Africa

Kate Cronin-Furman compares and contrasts Sri Lanka's post-civil war memory projects with Rwanda's genocide commemoration as the basis for a broader discussion of the relationship between memory and justice.

In this Project on Managing the Atom Discussion Paper, Philipp C. Bleek chronicles nuclear weapons proliferation choices throughout the nuclear age. Since the late 1930s and early 1940s, some thirty-one countries are known to have at least explored the possibility of establishing a nuclear weapons program. Seventeen of those countries launched weapons programs, and ten acquired deliverable nuclear weapons.

A podcast from the Advanced Training Program on Humanitarian Action produced from a Middle East Initiative event on humanitarian negotiations with non-state armed groups featuring Professor Claude Bruderlein; Ashley Jackson; Stig Jarle Hansen; and Abdi Ismail Isse.

"What explains the Islamic State's disappointing record in Africa? Perhaps its leaders underestimated the historical ties between many African jihadi organizations and al Qaeda. Almost certainly they underestimated many African jihadi leaders' desire for autonomy, a trait that sat uneasily with the Islamic State's vision of centralized control through a caliphate. But the Islamic State also failed to back up its rhetorical appeals for loyalty with material support."

"Local pro-IS figures are willing, it seems, to move away from the actual IS organization's general practices, in particular related to the violence of control, in order to win over new supporters.  In Kenya, for example, pro-IS voices are reportedly attempt to lure support with promises of a decrease in violence (such as the implementation of the hudud or 'set' punishments for certain crimes such as murder and theft in Islamic criminal law) and lower taxes than with Al-Shabab."