Research

Congratulations to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf for yesterday winning the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. She recently retired as President of Liberia. It is for people like her that the award, which pays $5 million, was originally established. I explained and evaluated the Prize, a fascinating experiment, in “The Ibrahim Prize for Excellence Among African Leaders,” published in the African Policy Journal.

Inequality has been on the rise within the United States and other advanced countries since the 1980s and especially since the turn of the century.  The possibility that trade is responsible for the widening gap between the rich and the rest of the population has of course become a major political preoccupation

Trump has threatened new trade barriers against China while simultaneously depending on Beijing’s help to rein in North Korea’s alarming nuclear weapons program. These two aspects of US policy toward China are at odds.

It feels inappropriate to write a column that treats the two issues on a par. To state the obvious, the stakes are vastly higher in a potential US-North Korean military conflict, especially when it comes to the real danger that nuclear weapons will be used, but even if they are not. But we need to consider the Chinese trade issues together with the Korean nuclear issues because the Trump White House does. (Chief strategist Steve Bannon, for example, had the priorities reversed. Just before he was fired he said that the Korea issue was a “side show” compared with the all-important “economic war with China.”)

The ability to edit the genetic code of organisms is hailed as one of the most profound technological achievements of the last five years. Specific techniques known as “gene drives” can transmit inheritable traits throughout the entire population of an organism. There are several ways by which gene drives can be used to control major diseases such as malaria, which killed nearly 395,000 people in Africa in 2015. One approach is to introduce gene drives that induce sterility in mosquitoes.

For a summary of Prof. Juma's Twitter chat on this topic, click here. #AskCJuma. Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari is on a high-level visit to China this week. The focus of the working visit is to explore areas of cooperation between China and Nigeria on power, transport, roads, and agriculture. The visit has reopened a lingering debate on Africa-China relations. Much of this debate has focused on how China’s interests are shaping its relations with Africa. But according to a new book, Africa and China, this debate overlooks the extent to which Africans and their governments are shaping their relations with China.