Africa

Meghan M. Garrity, an International Security Program postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center discussed her research on government-sanctioned mass expulsion events at a virtual seminar on November 3, 2022.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, at the end of 2021 nearly 90 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide. What makes Uganda's expulsion of 50,000 Asians distinct? Unlike most displaced people, the Asians expelled from Uganda weren't fleeing conflict or natural disasters. Instead, the forced displacement that year is what political scientists call a mass expulsion. That's when a government implements an ethnically targeted policy to remove a group of people, en masse, without individual legal evaluations and refuses to allow them to return.

When the U.S. military trains other states’ forces, it tries to impart liberal norms such as respect for human rights. But when liberal norms clash, these soldiers prioritize loyalty to their unit, the military, and shared goals.

This spring, the Belfer Center organized a new event series called Africa in Focus to examine the many factors driving political transitions and geostrategic relations in Africa. This workshop series aims to kickstart an initiative that recruits more African policymakers and experts to discuss African politics and affairs with the Harvard Kennedy School community. 

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.

When winning rebels face intense security threats during civil wars, rebel field commanders are more likely to remain obedient during war-to-peace transitions because they have less incentive to challenge newly installed rulers and less capacity to mobilize supporters outside the postwar military hierarchy.

An analysis of new data on postwar election results and remilitarization finds that losing elections does not drive belligerents to remilitarize. Instead, remilitarization is often determined by citizens’ ability to accurately understand and vote according to the postwar military balance of power.

Opportunistic repression arises when states use crises to suppress the political opposition. An examination of the relationship between COVID-19 shutdown policies and state violence against civilians in Africa, including and a subnational case study of Uganda, tests this theory.

This article explores the symbiotic relationship between right-wing evangelicals and the apartheid state in undercutting racial equality in South Africa.

We are living in an age of mass political participation, and civil resistance has emerged as a mainstay of the many social movements active around the world. On this episode of "Behind the Book", we speak with Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, about their new book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, which provides a robust introduction to the theory and practice of civil resistance.