Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

If social media tools are enabling the opposition protests in Iran, and helping us outside the country understand what’s transpiring, some credit for this is due to Hossein Derakhshan—Iran’s “Blogfather” and the author of a life that’s taken some very through-the-looking-glass turns of late. Derakhshan is currently being detained by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.

[Photo: Digging for scraps of metal ore in a mountain of mining waste, Daily Mail Online]
More from the China-Africa symposium at IU: The general outlook of most speakers is reservedly optimistic about the prospects of China’s engagements in Africa. If the last fifty years of Western-sponsored development on the continent have borne so little fruit—and [...]

(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia)
Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development.
I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks [...]

My article on chieftaincy-related conflicts in Ghana appears today at the Globe and Mail online, coinciding with national elections there scheduled for tomorrow. The piece was assigned and written months ago, while I was in West Africa and the town of Bawku was still under a 6pm-6am curfew in the wake of some brutal attacks. [...]

More scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. (Pics from Lisa K.)

November 10, 2008
Paying sporadic attention to the news one item stands out: Gun and ammo sales are booming surging (insert your own punning headline [...]

Scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. balloon alley image by Lisa K.
Thursday, November 6
Two days after Obama’s election and there remains a palpable cloud of euphoria that glides above Manhattan streets like a giant [...]

The word ‘kleptocracy’ has been historically applied to a substrata of not-quite-failed states (Nigeria today, Indonesia under Suharto, Fujimori’s Peru) where rulers and elites have enriched themselves at the expense of raising people’s living standards. As more of the backstory around the current financial crisis comes to light, the United States is coming dubiously close [...]

In October 1980, Salih Sezgin was an illiterate seventeen-year-old when he was incarcerated in Diyarbakir prison, Turkey’s most notoriously brutal penitentiary. The military high command had just staged a coup dissolving the government. Many Turks welcomed the army’s intervention due the rising tide of political violence (committed by leftists & rightists) and economic instability that [...]