Leadership in Africa is typified more by disfiguring examples --
the Idi Amins and Robert Mugabes -- than by positive role models
such as Nelson Mandela and Seretse Khama.

Now that Charles Taylor has left Monrovia to President Moses Blah, reducing warfare in Liberia is a present possibility...

Mbeki Is Avoiding the Right Course on Zimbabwe

"The inhabitants of tropical Afria in 2003 demand higher levels of performance from their governments than they could, or dared to do, in the 1970s and 1980s, a decade or two after independence from colonial rule."

"This is the heart of a very special Africa."

The threat of terror has given the problem of failed states an unprecedented immediacy and importance. In the past, failure had a primarily humanitarian dimension, with fewer implications for peace and security. Now nation-states that fail, or may do so, pose dangers to themselves, to their neighbors, and to people around the globe. The contributors to this volume develop an innovative theory of state failure that classifies and categorizes states along a continuum from weak to failed to collapsed.

Zimbabwe is in critical condition, thanks to the despotic greed of its aging dictator.

Strengthening African governance requires a new method of comparing those nations who deliver essential public goods to their citizens against those failing to perform well or at all. Africa declared in July that it would monitor and improve its national forms of governance. Now it says that it will not.