than they’re able to prove on paper. In Cairo, for example, they have $241.4bn worth of unregistered property, according to De Soto. In his book The Mystery of Capital (2000), he puts this figure into perspective: it’s six times all the money held in Egyptian savings accounts, 30 times the market value of every publicly listed company in Cairo, and 116 times the value of all Egypt’s privatised former state companies.

Without papers proving ownership, you can’t record the sale of your property or use it as collateral to secure a loan.The evidence is ample: bureaucracy – and the security that comes with it – is what people living in poverty need to climb out of poverty.

one agency after the other has started donating paperwork, Excel sheets and bookkeeping courses. They call it "capacity building".

Tax Inspectors Without Borders

British tax veteran Lee Corrick went to Kenya in 2011 to train local inspectors. For years, the Kenyan tax office had had problems with a big multinational company – something to do with tea auction licence rights and letters of credit. It sounds overly complicated, and the Kenyans thought so too. But after two workshops with Corrick and a stern talk with the multinational, the Kenyan tax office managed to collect $23m. In fact, revenues from Kenyan tax inspections doubled after Corrick came to town. And in Colombia, the take increased tenfold after training.

In one area, farmers’ land was officially added to a land registry; in another, it wasn’t. The researchers then looked at how the farmers used their land.Here’s what they found: farmers who owned their land on paper invested more. For example, they more often planted trees, such as oil palms, that would continue to provide income all their lives. And since they no longer feared their land would be snatched out from under them, they spent less time guarding it. That left them more time to do other things – like earn money.

If development economists and people living in poverty like Lebrun are calling for bureaucracy outright, why doesn’t everyone – aid organisations, governments, companies – get behind it 100%?The answer is simple. Bureaucracy is boring.

A TV ad showing a sweetly smiling Haitian girl who’s just got her first school uniform works better than one with a blah bureaucrat in a fluorescent-lit office drawing lines on paper with a ruler

capacity building remains the neglected stepchild

the truth is, real progress is a gradual, thoroughly bureaucratic, deadly dull process. Saving the world isn’t sexy.

In early June, the International Crisis Group did something its leaders said was a historic first: It issued a statement on an internal crisis in the United States. The ICG, an independent organization headquartered in Belgium, analyzes geopolitics with the goal of preventing conflict. It is known for issuing authoritative, deeply sourced reports on war-torn countries — say, how to end the brutal conflict in Yemen.

In language similar to how it might describe fragile foreign states, the ICG cast the “unrest” as a crisis that “put the nation’s political divides on full display.” And it chided the Trump administration for “incendiary, panicky rhetoric that suggests the U.S. is in armed conflict with its own people.”

“Over the long term, the nation will need to take steps to end the police’s brutality and militarization as well as structural racial inequality if it wants to avoid similar future crises,” the ICG said.

The ICG decided it saw a confluence of factors in America that it sees in far more troubled countries. One appeared to be growing militarization of the police. Another was the seeming politicization of the military. Also key: Some U.S. political leaders, including Trump, seem determined to exploit racial divisions instead of pushing for unity. The ICG is now debating whether to launch a program that focuses on U.S. domestic issues in a systematic way

past U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat, all had credibility gaps when it came to promoting human rights while protecting U.S. interests. Obama, for instance, was criticized for authorizing drone strikes against militants that often killed civilians

“I think there’s a qualitative difference with this administration, for whom human rights seems to be treated purely as a transactional currency,”

In 2019, Freedom House released a special essay titled “The Struggle Comes Home: Attacks on Democracy in the United States.” The Washington-based NGO, which receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. government, was established in 1941 to fight fascism. Its report, which ranks how free countries are using various indicators, described a decline in U.S. democracy that predated Trump and was fueled in part by political polarization. Freedom House warned, however, that Trump was accelerating it.

Rights activists worry the panel will craft a “hierarchy” of rights that will undermine protections for women, LGBTQ people and others, while possibly elevating religious freedom above other rights

“There is intense racism and law enforcement abuse of human rights in China, in Russia, in Brazil and a lot of other countries that the United Nations has a hard time mustering the will to condemn,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a former senior human rights official under Obama. “But none of those countries is the indispensable nation. What human rights organizations and institutions are saying by focusing on the United States is something that they cannot explicitly admit, and that is that they believe in American exceptionalism. They understand that America falling short of its ideals has a far greater impact on the world than a Russia or a China doing what we all expect those authoritarian states to do.”

A top State Department official, Brian Hook, later wrote a memo to Tillerson arguing that the U.S. should use human rights as a weapon against adversaries, like Iran and China. But repressive allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, should get a pass, it said. “Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” Hook wrote.

the memo appears to have laid out the policy approach the Trump administration has taken on human rights, even after Tillerson was fired in early 2018. His successor, Mike Pompeo, frequently weighs in on human rights but almost exclusively to bash governments hostile to the United States or, occasionally, ones with which the U.S. has limited strategic interest.

it sometimes goes to great lengths to protect abusive U.S partners, as it has done by pressing ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia despite its assassination of a writer for The Washington Post

“The current administration doesn’t think most of its supporters care about international violations of human rights broadly,”

The international furor against the Trump administration was especially intense in mid-2018, as the U.S. was separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, then putting the children in detention camps. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights called the U.S. actions “unconscionable.”

Trump administration officials also say human rights activists are never satisfied, no matter who is in the White House. This is not an unfair argument: The groups routinely criticize even administrations most friendly to their cause. Bush was eviscerated over his handling of the war on terrorism, especially his decision to invade Iraq, even though he and his aides asserted that they were liberating and protecting people. Obama’s human rights legacy was declared “shaky.” For U.S. officials who must make choices between bad and worse options every day, the endless criticism is frustrating.

Pompeo’s disdain for the human rights community is one reason he created what’s known as the Commission on Unalienable Rights. The secretary asserts that activists keep trying to create categories of rights, and that “not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right.”

Privately, administration officials say they do a lot of excellent human rights work that doesn’t get attention. They note that Congress has kept up funding for much of that work, even though Trump has tried to slash that funding. They also argue that the Trump team’s objectives and priorities are clearer than those of past administrations, especially when distinguishing friend from foe. While Obama tried to engage Tehran and Havana, the Trump administration casts those regimes as irredeemable, and it’s willing to attack them on human rights to weaken them. On the other hand, while Obama kept Hungary’s leader at a distance, Trump has welcomed him to the White House. Critics may see that as another example of Trump liking dictators, but his aides say it is a way to limit Russian and Chinese influence in Eastern Europe.

Human rights leaders say there are two noteworthy bright spots in the Trump administration’s record. It has put significant resources into promoting international religious freedom — routinely speaking out on the topic, holding annual ministerial gatherings about it, and launching an international coalition of countries to promote the ideal. A few weeks ago, Trump issued an executive order instructing Pompeo to further integrate the promotion of religious freedom in U.S. diplomacy. The administration also has used a relatively new legal tool, the Global Magnitsky Act, to impose economic sanctions on numerous individuals implicated in human rights abuses abroad. The sanctions have fallen on people ranging from Myanmar military officials suspected in the mass slaughter of Rohingya Muslims to an allegedly abusive Pakistani police official.

“In comparison to the remainder of its human rights record, the Trump administration’s use of the Global Magnitsky sanctions has exceeded expectations,”

The religious freedom alliance, for instance, includes countries such as Hungary, whose government the U.S. is trying to court but which traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric. The religious freedom push also dovetails with a priority of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who have long pushed for greater protection of Christian communities overseas.

Under intense outside pressure, the administration imposed Magnitsky sanctions on more than a dozen Saudis for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi; but it spared the man the U.S. intelligence community considers responsible for the killing, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump has defended

The dire situation of Uighur Muslims in China illustrates how both the Magnitsky effort and the religious freedom effort have collided with Trump’s own priorities.

In recent years, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uighur Muslims, putting them in camps from which ugly reports of abuse have emerged. China claims it is “reeducating” the Uighurs to stamp out terrorist thinking in the population. Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress are furious over the detention of the Uighurs.

Pompeo, meanwhile, has raised the Uighurs as an example of why the U.S. must promote religious freedom. But Trump has been unwilling to use the Magnitsky sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the mistreatment of the Uighurs. He told Axios he doesn't want to impose the penalties because it might derail trade talks with Beijing, the success of which he sees as critical to his reelection

Trump’s diatribes against journalists — and his claims that many legitimate media outlets are “fake news” — are believed to have inspired some countries to impose tougher laws curtailing press freedoms.

When the State Department spokesperson recently tweeted out criticism of Beijing’s treatment of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, a Chinese official tweeted back at her with some of Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”

In 2018, a U.N. envoy, Philip Alston, unveiled the findings of an investigation into poverty in the United States. Alston has said he was initially invited to study the topic under the Obama administration, but that the Trump administration — under Tillerson — had reextended the invite. Alston’s report minced few words. The United States, he reported, was home to tens of millions of people in poverty, and that was likely to be exacerbated by Trump’s economic policies.

Nikki Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fought back. She called Alston’s work “misleading and politically motivated,” insisted that the Trump administration’s plans would lift people out of poverty, and argued that the U.N. should focus on poverty in less-developed countries.

The council instead requested a broader, more generic U.N. report on systemic racism and police brutality against Black people and also asked for information on how various governments worldwide deal with anti-racism protests. The resolution did, however, mention the Floyd death and the report is expected to cover the United States, among other countries.

The growth of the GDP is primarily driven by government spending on mega infrastructure projects (spearheaded by the military), leading to a boom in the construction sector. Government spending is financed by a bloated public debt, the burden of which is disproportionality shouldered by the lower segments of society.

the regime did not invest in the development of the manufacturing sector, and it did not lay down the foundation for sustainable, long-term economic growth

The decline in the level of consumption was not counteracted by an increase in the level of exports in goods and services. This is reflected in the value of Egyptian exports, which reached 47.45 billion USD in 2018, a decrease of 1.66 billion USD compared to 2013. Other indicators also reflect a worsening international competitive position. For example, the trade deficit ballooned from -6.34% of the GDP in 2013 to -10.45% of the GDP in 2018

the military directly employs 19.2% of the labour force. This makes the military the second largest employer in the country, after the public sector that employs 5.6 million.

projects include much-publicised mega infrastructure projects, with dubious economic benefit, the most notable of which is the new administrative capital. The construction sector, which is closely connected to the military led projects, played an important role in generating economic growth. In 2018, it is estimated to have grown by 8.9%, making it the number one contributor to the GDP growth

growth of the GDP is not driven by a dynamic private sector, but mainly by a massive military led construction spree, and mega-infrastructure projects that have little positive impact on increasing the competitiveness of the Egyptian economy

the unemployment rate, which reached 8.1% by the first quarter of 2019, the lowest in 10 years. This drop in the level of unemployment, however, requires some additional qualification. The rate of utilization, which measures the number of workers employed for at least one hour per week as a percentage of the population, has dropped from 44.5% to 39%. This is also accompanied by a reduction in the level of workforce participation from 46.4% to 41.6%, indicating a reduction in the level of those seeking work, rather than an increase in the number of available jobs. Loss of hope should be credited with the drop in the level of unemployment, not improved economic conditions.

profits generated from business owned by the armed forces are exempt from taxation, under law 96 (2015). This means that the government is shifting the burden on the shoulders of the poor, as they finance the military construction spree, which in-turn is used to enrich the military elites and other regime insiders

as debt continues to pile up, the pressure on the poor will continue to rise, as the government continues to cut social spending. This will reduce the level of effective local demand, leading to greater pressure on the private sector. In addition, if the construction spree continues, the possibility of overcapacity and over-accumulation of capital in the construction sector becomes more prominent. In essence, a bubble that is bound to burst.

in England, where life expectancy has stalled for the first time in more than 100 years and has even reversed for the most deprived women. The gap in health inequality is growing at a larger rate than 10 years ago and Professor Marmot is clear in his review that this is in a large part due to the impact of cuts that people in Merseyside have been shouting about for years.

The headline figure many people will read today is that Council Tax is going up again - and understandably there will be plenty who are already struggling to make ends meet that will greet that headline with concern. But one of the cleverest tricks of a Tory government hell bent on stripping local government to the very core is that it is often local government that gets blamed. The fact that Liverpool Council will have lost £444m of its government funding between 2010 and 2020 won't be at the forefront of people's minds when they get their increased tax bill on Liverpool Council headed paper.

“Austerity has taken a significant toll on equity and health, and it is likely to continue to do so. If you ask me if that is the reason for the worsening health picture, I’d say it is highly likely that is responsible for the life expectancy flat-lining, people’s health deteriorating and the widening of health inequalities. “Poverty has a grip on our nation’s health – it limits the options families have available to live a healthy life. Government health policies that focus on individual behaviours are not effective. Something has gone badly wrong.”

"When you have rising infant mortality [death of a child under the age of one] then you have a fundamental problem as a society. "Infant mortality has been falling in England every year since the war, now it is rising - and it is rising faster in Liverpool than anywhere else - it is more than twice the national average here." She said that in Liverpool, between 2014 and 2017 there were a total of 572 excess infant deaths compared to what would have been expected based on historical trends. The research estimate that each 1% increase in child poverty was significantly associated with an extra 5.8 infant deaths per 100,000 live births.

a clear link between government austerity and the shocking decline in health outcomes, especially for the most young and the most vulnerable.

“Health outcomes are the best indicator of society and this report shows how inequality is casting a long shadow - which will last for decades- over children born today.”

the industriousness and ingenuity displayed by the Mashhour crew and their colleagues on the tug boats are the very qualities that allow millions of Egyptians to survive the misrule that has led to rising poverty levels even as limited reforms have primarily benefited the ruling elites and crony capitalists. While the government in Cairo has received kudos for GDP growth, Egypt’s poverty rate has nearly doubled over 20 years, from 16.7% in the year 2000 to 32.5% in 2019.

The patronizing view that the man in the street needs the guiding hand of his betters has often encouraged international partners over the years to direct funding to the elites rather than small and medium-sized enterprises, despite pledges to prioritize those very sectors.

their government provides them with neither the competitive market economy nor the political freedoms that would allow them to demonstrate their readiness.

the waterway is of exceptional value to the government in Cairo: Not only is it a significant source of hard currency for a country with a chronic trade deficit, its strategic importance to global commerce elevates Egypt’s international status

Many who seek the resources — and salaries — commensurate with their skills must leave the country to find them. This is why remittances from abroad dwarf many sectors of the economy. Remittances in 2020 were worth $29.6 billion, over five times the Suez Canal’s revenue of $5.61 billion and more than double the revenues from tourism at its 2019 peak of $13 billion.

The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere.

New York City and state, mired in graft and corruption, cannot build a single mile of subway for less than $2 billion

The United States spends perhaps a trillion dollars every year on its military and wars

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources.

if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women

it is particularly worrying how far the coronavirus is spreading within the political elite in countries where many senior politicians are over 60, making them especially at risk. In Burkina Faso, a country that has experienced more than its fair share of instability in recent years—and which is currently struggling against an insurgency—the ministers of foreign affairs, education, the interior, and mines have all tested positive.

In Nigeria, one of the most economically and politically important countries on the continent, Abba Kyari, the chief of staff to 77-year-old President Muhammadu Buhari, has come down with the disease. Although media outlets have reported that Buhari tested negative, this has not stopped damaging rumors that the often ill president has been incapacitated from circulating in Twitter.

The world should also be paying close attention to Iran, where media censorship has obscured the extent of the crisis. So far, two vice presidents and three cabinet officials are known to have gotten the virus. It is also estimated that 10 percent of parliament and many prominent figures within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are sick—including a senior advisor to the 80-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, raising questions about his health.

A leadership crisis is just one of the potential sources of political instability the coronavirus could spark. Others include the risk of popular unrest and the debt crises that will soon engulf many countries around the world. Along with the fact that some of the main providers of foreign aid are now preoccupied with their own financial crises, there is a serious risk that politically and economically weak states will face a perfect storm of elite deaths, debt, mass unemployment, and social unrest

In countries where poverty is widespread, health systems are weak, and the cost of food is high, citizens are already under intense financial pressure. Despite earning the least, those who live in slum areas around capital cities often have to pay more for access to water and food than those who have valuable properties in the city centers. While the cramped conditions of slum living make it implausible to self-isolate, limited and inconsistent income make it impossible to buy in bulk—or to stay home for weeks on end without working and risk starvation. For many of the poorest people in the world, hunger is just a few days away

Already, there have been sporadic incidents of unrest in a number of countries, including prison protests in Italy. Meanwhile, heavy-handed efforts to enforce the curfew threaten to further erode public confidence in the government and the security forces. There are reports of widespread human rights abuses being committed in Kenya and South Africa, where the police have been using water cannons and rubber bullets to enforce the lockdown.

Unless the deferral of debt goes hand in hand with debt cancellation and long-term rescheduling, the end of the coronavirus crisis could be followed by a series of economic collapses across the developing world. In turn, this will undermine the ability of governments to provide affordable fuel and food, further increasing the risk of public unrest.

Civil wars, political instability, and poverty kill millions of people every year. These deaths rarely elicit the kind of comprehensive media coverage that COVID-19 has received, but they are no less important. It is possible to prevent the worst political consequences of the coronavirus but only if governments and institutions act now. Wealthy nations must increase their aid budgets rather than cut them, and international organizations must anticipate and work to avoid political crises more proactively than ever before. That is the only way to collectively survive the present in a way that does not undermine the future.

AGRA, initiated in 2006, heralded a new campaign to bring the kind of input-intensive agriculture to Africa that had failed to take hold on the continent when the first Green Revolution swept through much of Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

AGRA worked with governments to speed the development of high-yield commercial seeds designed for Africa’s wide range of soils and climates and to facilitate the delivery to farmers of those seeds and the inorganic fertilizers that would make them grow.

Many warned that it was seeking to impose Western technologies inappropriate for the continent’s soils, farmers and food systems. Some decried the lack of consultation with African farmers on the nature of the interventions.9 Others pointed out the serious flaws in the first Green Revolution: water supplies depleted and contaminated with chemical runoff; farmers indebted due to high input costs while yields declined after their initial increases; and the loss of crop and diet diversity as Green Revolution crops took over the countryside

African farm groups like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) also warned of the loss of food sovereignty, the ability of communities and nations to freely choose how they wanted to feed themselves, as large commercial firms could come to dominate local markets backed by new government policies designed to ensure market access.

Evidence would suggest that the main beneficiaries are likely not the poorest or most food-insecure farmers but rather a growing number of medium-scale farmers who have access to more land and are already integrated into commercial networks. Only a fraction of such farmers come up from the ranks of smallholders; many are new investors in farming from urban elites. One study showed that a tiny fraction of smallholders is likely to become commercial farmers.18

These data suggest that Green Revolution programs have not produced a productivity boom through intensification but rather an extensification onto new lands. The promotion of extensification is a serious contradiction for Green Revolution proponents. The explicit goal of “sustainable intensification” is to minimize pressure on land and water resources while limiting further greenhouse gas emissions. To the extent Green Revolution programs are encouraging extensification, they are at odds with national and donor government commitments to mitigate climate change. Depending on individual countries’ land endowments, extensification can be a serious problem. Rwanda, for example, is densely populated and does not have vast tracts of uncultivated arable land.

One of the negative consequences of the Green Revolution focus on maize and other commodity crops is the declining importance of nutritious and climate-resilient crops like millet and sorghum, which have been key components in healthy diets. These are rarely supported by African governments or AGRA; meanwhile, input subsidies and supports for maize and other favored crops provide incentives for farmers to decrease the cultivation of their own crop varieties

Cassava, a key staple in Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and many other AGRA countries, saw a 6% decline in yields. Overall, roots and tubers, which include nutritious crops such as sweet potatoes, experienced a 7% decline in yields. Groundnuts, another critical staple source of protein in many countries, saw an alarming 23% drop in yields.

The Staple Crop Index shows that Rwanda’s apparent success in maize has come at the expense of more comprehensive food crop productivity.

The total number of undernourished in AGRA’s 13 countries has increased from 100.5 million to 131.3 million, a 30% increase, from before AGRA to 2018. Only Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali report a significant decline in the absolute number of chronically hungry residents

Only one country, Ethiopia, shows anything resembling the combination of yield growth and hunger reduction Green Revolution proponents promised, with a 73% increase in productivity and a 29% decrease in the number of hungry. Note, however, that neither of these is on track to meet AGRA’s goal of doubling productivity (100% increase) and halving the number of hungry (which would be a 50% decrease). Ghana is the only other AGRA country that shows decent productivity growth with some decrease in hunger. Malawi achieved relatively strong yield growth but only a small reduction in undernourishment.

AGRA seems to be feeding Africa’s worrisome trend toward locking in path dependency on input-intensive agriculture, much to the detriment of smallholder farmers

Unlike industrial-scale farmers in developed countries, their path has not yet been determined; there remain opportunities to chart paths different from the high-input agriculture model promoted by AGRA.

Agroecology is one of the systems giving farmers the kinds of innovation they need, farming with nature to promote the soil-building practices that Green Revolution practices often undermine. Building on farmers’ knowledge of local conditions and food cultures, multiple food crops are grown in the same field. Compost, manure and biofertilizers — not fossil-fuel-based fertilizer — are used to nourish fields. Biological pest control decreases pesticide use. Researchers work with farmers to improve the productivity of their seeds rather than replacing them with commercial varieties farmers need to buy every year and douse with fertilizer to make them grow.25 AFSA has documented the effectiveness of agroecology, now widely promoted among its member organizations as a key step toward food sovereignty.26 Such initiatives also achieve productivity increases more impressive than those achieved by Green Revolution programs. One University of Essex study surveyed nearly 300 large ecological agriculture projects across more than 50 poor countries and documented an average 79% increase in productivity with decreasing costs and rising incomes.27 Such results far surpass those of the Green Revolution.

It is time for international donors and African governments to change course, to shift their agricultural development funding toward the kinds of low-input sustainable farming that many small-scale farmers in Africa are pioneering under the banner of agroecology. With substantial support, like that provided to Green Revolution programs, agroecology can be Africa’s food future

Media tycoon Karoui, a populist figure who until Wednesday sat in jail on suspicion of money laundering and tax evasion, took 15.6 percent of the vote. He denies all the charges and says they are politically motivated

In Ettadhamen, Saied's humble persona and rejection of the political status quo propelled him to the top, with 21.7 percent of the first-round vote. Karoui, who founded a charity to alleviate poverty and whose Nessma TV channel has promoted his philanthropic activities, trailed in second place on 19.4 percent. Despite his personal wealth, his supporters see him as a liberal champion of Tunisia's poor

In a country that ranks as the 73rd most corrupt out of 180 states, according to the Economic Research Forum, mistrust of the political elite has become widespread.

40 percent of Tunisia's unemployed have university degrees

it is still possible that Karoui will contest the results if he loses on Sunday - ushering in another period of political uncertainty. "Not only will the parliament be fractured and the government unstable, but the entire electoral mandate could be questioned as well,"

While Parliament drafts and votes on legislation, the president's mandate is limited to foreign affairs, defence and national security. But the language of the 2014 constitution remains relatively vague when it comes to setting out the jurisdiction of the president versus the head of government, the prime minister

"Given that there is no constitutional court to adjudicate between them, ultimately the distribution in power will be based on the personality of who occupies each position and how far they are willing to go to challenge one another,"

growing nostalgia for a strong, presidential system - a desire that is only likely to grow as the fractured parliament struggles to form a government - it is possible that the presidency will emerge as the stronger of the two executives

The Chinese government views American corporations as vehicles for American political influence, which they clearly are. The fact that a laundry list of high-level U.S. politicians have commented on the dispute—while the U.S. is negotiating a trade deal with China—only proves that Beijing is right to see incursions by U.S. businesses into China as a threat. Seen in this light, arguments that the NBA should insist on American speech rules in China are arguments for using American corporate power to meddle in another state. This would trouble a country in any context, but it is likely especially worrying given the United States’s history of virulent and aggressive corporate imperialism.

Another distasteful and unconstructive thread running through the current debate is America’s moral superiority because of its robust speech rights. At the core of the argument that U.S. firms should not do business in China—or if they do, they should somehow not comply with Chinese rules—is an argument about China’s speech constraints and, therefore, its moral inferiority. But, as I’ve said before, evaluating China along welfare or human rights grounds is not so simple. Speech rights are much less robust than in the West, to be sure, but China has shown extraordinary concern—and done more than any other country—for its poor. The country has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and a child born in China today has a better shot at upward social mobility than a child born in the U.S.

The point is not that the two countries are morally equivalent. Rather, it is simply hard to swallow the moral superiority that underlies so much American rhetoric about China

a larger history of American firms insisting on American speech rules for the rest of the world. Whatever one thinks about American-style free speech, it is not universally beloved; indeed, it is nearly universally rejected. Yet Americans expect domestic companies to push it around the world, and many do. This issue comes up again and again in discussions about technology policy in particular, because so many tech tools are platforms for speech

Speech rules, many Americans and American tech firms feel, should be both uniform and maximal; the American rule should predominate everywhere. And this view has U.S. government backing. That is why the U.S. is pushing platform immunity provisions in its trade deals, which would protect firms like Facebook from liability associated with speech harms. And that is why the U.S.-U.K. data-sharing agreement gives the U.S. veto power over British attempts to get criminal evidence in cases that implicate free speech concerns

American speech imperialism never made much sense—why should the rest of the world adopt the American rule on anything? But if it ever made sense, it makes less sense today, given the state of our communications platforms, which enable mass shootings, radicalization, election hacking and more. The results of American platforms’ free-speech free-for-all have not been happy in Myanmar, India and much of the rest of the world. The U.S. does not have this all figured out; we should stop pretending that we do.

The Amal Movement was founded in 1974 by Lebanese-Iranian cleric Musa Sadr to represent Lebanon’s Shia, who had long been marginalised as one of the country’s poorest sections of society. Though originally notable for its efforts to pull Shia Lebanese out of poverty, during the civil war it became one of the country’s most effective militias and controlled large parts of the south.

Amal is a close ally of fellow Shia party Hezbollah, and their politicians have run on the same list in elections. However, they occasionally diverge in opinion.

Birthed from the resistance movement that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah has since become the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. Iran-backed and Syria-allied, the movement was the only militia to keep its arms at the end of the civil war, as it waged a deadly guerilla war against the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon.

Though Israel was forced out in 2000, Hezbollah’s military capabilities have only increased, and its war against Israel in 2006 and ongoing involvement in the Syrian conflict have divided opinion among the Lebanese. The movement and its allies did well at the ballot box in 2018 and Hezbollah now has two ministers in the cabinet.

Hassan Nasrallah lives in hiding due to the constant fear of Israeli assassination.

Known as “al-Hakim” (the doctor), Geagea is a medically trained warlord-turned-politician. During the 1975-90 civil war, Geagea was one of the most notorious militia leaders, heading the Christian Lebanese Forces. He was a close ally of Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated days before being sworn into the presidency in 1982 with Israeli support

he was convicted of involvement in a number of assassinations and attempted murders in widely condemned trials. Geagea was kept in a solitary windowless cell for 11 years until his pardon in 2005 following the Syrian pullout

The Lebanese Forces, which is an offshoot of the right-wing Kataeb party, is the second-largest Christian party after the FPM. Its three ministers resigned early in the protest movement, and the party has now attempted to join the demonstrators and help block roads, though many protesters have rejected its overtures.

Feudal lord and socialist, advocate of de-sectarianising Lebanese politics but also a fierce defender of his Druze sect, Jumblatt is a difficult man to pin down. Often described as Lebanon’s kingmaker, his allegiances have swung several times, a trick that may have helped keep him alive.

The Kataeb party has fallen a long way since its civil war heyday. Also known as the Phalangists, the party used to be the dominant Christian party, and was inspired by its founder Pierre Gemayel’s trips to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Franco’s fascist party in Spain. The Gemayel family has suffered a series of assassinations, most notably president elect Bashir Gemayel in 1982. Bashir’s brother Amin then went on to claim the presidency, and Amin’s son Sami is now heading the party. In recent years however the Kataeb party has struggled to attract votes from its offshoot the Lebanese Forces and the FPM

While some in the crowd expressed uneasiness about Saied’s professed social conservatism, others remained confident that the enigmatic figure could transcend the divide between secularism and Islamism that has defined much of the past decade in Tunisian politics

Over two rounds of presidential voting, Tunisia’s post-Arab Spring order was turned upside down as household-name politicians from across the spectrum were toppled. Instead, the electorate turned decisively toward a distinctly Tunisian brand of populism, one focused on combating corruption and alleviating poverty in a nation still reeling from nearly a decade of post-revolution stagnation.

Saied campaigned on a maverick platform of anti-corruption measures and radical constitutional changes that would place localized, direct democracy at the center of policymaking.

“[Saied] offered ideas and hopes, even though hard to realize, while Karoui offered food and money,” Youssef Cherif, head of the Columbia Global Affairs Center in Tunis, told Al-Monitor.

voters between the ages of 18 and 25 proved decisive

Despite lofty rhetoric, with promises to return power to the people and remake Tunisian political structures, major questions remain unanswered about a future Saied presidency, his agenda and what type of political bloc could emerge to work with him in what promises to be a badly fractured legislature.

In a survey conducted by Tunisian publication Le Manager, Saied had failed to take a clear position on 24 out of 25 current political topics they studied, more than any other candidate. 

While Saied’s social conservatism might hint at a possible alliance on some issues with an Ennahda-aligned bloc, analyst Cherif said that many parts of his agenda, particularly those targeting corruption, could put members of the party in its crosshairs.

“The fact that he doesn't have a structured political party will complicate things for him, and he might end up isolated in the Presidential Palace of Carthage,”

ISIL and al-Qaeda's interest in Sahel's goldmines has long been known. According to the International Crisis Group (ICG), a non-governmental organisation, terror groups have been seizing gold mines in the region and using them to finance their operations since 2016. The ICG says armed groups are also using their control over gold mines as a way to recruit more local people to their cause. 

Mali, too, has long suffered insecurity which has allowed the country to become a playground for groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda. Earlier this month at least 53 soldiers and a civilian were killed in an ISIL attack on a military post in northeast Mali. The attack came a month after two similar attacks killed at least 40 soldiers near the country's border with Burkina Faso. 

As world leaders pat themselves on the back for "destroying ISIL" in Syria, the group is openly building up its strength in Africa. 

If effective measures that address not only the ongoing insurgency but the core problems that allowed it to prosper in the region are not implemented right away, the destruction and suffering caused by ISIL in Syria and Iraq will be repeated in the Sahel. More and more people will try to escape their predicament by embarking on deadly journeys towards Europe. A few will make it there, while tens of thousands of others will either die horrible deaths at sea or languish in outrageous refugee camps in Africa.

The Lagos-based Punch newspaper declared on Dec. 11 it will no longer address Buhari as president, but by his military rank of major-general in recognition of the martial tendencies of his government.

Omoyele Sowore, a prominent critic of Buhari, was detained by intelligence agents, 24 hours after the secret police belatedly submitted to a court order to release him on bail. The publisher and former presidential candidate was first arrested in August, after calling for revolution, and charged with various crimes including treason.

at least 61 cases of attacks or harassment of journalists in Nigeria this year, more than any year since 1985, according to a report published by the Lagos-based Premium Times newspaper last month

The detention of Sowore, despite a bail order, “doesn’t send a favorable signal to investors concerned about contract risk,” said Adedayo Ademuwagun, an analyst at Lagos-based Songhai Advisory LLP. “The more the government demonstrates that it doesn’t respect its own laws and legal institutions, the less faith investors will have in the system.”

Two bills -- one designed to regulate “internet falsehoods,” the other to rein in “hate speech” -- are being scrutinized by the Senate. Under the former, individuals found guilty of creating or transmitting “false” information online face fines of up to 300,000 naira ($824) or three years in prison. An early version of the latter sought life imprisonment for anyone convicted of stirring up ethnic hatred and the death penalty if the offense causes loss of life.“If these bills become law, we will see the political class and the security services move rapidly to use them to stifle dissent,” said Cheta Nwanze, head of research at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence. Legislation already on the statute books has been used to justify a recent raid on a leading newspaper as well as the imprisonment of journalists.

some of the continent’s more democratic states have failed to end corruption or deliver high levels of economic growth. On the other hand, Ethiopia and Rwanda achieved impressive successes, attracting international praise for reducing poverty and unemployment while consistently securing high economic growth

Ethiopia received almost $5 billion in foreign aid in 2018, while Rwanda received just over $1 billion. The figure for Rwanda is particularly striking when one considers that democratic Malawi, which saw a peaceful transfer of power to the opposition in June 2020, receives considerably less aid per person: $70 for each Malawian in 2018, compared with almost $91 for every Rwandan

recent trends in academic and policy research have played an important role in the rise of authoritarian development. These trends provided donors with an intellectual foundation for investing in countries that, on the basis of their human rights records, the EU and the UK might have been expected to avoid.

researchers suggested that when patrimonial systems are tightly controlled, waste can be minimized and resources channeled toward productive investments to support developmental outcomes

official figures are part of a broader propaganda campaign designed to sell the regime both at home and abroad

there is some evidence that the empirical data used to identify Ethiopia and Rwanda as success stories may not be as impressive as it was first thought

The combination of the rise of China, democratic malaise in the West, and the economic struggles of many African democracies has led citizens and political elites to increasingly question the value of democracy for development

The Tiger economies of East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, entrenched the economic progress they achieved in the 1970s and 1980s by undergoing relatively smooth transitions to more open and inclusive—and hence legitimate and stable—political systems in the 1990s. The prospects for such transitions have always seemed less likely in Ethiopia and Rwanda, where opposition parties are not allowed to operate effectively and limited social and political cohesion remains a cause for concern.

While the jury is still out on Rwanda, the political foundations of economic development in Ethiopia appear to be crumbling. When the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power in 1991, it initially appeared to have broken out of Ethiopia’s damaging cycle of repression and rebellion. Rather than seeking to enforce one ethnic identity over the others, the EPRDF committed to giving the country’s different communities the freedom and self-respect they had always desired. The government enshrined a right to self-determination in the Ethiopian constitution. However, the reality was very different

the ruling party kept itself in power by rigging elections and repressing opponents. As a result, many ethnoregional groups felt that in addition to being politically marginalized, they were denied the opportunity to press their concerns through democratic channels.

although he quickly won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for moving to end a long-running dispute with Eritrea and promising a raft of democratic reforms, Abiy was unable to return Ethiopia to political stability. Most notably, the growing political marginalization of the TPLF left the former dominant clique increasingly frustrated. Tigrayan leaders ultimately quit the government, while Abiy disbanded the EPRDF and replaced it with his own political vehicle, the Prosperity Party. From that moment on, civil conflict between the federal government and the TPLF, whose role was now limited to control over the Tigrayan regional government, became increasingly likely.

Since civil conflict began in November 2020, Ethiopia has had a new set of developmental challenges. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been displaced, major infrastructure has been destroyed, and Abiy’s reputation as a reformer has been undermined. Moreover, there is a serious risk that even though federal government troops have regained overall control of Tigray, the TPLF will be able to wage guerrilla attacks that will continue to weaken political stability and investor confidence.

Abiy, like his predecessors, will use coercion to maintain political control, building up more problems for the future. Although negotiated and smooth political transitions are not impossible, they are less likely in heavily divided societies and have been rare in sub-Saharan Africa.

Although Ethiopia and Rwanda are often mentioned in the same sentence, Ethiopia is the more important example for the argument that authoritarian government models would serve Africa better than democratic ones. With a small population, a distinctive history, and an intensely authoritarian government, Rwanda is not a promising case from which to generalize. By contrast, Ethiopia, with a large and extremely ethnically diverse population, provides a more compelling example.

The empirical evidence in favor of authoritarian development models in Africa has always been remarkably thin. The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth. Fast-forward to today, and there are very few authoritarian regimes with the potential to join Ethiopia and Rwanda as notable success stories. Instead, most studies have found that democratic governments perform better when it comes to providing public services or economic growth.

On its own, Rwanda’s small and aid-dependent economy cannot sustain the narrative that authoritarian regimes perform better on development—and if it does not, there is no justification at all for supporting repressive regimes.

Remittances from Yemeni workers abroad had dropped by 80% – $253m (£200m) – in the first four months of 2020 as a result of job losses across the Gulf region. The closure of supply routes has led to food shortages and food price hikes in the country, which imports 90% of its food.

Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, the west African Sahel, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Haiti as extreme hunger hotspots.

Oxfam said countries with existing problems, such as South Sudan and Syria, were already seeing hunger worsen but there was also concern for middle-income countries such as India and Brazil. Mass unemployment was affecting all countries, but informal labourers were suffering the most, often unable to travel to work. Travel restrictions were also hitting food supplies by preventing farmers from hiring workers and small-scale producers from accessing their own fields.

humanitarian assistance around the world had been curtailed by restrictions on movement and other precautions to prevent the virus spreading

a crisis in Africa’s Sahel region, where at least 4 million people have been displaced by extreme climate conditions that were damaging crops, causing greater tension between communities sharing resources.

design thinking” has also reached the halls of power. You can find it in the upper reaches of corporations and governments and universities. It organizes and mediates decision-making among executives and elites. At Stanford’s d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.” So what is it?

Here’s what I say “design thinking” is: using a particular set of design methods to solve problems that traditionally have fallen outside the purview of design. I show my students what designers call the “hexagon diagram,” a ubiquitous image that came out of the d.school in the mid-2000s and purports to represent the five steps of design thinking. It consists of five hexagons that read: “Empathize,” “Define,” “Ideate,” “Prototype,” and “Test.” The idea is that design thinking involves listening to and empathizing with some group of people, then using what you’ve heard to define the problem you want to solve. Then you come up with ideas, prototype those ideas, and test the prototypes to see if they work.

Suddenly everything is a design-thinking problem: postpartum depression, racial injustice in sentencing, unsustainable growth. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But my students aren’t stupid; they’re smart. They’re picking up on something. In the worlds they inhabit, “Better by design” is a dominant structure of feeling.

Any solution implemented would leave “traces” that couldn’t be undone. “One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance,” they wrote. “Large public works are effectively irreversible, and the consequences they generate have long half-lives.” The designer had no “right to be wrong,” because these problems mattered. Human lives, or the quality of human lives, were on the line.

Rittel called them “wicked problems.” They were “wicked” not because they were unethical or evil, but because they were malignant and incorrigible and hard. There did exist simple problems that didn’t rise to this level. But “now that [the] relatively easy problems have been dealt with,” the problems worth designers’ time were the wickedest ones. The hardest problems of heterogeneous social life called for designers’ exclusive focus and concentration.

Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.

“It is not easy to live with epistemic freedom,” he wrote, and so designers often sought out sachzwang — practical constraint, inherent necessity, “a device to ‘derive ought from fact.’” But they shouldn’t. Without methodological constraint, design had room for heterogeneity. It had the capacity to surprise. “Nothing has to be or to remain as it is,” Rittel wrote, “or as it appears to be.”

In 1987, Peter Rowe published an ethnographic study of designers called Design Thinking (this may be the first printed instance of the phrase). But Rowe’s study of observed evidence concluded, just as Rittel and Papanek had argued, that in fact there was no one “design thinking.” “Rather,” Rowe wrote, “there are many different styles of decision making, each with individual quirks as well as manifestations of common characteristics.” It had become a commonplace that there was no one way to make design. The more interesting question was how to observe and negotiate the proliferation of differences.

IDEO is just another multinational corporation. But it’s a multinational corporation whose niche branding and marketing, funded by the success of “design thinking,” have been so phenomenally successful as to seem like straight sorcery.

even as “design thinking” rendered “design” yet more capacious ,  it also jettisoned the self-conscious suspicion of “methodology” at which designers, following Horst Rittel, had arrived in the ’60s. Design thinking was unambiguously a recipe, a formula, a five-step program

It was design for a service economy: memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details. Horst Rittel had convincingly described the folly of trying to define or rationalize design’s “how”; IDEO’s template for design thinking brought back the “how” with a vengeance.

So it was that in the United States in the early 2000s, design again became not just a method but a universal method — and a method that seemed a little bit magical. It applied to everything, and anyone could do it. “Contrary to popular opinion,” read a sidebar in Brown’s 2008 Harvard Business Review essay, “you don’t need weird shoes or a black turtleneck to be a design thinker.” You didn’t need, in fact, to be a designer. All you needed was a set of designerly qualities — empathy, “integrative thinking,” optimism, experimentalism, a collaborative nature — and that brightly colored five-step map.

Lyons and IDEO’s design-driven project aimed to solve the alleged problem of insufficient “competitiveness.” That problem, as stated — and the changes Gainesville instituted to address it, including beautiful graphic design, better web resources, and that friendly new office called the Department of Doing — had at best a tenuous relationship to the experiences of many of Gainesville’s poor and Black residents. Although the plans were intended to boost Gainesville’s economy on the whole, they did not create affordable housing, eradicate food deserts, or raise high school graduation rates. They didn’t address those for whom “competitiveness” seemed a distant problem. They seemed to leave much of Gainesville behind.

“Design thinking” can’t solve the wicked problems that organize Gainesville’s inequality: poverty, income disparity, structural racism, environmental injustice, unregulated market capitalism. You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them. You argue, you iterate, you fail, you grieve, you fight.

This is what worries me about design thinking: its colossal and seductive promise. There was an earlier Anglo-American vogue for design — a love affair with industrial design, beginning in the Depression era — but it was relatively benign in its claims and its outcomes. This more recent vogue for design thinking seems more insidious because it promises so much more. It promises a creative and delightful escape from difficulty, a caper through the Post-it Notes to innovative solutions. And it promises this as a service, delivered at what is often great cost — not just to IBM and Intuit and Starbucks, but to villages and nonprofit organizations and cities like Gainesville without enormous resources to spare.

By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways.

Americans love design most when we’re afraid.

design isn’t magic. To address a wicked problem is to look for its roots — and there’s no hexagon map for getting there

There is no consensus as to how resources should be distributed, social life arranged, justice done. To design, really design, is to acknowledge those divergences — and then to listen one’s way, and push one’s way, to somewhere new. Such battles from competing positions can be truly wicked, Rittel believed, but it’s better to fight than to obscure irresolution with optimism. He had a point. Design may come in an elegant package, but it doesn’t always make things right.

“Those people [without internet access] risk being shut out of attempts to build a smartphone-based contact-tracing app, unless the government urgently funds ways to bridge the gap with digital training and support,”