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Biden to call for African Union to permanently join G20 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...biden-african-nations-join-g20 AU Africa G20 US USA diplomacy climate Russia Ukraine China Senegal SouthAfrica
shared by Ed Webb on 09 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • President Biden next week will announce U.S. support for the African Union to become a permanent member of the Group of 20 nations, a step that would give African nations a long-sought prize and could make it easier for Biden to secure their cooperation on issues like Ukraine and climate change.
  • Biden will make the announcement during next week’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, said Judd Devermont, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for African Affairs
  • Biden’s push comes as African countries and other countries in the global south have borne the brunt of the economic impact from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those countries have been hit especially hard by a global food crisis as well as rising fertilizer and fuel prices, making it difficult for the United States to secure their support during United Nations votes that have condemned Russia for the invasion and for its annexation of Ukrainian territories.
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Qatar's Soccer Stars Are Guinea Pigs in an Experiment to Erode Citizenship Rights - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...immigrant-players-not-citizens Qatar citizenship ISIS opinion analysis politics labor migration migrants sport sports
shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition
  • this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.
  • that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation
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  • Tibetans in exile have been granted pseudo-passports—but not citizenship—by India. Residents of American Samoa are “U.S. nationals” not possessing the full rights of citizenship. The disintegration of Yugoslavia left thousands of Roma people stateless. Issues of statelessness and ambiguous citizenship are universal in any part of the world which experiences crisis and conflict.
  • The creation of a new, opaquely defined but unambiguously lesser form of citizenship is not a symptom of exploitative labor conditions. It’s a symptom of a regional erosion of citizenship.
  • Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain all emerged as states containing substantial populations of bedoon—stateless residents who were not recognized as citizens and were, in some cases, denied even birth certificates.
  • Most significant of all are the post-1948 populations of Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, millions of people who were eventually issued identity documents by several governments, such as subvariants of Syrian passports (Syrian travel documents for Palestinian refugees), which looked like and served as passports but faced adamant political insistence from all sides—save Jordan, which eventually largely naturalized Palestinians—that this documentation was not, in fact, citizenship.
  • The Middle East and North Africa are becoming a kind of citizenship frontier: a region where certainty, permanence, and protection of citizenship is being uniquely and dangerously corroded. And Western countries are enabling this dynamic.
  • Since the 2010s, the Middle East is emerging as a kind of experimental zone where the erosion of citizenship rights can be trialed. While Qatari soccer players are temporary citizens naturalized with an expiration date—even if the details of when their passports expire is not public—Western countries are increasingly comfortable denaturalizing and revoking the citizenship of their own immigrant citizens of Middle Eastern origin when those citizens are accused of terrorist activity in the region.
  • some right-populist movements are claiming that Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are somehow not really American, Dutch, or British
  • The West looks the other way as Gulf states chip away at citizenship norms for expediency, and local governments don’t protest too much when Western governments strand their denaturalized ex-citizens in the region. Especially after the emergence of the Islamic State, with its large contingent of Western, immigrant-origin fighters, the revocation of citizenship became an appealing alternative to long and complicated criminal prosecutions.
  • Western institutions in the Middle East have led the way in demonstrating that the definition of citizenship can be changed to solve an embarrassing problem, be that one of your citizens swearing allegiance to the Islamic State or the fact that half your national soccer team is foreign
  • The erasure of citizenship rights in these cases can be tolerated by international legal regimes because they are considered exceptional. It’s just for some athletes. It’s just for terrorists. But it doesn’t stay that way: The model, once implemented, is attractive for other uses.
  • conditional citizenship, a term coined by the American author Laila Lalami to describe people who, through a web of big and small prejudices and bureaucratic procedures, have “rights the state finds expendable.”
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The Qatar crisis ends…in the most boring way possible | The Duck of Minerva - 0 views

www.duckofminerva.com/...-most-boring-way-possible.html Qatar GCC Iran US USA Turkey diplomacy IR analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • As we see with the end of the Qatar crisis, however, this “boring” stuff matters. The crisis may have started with a dramatic event, but that event ultimately had little impact on the region. Meanwhile, politics returned to “normal” through slow, gradual shifts in the interactions between states
  • most of what occurs in international relations is boring, day to day, interactions
  • The Qatar crisis threatened to upend Middle East politics. Instead, it fizzled out.
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Beijing turns table on debt trap diplomacy claims | Article | Africa Confidential - 1 views

www.africa-confidential.com/..._on_debt_trap_diplomacy_claims China Africa debt US USA EU Ethiopia AU OBOR BRI climate development
shared by Ed Webb on 19 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang's remarks that multilateral lenders and commercial creditors should carry the biggest blame for the debt distress of some African states comes as a thinly veiled retort to western critics who accuse China of 'debt trap' diplomacy
  • While the US and European Union will not attempt to match the size of Beijing's infrastructure investment in Africa, they are attempting to ramp up their diplomatic and economic relations in Africa, anxious to avoid losing more ground to China.
  • 'Africa should be a big stage for international cooperation, not an arena for major countries' competition', said Qin, at a joint press conference with African Union Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat at the new headquarters of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, financed by China.
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  • Financial experts interpreted Qin's inclusion of Angola, Benin and Gabon on his itinerary as a signal that Beijing's harbours plans to expand its Belt and Road infrastructure projects into West and Central Africa.
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To Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the World Will Have to Think Local - 1 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-goals-sdgs-think-local-cities UN SDGs development finance opinion analysis cities urban globalsouth
shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jan 23 - Cached
  • the post-World War II architecture is reaching its structural limits. In particular, it is incompatible with the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which are 17 objectives designed to bring sustainable development to every part of the world—notably the world’s developing nations and, in particular, the world’s least-developed countries. The new goals include completely eliminating global extreme poverty, managing sustainable production and consumption cycles, ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls, and strengthening resilience and adaptivity to hazards tied to climate change.
  • the current global financial architecture centers on sovereign states, with international credit and the benefits of such credit—notably the ability to raise capital in order to fund projects, including infrastructure—tending to flow to countries rather than to the neediest local communities themselves.
  • even if international donors and investors encourage better national governance, and they should, funding for local projects still competes, often unfavorably, with national government priorities—such as national defense, foreign affairs operations, government salaries, and national budget deficits
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  • In the era of the Sustainable Development Goals, local communities are almost always the lead development actor. In fact, a deeper examination of the goals’ underlying targets shows that almost 65 percent of them are supposed to be implemented by local governments. And yet the global financial architecture does not operate on that basis.
  • Around 80 percent of global GDP is already being generated in cities, while 68 percent of the total global population will be made up of urban residents by 2050, according to World Bank data
  • of the 1.4 billion-person increase in population projected to occur within developing countries by 2030, 96 percent are expected to live in urban areas. And 30 of the world’s 35 most rapidly growing cities are in the least-developed countries.
  • Relative to national governments, local governments are singularly positioned to advance projects to address climate change, including infrastructure projects for climate adaptation and resilience: They have the clearest understanding of local needs, they are able to convene local stakeholders to democratize the creation of a climate action plan, for example, and they can pass appropriate policies in much easier fashion than central governments.
  • cities are stuck between hoping that more money trickles down from the central government or accessing international credit. But in a nation-centric system, the second is often impossible
  • Under this nation-centric architecture, national debt determines whether cities can access international credit almost regardless of that city’s own debt profile
  • In Bangladesh, when cities were graded for credit at the local level, over a third of them attained a rating that was above investment grade. Yet those ratings make no difference, because Bangladeshi capital markets are not accessible by municipalities. The same is true for many cities in developing and least-developed countries, such as Kenya, Morocco, Botswana, and Indonesia.
  • between now and 2050, the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to more than triple, reaching approximately 1.3 billion people. Yet, barring fundamental changes, the region will likely lack the levels of capital investment necessary to finance development to support this population growth—including investment in infrastructure and urban planning, as well as commercial and residential real estate. If financing is not able to reach the local level, this will practically assure that the rise in urbanization in this part of the world, as well as others, will coincide with a rise in poverty—especially urban poverty and the growth of slums and unplanned communities—and its attendant consequences.
  • Urban areas can leverage their new capability and financial strength to help rural areas access international credit, whether by creating a pooled fund where urban and rural areas can issue a single bond or by collectively accessing thematic funds that focus on specific interests like climate change, women’s economic empowerment, or financial inclusion.
  • an independent municipal investment fund that will exclusively focus on delivering investment to local projects, notably in developing countries and particularly in the least-developed countries—the creation of which was supported by the United Nations Capital Development Fund, United Cities and Local Governments (an umbrella organization for local and regional governments around the world), and the Global Fund for Cities Development (their technical partner). The hope is that the successful investments will create demonstration effects that will incentivize public and private lenders to expand financing of the municipal finance space.
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