Africa

37 Items

Military watching the start of work on the first part of some 180 kilometers of a 5.5 meter-high metal wall

AP/Czarek Sokolowski

Magazine Article - Foreign Affairs

When Migrants Become Weapons: The Long History and Worrying Future of a Coercive Tactic

| March/April 2022

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

The 1st Battalion of the world-famous Foreign Legion arrived in Paris on July 12, 1939.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Leaning on Legionnaires: Why Modern States Recruit Foreign Soldiers

    Author:
  • Elizabeth M.F. Grasmeder
| Summer 2021

Modern states recurrently buttress their militaries with legionnaires—soldiers who are neither citizens nor subjects of the governments for which they fight. Legionnaire recruitment is a function of political constraints on a government's ability to enlist citizens and its perceptions of external territorial threats.

Soldiers marching with national flags in parade

AP Photo/Ron Edmonds

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Buying Allies: Payment Practices in Multilateral Military Coalition-Building

    Author:
  • Marina E. Henke
| Spring 2019

Many states have been paid to join multilateral military coalitions. These payments are largely covered by “pivotal states”—those that care the most about an operation’s success—and take the form of deployment subsidies and political side deals to attract critical contributors to the mission.

Erica Chenoweth, HKS Professor of Public Policy (center), talks with Belfer Center Director Ash Carter (right).

Belfer Center/Benn Craig

Q&A: Erica Chenoweth

| Spring 2019

This Q&A focuses on Erica Chenoweth, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. Her forthcoming book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, explores what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance.

Zoe Marks (center) with her translator Patricia Turay and her family in Makeni, Sierra Leone, where Marks was researching impacts of civil war and its aftermath.

Zoe Marks

Q&A: Zoe Marks

| Spring 2019

This Q&A focuses on Zoe Marks, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics. Her current book project examines the internal dynamics of rebellion in Sierra Leone to understand how and why rebel groups can sustain a viable threat to the state without widespread support.

Will China's Naval Base Cause Friction with the US?

Analysis & Opinions - Africa Times

Will China's Naval Base Cause Friction with the US?

| January 3, 2016

"Beijing's intentions are thoroughly aquatic: it is interested in power projection across water, not land. The facility in Djibouti is likely to be the first such instalment around the Indian Ocean from which Beijing can in the future protect the maritime trade routes which are so crucial to its economy. The fact that Djibouti is located at the crucial choke point through which vessels traversing the Suez Canal must pass only enhances its attractiveness as a base location."

2016-2017 Harvard Nuclear Policy Fellowships

Announcement - Managing the Atom Project, Belfer Center

2016-2017 Harvard Nuclear Policy Fellowships

| December 15, 2015

The Project on Managing the Atom offers fellowships for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career researchers for one year, with a possibility for renewal, in the stimulating environment of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. The online application for 2016-2017 fellowships opened December 15, 2015, and the application deadline is January 15, 2016. Recommendation letters are due by February 1, 2016.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, joined by U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, looks at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in the French tricolor after he lit it on November 16, 2015, in a sign of solidarity following the November 13 terrorist attack.

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

The Cold Realism of the Post-Paris War on Terror

| November 20, 2015

"...[W]e now know that the notion that regime change leads to a better democratic or a humanitarian outcome is decidedly false. From Iraq, where the West tried a heavy footprint strategy, to Libya, where it opted for a light one, the idea that Europe or the United States can actually execute democratic change by force has been exposed as a fallacy."

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Announcement

Symposium on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Nuclear Disarmament, Non-proliferation, and Energy: Fresh Ideas for the Future

Dec. 15, 2014

The ninth Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York from April 27-May 22, 2015. This is the fourth such conference since the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. Participating governments will discuss nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy with a view to arriving at consensus on a number of issues.

Protests against ousted president Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters have generated high sales for all sorts of nationalist souvenirs, from flags to T-shirts, July 7, 2013.

Wikimedia Commons

Analysis & Opinions - Los Angeles Times

Egypt's Second Chance at Democracy

| July 17, 2013

"It is not clear that Egypt has the prerequisites for democracy. But let us recall with humility that it took centuries for democracy to develop in the West, and Egypt's starting point is much more difficult. What is essential is that Egypt be a moderate, stable and peaceful state. Israel too has to do its part. Unable to directly influence events in Egypt, it will be called on to demonstrate restraint in the face of continued attacks from the Sinai Peninsula, as well as from the Gaza Strip."